‘The total number of deaths will start to increase again’

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned Sunday that mortality from coronavirus cases will increase in the near future.

© getty: former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb
Gottlieb: ‘The total number of deaths will start to increase again’

Gottlieb noted that a better understanding of the coronavirus and a higher proportion of infections in younger people is currently causing fewer deaths, but said on CBS ‘”Face the Nation” that “the total number of deaths will start to increase again as the number of hospitalizations starts to increase again. “

“We will see that the deaths are approaching,” he added. “You are going to have more deaths, tragically.”

GRIM WARNING: “The total number of deaths will start to increase again,” @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan as the # COVID19 epidemics worsen in places like Florida and Arizona and more Americans are hospitalized pic.twitter.com/lAR6CDu2Zx

– Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 5, 2020

Asked by CBS’s Margaret Brennan about President Trump’s claim that the virus was “harmless” in 99 percent of cases, Gottlieb replied, “I’m not really sure what it means,” speculating that the president might be referring to the number of people hospitalized in relation to those infected, which was probably less than 5 percent when taking asymptomatic cases into account.

“I’m not really sure what he meant,” @ScottGottliebMD says of @ realDonaldTrump’s claim that 99% of # Covid19’s cases are “harmless.”

CLOCK -> pic.twitter.com/WxpX4BdGtp

– Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 5, 2020

“But certainly more than 1 percent of people get a serious illness from this … about 60 percent of infected people become symptomatic, about 10 to 15 percent of them will develop some form of COVID pneumonia and somewhere around 2 to 5 percent of them will be hospitalized, depending on the age mix of people who are becoming infected, “he added.

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