Dr. Scott Gottlieb says U.S. may see more than 1000 Covid-19 deaths per day for a "sustained period of time."
Dr. Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, explained that the succeeding months could prove to be “the densest phase of the pandemic.”
“We’re probably going to see significant spread across the entire United States in a confluent epidemic that we’re much better prepared to deal with, so I don’t think that we’re going to see the excess death that we saw with the first wave of this pandemic when it struck New York,” he told “Squawk Box.”
Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed that the U.S. recorded more than 84,000 new cases of the virus and 557 new Covid-19 deaths on Monday.
According to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data, the U.S. has posted an average of 835 daily new coronavirus deaths per day over the past week.
“But the sheer fact that we’re going to be infecting so many people right now is probably going to mean that the death tolls get well above 1,000 for a sustained period of time," Dr. Gottlieb said.
He pointed out that the next couple of months will likely be “the last acute phase of this pandemic that we need to go through” and that 2021 will become better.
The U.S. outbreak could still overwhelm hospitals, saying the current surge is happening across the whole country, according to the doctor.
“It’s going to be a concern,” Dr. Gottlieb said Tuesday. “There’ll be parts of the country that get very pressed, and the challenge is that because you have a more diffuse epidemic across the whole country you’re not going to be able to back stop that many local regions that have very dense epidemics.”
However, he admitted that a nationwide shutdown in the U.S., like those being implemented in Europe, may not happen.
“It’s going to continue to build over the next three weeks and Thanksgiving will probably be an inflection point where the spread will be so diffused that the month of December, I think we’re going to have to take more targeted measures to try to slow down certain activities,” he said.
Dr. Fauci's reaction
The number of coronavirus cases in USA puts the country in a “bad position,” according to White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“When you look at the country and the heat map color, when you see red dots, which indicate that that part of the county, the city … is having an uptick in cases … all of that puts us in a precarious situation," he said.
He told SiriusXM’s “Doctor Radio Reports” in an interview that America’s Sun Belt states started reporting an increase in outbreaks and infections over the summer. He noted that the country was never able to post below 20,000 daily Covid-19 cases on average like other countries.
“We never got out of the real wave. We kind of went up and down within a wave,” Dr. Fauci said. “When I hear people talk about second and third waves, it really is the original wave that just resurges up, comes down a little, and resurges up again.”
