The White House has given a chilling warning to Americans, telling them to prepare for as much as 100,000 to 240,000 deaths from Coronavirus and that is if social distancing guidelines are maintained.
The nerve wrecking warnings come after the U.S. death toll rose to 3,669 as of late Tuesday afternoon officially surpassing China's official death toll of 3300.
The Coronavirus outbreak hit American shores two months ago, leaving more than 180,000 infected and sick with New York City the worst hit state in the US, and now Dr. Tony Fauci, the White House Coronavirus co-ordinator and also the director of of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has painted a very bad picture for Americans .
'The answer is yes - as sobering a number as that is, we should be prepared for it,' he said when asked about the six-figure death mark during the daily White House press briefing.
'Is it going to be that much? I hope not and I think the more we push on the mitigation the less likely to be that number but, being realistic, we need to prepare ourselves that is a possibility that that's what we'll see.'
Fauci used the figures to urge people to stick to social distancing guidelines of six feet of separation.
'Whenever you’re having an effect, it’s not time to take your foot off the accelerator, and on the brake, but to just press it down on the accelerator,' Fauci, said of mitigation efforts.
'The fifteen days that we’ve had of mitigation clearly are having an effect,' he noted.
Fauci said such efforts could also help prevent a potential second wave of illness.
'We hope that doesn't happen and that is why we are really pushing and why I was so emphatic about making sure we abide by those mitigation strategies,' he said.
Trump has also painted another grim picture for US inhabitants, saying;
'It's absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days, it's a matter of life and death, frankly,' the president said.
'I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We're going through a very tough few weeks. And, hopefully, as the experts have predicted is a lot of us are predicting having studied it so hard, going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel and this is going to be a very painful, a very very painful two weeks,' he noted.
Dr. Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the administration's day-to-day response to the disease, also discussed models that showed how without mitigation efforts, the projected death count in the U.S. was between 1.5 and 2.2 million. With effective mitigation efforts, Birx said those numbers could drop to between 100,000 and 240,000, which was still "too much," she noted.
In another data projection, Birx showed how strong mitigation efforts in states like Washington and California had helped to keep the cumulative cases per 100,000 residents relatively low.
'If all of the other states and all the other metro areas are able to hold that case number down, then it's a very different picture,'
'We're going to do everything we can to get it significantly below that,' she said.
Fauci adding to what Birx said, continued; 'We don't accept that number, that that's what it's going to be. We're going to do everything we can to get that number even below that,'
