U.S. coronavirus deaths surged past 100,000 Wednesday, even as
President Donald Trump continues urging states across the country
to reopen.
The U.S. leads the world in reported confirmed coronavirus
cases, with more than 1.6 million American cases since January,
according to a Johns
Hopkins University tracker.
A day before the U.S. reached the 100,000-death mark, Trump once
again blamed China for not stopping the virus before it spread
across the globe, and touted his decision in January to restrict
travel from China to the U.S.
“For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done
my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million
People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the
number,” he
tweeted on Tuesday.
But models that suggested millions of Americans would die from
the coronavirus assumed that officials and the public would not
take any steps to mitigate the pathogen’s spread, according to
Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global
Development who led efforts on global disaster response under the
Obama administration.
“He’s basically saying we’ve done less poorly than
complete inaction, that’s a pretty underwhelming bar to set,”
Konyndyk told POLITICO. While it’s difficult to say definitively
what impact Trump’s travel restrictions had on the U.S. outbreak,
the administration did little to take advantage of any extra time
to ramp up production of personal protective equipment or testing
supplies, he added.
An outbreak model favored by White House officials projects the
virus will cause approximately 32,000 additional deaths by Aug. 4.
That would put the country’s overall toll at just under 132,000,
according an update released Wednesday by researchers at the
University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and
Evaluation.
Former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday cited a
study by Columbia University researchers that found that if
social distancing measures had been implemented one week sooner,
the U.S. could have avoided nearly 36,000 deaths nationwide as of
early May. “This is a fateful milestone we should have never
reached — that could have been avoided,” Biden
said in a Twitter video.
Democrats have blasted Trump’s handling of the pandemic,
saying a lack of federal planning to organize testing and
procurement of needed supplies has left states to fight with each
other for scarce supplies on the private market.
The administration delivered a report to Congress over the
weekend outlining its national coronavirus testing strategy, which
suggests that conducting 300,000 tests per day and achieving a
positivity rate under 10 percent is sufficient. But Democrats and
public health researchers immediately panned those numbers as
inadequate.
The authors of an analysis published by Harvard University’s
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics said the administration report
distorted their work. The HHS plan “selectively adjusted
assumptions” and “does not provide an accurate summary of the
modeling supporting our recommendations,” researchers E. Glen Weyl
and Divya Siddarth and Safra Center Director Danielle Allen said in
a statement Tuesday.
They argue the U.S. needs to conduct 1 to 1.5 million tests per
day. “We have been arguing for and modeling a suppression strategy,
which our numbers reflect,” Allen, Weyl and Siddarth said in a
statement. “The administration appears to have embraced a
mitigation strategy. We continue to encourage the administration to
aim high. Mitigation should be but a stepping stone to
suppression.”
Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former FDA commissioner, cautioned
over the weekend that the coronavirus is not yet contained, noting
that the number of people hospitalized nationwide per day has begun
to increase after a two-week decline.
“Some uptick in cases was expected as we re-opened but raises
concern,” Gottlieb tweeted
Sunday. “Risk is we don’t better contain spread, get slow
burn, and bigger re-ignition in Fall.”
