White House Denies Reports of Internal Documents Showing Projected Coronavirus Daily Death Toll

The White House is denying a report that members of President Donald Trump’s administration predict that by June 1, there will be 3,000 coronavirus deaths per day.

The New York Times reported earlier on Monday that the predictions were based off data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

That predicted number of daily deaths would be roughly double the current average of 1,750. Additionally, they predict that the number of new cases per day would leap from 25,000 to 200,000.

“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 modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed,” Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.

He continued, “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.”

The Times’ report comes a day after former Food and Drug Administration Commission Scott Gottlieb said that the mitigation efforts were not working “as well as we expected,” as IJR reported. 

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Gottlieb said. “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.”

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Additionally, Gottlieb said he predicts that by the end of June, there will still be around 30,000 confirmed cases added every day.