US reaches 60,000 COVID-19 death toll; Trump says they’ve done a “great job”

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• US death toll passed 60,000 mark on Wednesday according to the tracking data by John Hopkins University.
• The numbers served as an evidence that the social distancing order and other stringent measures are working, as pointed out by President Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
• Trump bragged that the government has done a great job since the figures were way below the estimated fatalities of around 100,000 to 200,000.

Death toll in the US passed 60,000 mark on Wednesday based on the tracking by John Hopkins University. President Donald Trump promoted the news as a success.

The president said two weeks ago that COVID-19 fatalities would climb up to 60,000. The figures are way below the coronavirus task force’s projected numbers of around 100,000 to 200,000, and also much lower than the 2 million prediction by a British research (but on the assumption there would be no social distancing measures).

“Now we’re going toward 50 — I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it… But we would have had millions of deaths instead of — it looks like we’ll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of,” Trump told reporters in the White House.

Trump and the White House officials were depending on the tracking of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (UW-IHME), which estimated 60,308 cumulative deaths during the first wave of coronavirus. The first wave was expected to last until early August.

Trump, Fauci and other members of the coronavirus task force took the numbers as an evidence that the social distancing order and other stringent measures yielded positive effects. Earlier in April, Fauci told NBC’s Today that the estimate death toll would be around 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000 which US officials previously projected.

However, the lower numbers from UW-IHME, compared with many other epidemiological models, drew criticism among some health officials who argued that the projection was “overly optimistic.”

In an interview with Politico, IHME Director Christopher Murray said they took the social distancing order into consideration, thus the framework displayed reduced death toll.

The IHME adjusted its death projection higher to 74,073 on Monday, which the president mentioned during his press briefing in the Rose Garden.

“So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people,” Trump said. “But if you look at what original projections were, 2.2 million, we are probably heading to 60,000 to 70,000.

“I think we’ve made a lot of good decisions… I think we’ve done a great job,” he added.

Source: AOL.com