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.”
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