Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottleib, who’s become a regular guest on CBS’ Face the Nation, told host Margaret Brennan on Sunday that while coronavirus cases are no longer growing at an exponential rate in the United States, the country may have to prepare for “persistent spread,” in which there are somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 new infections and 1,000 new deaths, per day.Gottleib didn’t want to look beyond the end of June because it’s too hard to predict (though he does expect a bit of reprieve later in the summer before potential flare-ups in the fall), but for now he doesn’t seem optimistic that the decline will be as fast as the rise was in March. That means by the end of June, there could be more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country.> NEWS: @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan that 100k deaths by June is possible, but is hard to make projections beyond that because of “persistent spread.” He says that 20k to 30k new COVID19 infections could become the “new normal” pic.twitter.com/Wpv8oyZUHE> > — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 3, 2020He also cautioned that the national decline can be misleading since it relies so heavily on the New York City metro area, which is indeed trending downward, but because the outbreak there was so large, it masks smaller outbreaks across the rest of the country. > NEWS: There are about 20 states where cases are rising on a daily basis, @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan, saying that mitigation wasn’t as effective as anticipated. “While mitigation didn’t fail… it didn’t work as we expected,” he says pic.twitter.com/nT6oqDhxAM> > — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 3, 2020More stories from theweek.com 5 scathing cartoons about Democrats’ MeToo hypocrisy 5 scathingly funny cartoons about Mike Pence’s unmasked hospital visit Oxford scientist says if coronavirus vaccine is effective it will likely be seasonal
