Birx: 100K to 200K Deaths if Things Go 'Almost Perfectly'

The figure of up to 200,000 possible American deaths from the coronavirus is now in wide circulation, with Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Trump both mentioning the number on Sunday. On Monday, the White House coronavirus response coordinator agreed, and Dr. Deborah Birx cautioned that it's actually a best-case scenario. "If we do things together well, almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000," Birx said on the Today show, reports NBC News. "I think in some of the metro areas we were late in getting people to follow the 15-day guidelines," she said, adding that she and other officials are "very worried about every city in the United States."

• Fauci: "Whenever the models come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario," Fauci said Sunday on CNN. "Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I've never seen a model of the diseases that I've dealt with where the worst case actually came out. ... I mean, looking at what we're seeing now, you know, I would say between [100,000] and 200,000 [deaths]. But I don't want to be held to that."
• Trump: At his press conference Sunday announcing the extension of social distancing guidelines, Trump repeatedly made reference to early, worst-case estimates of about 2 million deaths in the US, notes the Washington Post. "And so if we could hold that down, as we're saying, to 100,000—it's a horrible number, maybe even less—but to 100,000," said Trump. "So we have between [100,000] and 200,000, and we altogether have done a very good job."

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