The Trump administration anticipates that more than 3,000 Americans will be dying each day of COVID-19 by June 1, according to a newly revealed internal government document obtained by the New York Times.
The Times obtained an internal Centers for Disease Control document providing detailed projections on the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic around the country. The data goes up to May 2.
The document says that new cases will grow to a rate of around 225,000 per day by June 1, and that deaths will reach around 3,000 per day by the same date.
There are currently around 25,000 new cases each day in the United States, and around 2,000 deaths each day.
The CDC gathered the data and built the models on which the projections are based, the Times reported, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency created the charts.
The report also suggests that infection rates will increase more in rural America over the coming months. The document names “the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southeast, Northeast, and around southern California” as potential new hotspots, while Louisiana and New York City remain on a downwards trajectory in the federal government’s modeling.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the report says.
Separately, the report provides new information from the federal government on COVID-19 death rates in the U.S. Around 16 percent of those hospitalized during a period beginning on March 1 died of COVID-19, per available discharge data.
White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere pushed back against the document, saying that it had not “been presented to the Coronavirus Task Force or gone through interagency vetting. This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.”
The grim and sobering statistics come as the Trump administration pushes to “reopen” the country, moving to bring federal employees back to work and using the bully pulpit to have local administrators end lockdown policies. Several states around the country, most of which are governed by Republicans, have done so.
Read the document that the New York Times obtained here:
