The United States should be prepared to endure 100,000 to 240,000 deaths from the #COVID-19 coronavirus over the next two months even if Americans continue to keep their distance from each other.

The peak number of deaths will come over the next two to three weeks, according to the White House coronavirus task force.

"Our country is in the midst of a great national trial unlike any we have faced before," said U.S. President Donald Trump as the White House on Tuesday formally introduced its extended 30-day social-distancing guidelines based on statistical models.

"This is going to be one of the roughest two or three weeks we’ve ever had in our country," Trump predicted.

For the most part, the two physicians on the podium with the president and Vice President Mike Pence administered the bitter medicine to the American public.

“This is a number we need to anticipate, but we don't necessarily have to accept it as inevitable,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of the anticipated 100,000-plus fatalities.

“There's no magic bullet,” said Dr. Deborah Birx, an immunologist who is the response coordinator on the White House’s coronavirus task force. “There’s no magic vaccine or therapy,” just behaviors that can change the course of this viral pandemic.

More than 187,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed with the coronavirus. Total deaths in the country from the disease has exceeded 3,800 (about one-fourth of those in New York City) eclipsing the reported number in China and in excess of the number of lives lost initially in the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The first COVID-19 case in the U.S. was reported in the Western state of Washington on Feb. 29.

Source : VOA