US Daily Coronavirus Deaths Projected To Double to 3,000 by June - Report

By Staff, Agencies

An analysis prepared by several Trump administration departments projected that the number of coronavirus deaths will increase to about 3,000 each day by early June.

The interagency report from the US departments of Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services, also reportedly forecasts that the US will see about 200,000 new Covid-19 cases each day by the end of this month.

The sobering projections come as US President Donald Trump has pushed to start reopening the country, and expressed support for protesters against state restrictions on businesses and social gatherings in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 deaths are currently being reported in the US each day.

The New York Times said it had obtained an “internal document” containing projections “based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency [Fema]”.

CDC and Fema “forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now”, the paper said.

The Times report followed a Washington Post report on Saturday that said the Trump White House had followed a model for economic recovery written by Kevin Hassett, an adviser “with no background in infectious diseases”.

“By the end of April,” the Post reported, “with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam war, it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. ‘A catastrophic miss,’ as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it.”