Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC Wednesday that the United States could have around 300,000 coronavirus deaths by the end of the year if current trends persisted. That would be more than double the current total.
“Right now we have about 1,000 victims a day, so if we don’t change that trajectory, you could do the math and see where we are by the end of the year,” Gottlieb said in “Squawk Box.”
The United States has at least 142,000 Covid-19-related deaths, most of any country, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The 43.40 deaths in the United States per 100,000 people is the tenth highest in the world. The United States has a total of 3.9 million infections.
Daily deaths in the US from the coronavirus are still well below levels seen at the start of the pandemic, when more than 2,000 new deaths were recorded on a few days in April. But after the increase in cases and hospitalizations in recent weeks, deaths increased in certain parts of the country. On Tuesday, the death toll exceeded 1,000 for the first time since May 29, according to the Covid Monitoring Project.
Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Donald Trump, said death rates in the US have likely declined as medical workers learn to better treat the new virus. He said he has spoken to doctors who are treating Covid-19 patients who say “it may have been cut in half.”
The death rate for all confirmed cases was around 3.6% as of Wednesday. However, as The Wall Street Journal reports, the actual death rate may be only a fraction of that, considering that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes Covid-19 cases can be anywhere from six to 24 times higher than the confirmed count.
While saying for months that the actual count case is probably much higher, Gottlieb told CNBC on Wednesday that “the problem is that we are hospitalizing a lot of patients.” He added: “Even if we end up preserving more life in the hospital, what we are doing, if we end up hospitalizing many more patients, will ultimately have many victims, unfortunately, of this virus.”
Gottlieb’s comments Wednesday came a day after Trump warned that the nation’s Covid-19 outbreak is likely to “get worse before it gets better.” The president, who with few exceptions avoided wearing masks in public during the pandemic, also urged Americans to wear face covering to help limit the spread of the virus.
A virus model, once cited by the White House, currently projects that more than 220,000 people in the US could die of Covid-19 by November 1. However, the model projects a lower death count by that date, just over 183,000, if the United States had universal masking.
Gottlieb also said he believes the US death rate from the coronavirus could drop in the fall if more therapeutics are introduced to treat the virus, such as the Ridgeback Biotherapeutics drug Merck recently acquired.
“It is likely to be a drug for hospital use due to its side effect profile, but in early studies it appears that it may have activity against the coronavirus,” he said. “So there is promising therapeutics on the horizon, and it only underscores the fact that we are going to improve hospital mortality with this virus as we move forward in the fall and winter.”
Many companies, including Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna, are working on possible coronavirus vaccines, hoping that it will work and can be approved early next year.
Gottlieb stressed that the United States, meanwhile, must ultimately control coronavirus transmission, saying “there are ways to keep this under control.” He added, “Some states have chosen not to do that, and that is why you see this continue to spread.”
“We have the specter right now of parts of this country where local school boards are making the decision to close schools, but bars and restaurants are still open,” said Gottlieb. “We need to make a decision about what is important to us and what we are willing to sacrifice right now until we get to the other side of this.”
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and a member of Pfizer’s boards of directors, Genetic Testing Begins Tempus and the Illumina biotech company.
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