Scott Gottlieb warns of 'sustained period' with 'well above' 1,000 people dying from COVID-19 a day
The U.S. could begin seeing more than 1,000 coronavirus deaths per day for a “sustained period of time,” the former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Tuesday. “We’re probably going to see significant spread across the 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,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
“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 (a day) for a sustained period of time,” Gottlieb said.
The public health expert told the news outlet that the next several months could be “the last acute phase of this pandemic” and predicted the U.S. could be in a better coronavirus situation next year. He said cases will likely peak by the time a new president is inaugurated in January.
Currently, the U.S. is averaging more than 83,000 new cases per day and more than 820 deaths, according to The COVID Tracking Project. The number of daily deaths is still far lower than the peak daily death toll in the spring when the U.S. was averaging more than 2,000 deaths.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/524249-scott-gottlieb-warns-of-sustained-period-with-well