The White House dismissed Monday a Centers for Disease Control document showing an estimate of 3,000 daily deaths from the coronavirus by June 1.
“This is not a White House document nor has it been presented to the Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said on Monday.
Currently, there are about 1,750 deaths per day from the virus.
The document was leaked to the New York Times, which claimed it was a “Trump administration document” and questioned whether President Donald Trump was pushing to open up the country too quickly.
But the White House said that the document did not match the data vetted by the White House.
“This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed,” Deere continued.
The White House said that Trump’s guidelines to reopen the country were based on science and agreed to by the top health and disease experts in the government.
“The health of the American people remains President Trump’s top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions,” Deere concluded.
Trump acknowledged Sunday night in a town hall hosted by Fox News that deaths from the coronavirus would be higher than the estimated 60,000 deaths that he predicted in April.
“We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80. to 100,000 people,” he said. “That’s a horrible thing.”
