The head of the famed University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation warned on Sunday there will be a “rebound” of the fast-spreading coronavirus if stay-in-place orders are lifted on May 1.
In an interview with CBS News’ “Face The Nation," Dr. Christopher Murray said a premature end of social distancing guidance and stay-at-home orders could be devastating.
“The first testing we've done on this is if you opened up the entire country May 1, then we would very clearly have a rebound,” he said.
“We don't think the capability in the states exists yet to deal with that volume of cases. And so by July or August, we could be back in the same situation we are now.”
“So maybe some states can open up mid-May,” he added. “But we have to be very careful and make sure that we don't sort of lose all the effort that the American people have put into closures by premature opening.”
According to Murray, the IHME models of COVID-19 death rates are “driven by the data” and have worked, though there remains uncertainty in states with “incomplete implementation” of closures.
"The trend up in some states has been faster," he said. "In New York, for example, at the beginning, that pushed our forecasts up. And then the peaks that we're seeing in California and Washington have been lower than expected. And that's brought these forecasts down a bit. But they've all been within the same range.”
The latest series of forecasts have been for around 60,000-61,000 deaths, he said, and added the Institute “predicted the peak about now and that seems to be occurring at the national level.”
“But because of the incomplete implementation of social distancing closures in many states, it's adding a degree of uncertainty about what's actually going to happen in places like Texas as an example,” he said.