May is going to be a charnel house, and nobody knows that better than the actual pandemic experts that exist in the Trump regime.
As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.
The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.
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.
“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the C.D.C. warned.
The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, Mr. Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump said deaths in the United States could reach 100,000, twice as many as he had forecast just two weeks ago. But his new estimate still underestimates what his own administration is now predicting to be the total death toll by the end of May — much less in the months that follow. It follows a pattern for Mr. Trump, who has frequently understated the impact of the disease.
“We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people,” he said in a virtual town hall on Fox News. “That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this.”
Mr. Gottlieb said Americans “may be facing the prospect that 20,000, 30,000 new cases a day diagnosed becomes the new normal.”
Some states that have partially reopened are still seeing an increase in cases, including Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas, according to Times data. Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska also are seeing an increase in cases and reopened some businesses on Monday. Alaska has also reopened and is seeing a small number of increasing cases.
While the country has stabilized, it has not really improved, as shown by data collected by The Times. Case and death numbers remain stuck on a numbing, tragic plateau that is tilting only slightly downward.
At least 1,000 people with the virus, and sometimes more than 2,000, have died every day for the last month. On a near-daily basis, at least 25,000 new cases of the virus are being identified across the country. And even as New York City, New Orleans and Detroit have shown improvement, other urban centers, including Chicago and Los Angeles, are reporting steady growth in cases.
The situation has devolved most dramatically in parts of rural America that were largely spared in the early stages of the pandemic. As food processing facilities and prisons have emerged as some of the country’s largest case clusters, the counties that include Logansport, Ind., South Sioux City, Neb., and Marion, Ohio, have surpassed New York City in cases per capita.
Understand that this is the nightmare scenario that all the experts have been predicting for months now, where small city and rural hospitals around the country are inundated, and that raises the mortality rate significantly. We are headed that way right now, in a matter of weeks, not months. Under no circumstances should states be reopening anything.
200,000 cases per day means 10,000 dead per day 7-14 days later. It will be absolute chaos. reopening the economy now is only guaranteeing a massive spike in cases and deaths, and an economic crash into depression. As I said before, I guess it's going to take hundreds of thousands of deaths until Americans get it through their thick skulls.
Steve M sums it all up (emphasis his):
I think many Americans won't be able to grasp this because it's close to unthinkable, but let me restate what's being reported here: The president of the United States, who has been incessantly cheerleading for a reopening of the economy, is doing so even though his own administration's model is informing him that this will significantly increase the number of people who are sickened and killed by the coronavirus. President Trump is not crossing his fingers and hoping that the reopenings take place with few bad consequences. President Trump is choosing to kill innocent American citizens.
Trump will not be impeached for this, or for anything else between now and the end of his term in January 2021. But knowingly and willfully causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans is an offense worthy of impeachment and removal from office.
At the very least, some Democrats should be saying this now. They should be demanding to see the forecasts. They should be calling Trump a murderer.
And as bad as May will be?
June will be far, far worse.
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