As states are trying to reopen their economies, the Trump administration is privately projecting steady rises in cases, according to a new document obtained by the New York Times, showing deaths nearly doubling to 3,000 per day, up from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
The sobering numbers underscore the reality that reopening America will make matters worse.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”
According to data collected by the Times, the country has stabilized and yet the number of cases and deaths has only minimally declined in a plateau pattern instead of decreasing.
While New York City, New Orleans, and Detroit have shown improvement, other areas like Los Angeles and Chicago are showing steady increases. Rural areas are also showing dramatic developments, where food processing plants have caused clusters of cases per capita higher than New York City.
See more at the New York Times and CNBC.