On March 30, Scarf Lady predicted we would reach 100-200 thousand deaths ‘If we do things together, well, almost perfectly.’ The United States has now lost more than 200,000 lives to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experts like Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it didn’t have to be this way.
“Tens of thousands of people would not have died if the U.S. response had been more effective,” said Frieden, now president of Resolve to Save Lives, a global public health initiative.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Birx’s prediction in late March was “very sobering.” That was the time, he said, to develop and implement a plan to stop or at least slow the spread of the virus.
That didn’t happen then, and it hasn’t happened since. “Where is our national plan?” Osterholm asked. “How are we this far along and we don’t have one?”
“We have a long way to go,” he added.
