Dr. Fauci lowers projections of US coronavirus deaths to 60k due to social distancing, but some people aren’t buying it…

Today Dr. Fauci is lowering projections of the potential US coronavirus death toll from 100-200k to 60k:

BLOOMBERG – One of President Donald Trump’s top medical advisers slashed projections for U.S. coronavirus deaths on Thursday, saying that about 60,000 people may die — almost half as many as the White House estimated a week ago.

The falling projection, the result of aggressive social distancing behaviors Americans adopted to curb the spread of the virus, may accelerate Trump’s effort to develop a plan to urge Americans to leave their homes and return to work next month.

“The real data are telling us it is highly likely we are having a definite positive effect by the mitigation things that we’re doing, this physical separation,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC in an interview.

“I believe we are going to see a downturn in that, and it looks more like the 60,000, than the 100,000 to 200,000” projected fatalities, he said. “But having said that, we better be careful that we don’t say: ‘OK, we’re doing so well we could pull back.’”

Fauci is arguing that lowering of projections is due to the social distancing mitigation across the country.

But others are having serious doubts:

I’m not going to claim to know the answer to this, but what I do know is that as the data gets better, the modeling always gets better. This is something that I remember Dr. Birx and Fauci saying in the past few weeks. The modeling is only as good as the data.

Further, when Dr. Birx introduced these 100-200k death projections on March 31, she plainly said that the data was skewed based on what they were seeing in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, because that’s the data they had at the time. “We have to predict on the data we have,” she said. Both Birx and Fauci pointed out that they were hoping that the numbers would be much less, but said that these projections were a possibility and something we should be prepared for.

In other words I don’t feel so hard pressed to blame the doctors and the modeling at this point. Yes, we need desperately to get the economy back going again, especially in areas where the spread of the coronavirus isn’t as bad. And I think we can do that if we continue to take precautions like wearing masks in public and keeping distance from people when we can. But I still firmly believe had we not taken the extreme measures that we did, when we did, our hospitals would be overrun, resources would be far more scarce than they are now, and even more people would be dying due to lack of care and resources.


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