The number of COVID-10 deaths in the US will go over 3000 and new cases to almost 200,000 daily by June 1, according to an internal draft report as per a report in PTI. This comes while over 24 states said they would be opening the economy amid the pandemic. As of May 4 over 1.2 million Americans tested positive and there were over 69,000 deaths.?
The economy has come to a halt and over 30 million people have applied for unemployment benefits.?
Multiple media reports have quoted the draft report projecting the horrifying figures of about 200,000 confirmed cases per day accompanied with 3,000 daily deaths by June 1.?
The numbers underscore a sobering reality: while the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse, The New York Times reported.?
There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned according to the daily.?
However, both the White House and the CDC disavowed the report. The slides carry the CDC's logo, The Washington Post reported.?
According to the report, the projection was prepared by Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.?
I had no role in the process by which that was presented and shown. This data was presented as an FYI to CDC it was not in any way intended to be a forecast, Lessler told The Washington Post.?
Lessler said he didn't know how the update was turned into a slide deck by government officials and shared with the news organisations.?
Judd Deere, a White House Spokesperson said, This is not a White House document nor has it been presented to the Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting.?
This data is not reflective of any of the modelling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed, he said.?
The President's phased guidelines to open up America again are a scientific driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with. The health of the American people remains President Trump's top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions, Deere said.?
Meanwhile, more than a dozen US states eased COVID-19 restrictions and another over a dozen have announced their plans to do so in the coming days.?
States like Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Illinois, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Vermont, and West Virginia have lifted restrictions.?