Internal Trump Administration Model Projects Deaths Nearly Doubling As States Relax Restrictions

The New York Times: As Trump Pushes To Reopen, Government Sees Coronavirus Toll Nearly Doubling
As President Trump presses states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in coronavirus infections and deaths over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1 — nearly double the current level. The projections, based on data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and laid out in an internal document obtained Monday by The New York Times, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May, up from about 30,000 cases now. There are currently about 1,750 deaths per day, the data shows. (Stolberg and Sullivan, 5/4)

The Washington Post: Government Report Predicts Coronavirus Cases Will Surge To 200,000 A Day By June 1 
The work contained a wide range of possibilities and modeling was not complete, according to Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who created the model. He said he didn’t know how the update was turned into a slide deck by government officials and shared with news organizations. The data was first reported by the New York Times. (Wan, Bernstein, McGinley and Dawsey, 5/4)

ABC News: Trump's Reopening Push At Odds With New 100K Death Toll Prediction, New Draft Projections 
"These preliminary analyses were provided to FEMA to aid in scenario planning—not to be used as forecasts—and the version published is not a final version," the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in a statement. "These preliminary results are not forecasts, and it is not accurate to present them as forecasts." (Phelps and Gittleson, 5/4)

NPR: White House Rejects Government Report Projecting Rising Coronavirus Death Toll
The Trump administration on Monday pushed back against an internal government report, obtained by The New York Times, that predicts the daily coronavirus death toll could nearly double in the United States by early June. The Times story cites an internal CDC update, acquired from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that predicts the number of deaths per day from COVID-19 will reach about 3,000 by June 1. (Wise, 5/4)

The Hill: Startling New COVID-19 Death Projections Highlight Challenges Of Reopening 
The White House sought to throw cold water on the CDC model, with a spokesman saying it had not gone through interagency vetting or been presented to the coronavirus task force led by Vice President Pence. “This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed,” deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement. (Samuels, 5/4)

Reuters: Researchers Double U.S. COVID-19 Death Forecast, Citing Eased Restrictions
A newly revised coronavirus mortality model predicts nearly 135,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by early August, almost double previous projections, as social-distancing measures for quelling the pandemic are increasingly relaxed, researchers said on Monday. (Caspani and Layne, 5/4)

Politico: Models Shift To Predict Dramatically More U.S. Deaths As States Relax Social Distancing
Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, told reporters on a call Monday the primary reason for the increase is many states’ “premature relaxation of social distancing.” For the first time, Murray explained, the model is factoring in data from four different cell phone providers showing a major uptick in Americans’ going out in public. This rise of mobility in the last week or 10 days is likely leading to an increase in transmission, he said. (Ollstein and Oprysko, 5/4)

The Wall Street Journal: U.S. Officials Warn Of New Virus Surge As States Reopen
“Growing contacts among people will promote transmission of the coronavirus,” the institute said. Factors such as warming temperatures won’t offset the rising mobility, “thereby fueling a significant increase in projected deaths,” it said. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease official, cautioned to CNN on Monday that relaxing the social distancing helping to contain the spread could bring a rebound in cases, considering the virus’s “phenomenal capabilities of spreading like wildfire.” (Lyons, 5/5)

CNN: Relaxed Restrictions Across US Will Have A Dire Impact On Coronavirus Death Toll, Experts Warn 
"It's the balance of something that's a very difficult choice," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's leading infectious disease expert, told CNN Monday night. "How many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be some form of normality, sooner rather than later?" (Maxouris, 5/5)

The New York Times: Coronavirus In The U.S.: An Unrelenting Crush Of Cases And Deaths
In New York City, the daily onslaught of death from the coronavirus has dropped to half of what it was. In Chicago, a makeshift hospital in a lakefront convention center is closing, deemed no longer needed. And in New Orleans, new cases have dwindled to a handful each day. Yet across America, those signs of progress obscure a darker reality. The country is still in the firm grip of a pandemic with little hope of release. For every indication of improvement in controlling the virus, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere, leaving the nation stuck in a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections. (Bosman, Smith and Harmon, 5/5)

The Wall Street Journal: The Search Is On For America’s Earliest Coronavirus Deaths
The first known death caused by the new coronavirus in Chicago occurred in mid-March. But the medical examiner’s office in Cook County, which includes the city, now plans on poring over records of much earlier cases in search of evidence that people may have died from Covid-19 as far back as November. Across the U.S., health investigators have launched efforts to find previously unidentified deaths from Covid-19, in some cases looking far back enough to potentially rewrite the timeline of when the coronavirus first came to the country and began killing Americans. (Frosch, Rana and Kamp, 5/4)

CBS News: Second Wave Of Coronavirus Is "Very Likely," Doctor Warns 
As states begin to reopen and social distancing rules are relaxed, public health officials are warning about a possible second wave of coronavirus cases later this year. Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, an internal medicine physician at Sutter Health in San Francisco, said Monday on CBSN that public health officials agree another round of cases is "very, very likely to happen." (Leser, 5/5)