Senior US scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci issued on Sunday issued a cautious prediction that the novel coronavirus could claim as many as 200,000 lives in the United States, AFP reports.
Dr. Fauci, who leads research into infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, played down worst-case predictions of one million or more deaths, instead offering a rough estimate of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths and "millions of cases."
But Fauci, a leading member of Trump's coronavirus task force and for many Americans a comforting voice of authority, quickly added, "I don't want to be held to that ... It's such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people."
His comments came a day after the death toll in the US from the coronavirus topped 2,000. On Friday, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States reached 100,040, the highest number in the world.
The US on Thursday officially became the country with the highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19.
"This is the way pandemics work, and that's why we all are deeply concerned and why we have been raising the alert," Dr. Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House task force, said Sunday on NBC.
"No state, no metro area will be spared," she added.
Dr. Birx, the task force coordinator, declined to say what her recommendation would be to the president in the next few days about an eventual easing of work and travel restrictions. She did, however, say, "Every metro area should assume that they could have an outbreak equivalent to New York, and do everything right now to prevent it."