White House health experts argued strongly with President Donald Trump to extend a stay-at-home order for Americans fighting the spread of the coronavirus so the country could start seeing the rates of infection come down, a top U.S. health official said Monday.
"We felt that if we prematurely pulled back, we would only form an acceleration, or a rebound of something, which would have put you behind where you were before," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with CNN.
"And that's the reason why we argued strongly with the president that he not withdraw those guidelines after 15 days, but that he extend them. And he did listen."
Trump abandoned a hotly criticized plan to get the economy up and running by mid-April after Fauci said on Sunday as many as 200,000 Americans could die from the coronavirus outbreak.
The reversal came as the U.S. death toll topped 2,460 from the respiratory disease, according to a Reuters tally, with more than 141,000 cases, the most of any country in the world.
Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, on Monday repeated Fauci's estimated potential range of 100,000 to 200,000 dead in the United States, but also said that would require a near perfect response from U.S. officials.
"If we do things together well - almost perfectly - we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities," Birx told NBC's Today show.
The more dire warnings come more than two weeks after a New York Times report that models from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected that 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die and between 160 million and 214 million people could be infected.
The Times based its report on less specific models, translating CDC percentages into absolute numbers after consulting with independent experts. U.S. officials downplayed those models at the time.
At a news briefing on Sunday, Trump said he did not want to declare victory over the virus prematurely and his health advisers said not extending the order would result in more suffering and deaths.
Fauci said he and Birx met with Trump to discuss data showing the potential effects of relaxing mitigation efforts.
"Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in together in the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, 'Here are the data. Take a look,'" Fauci told CNN. "He looked at them and he just shook his head and said, 'I guess we got to do it.'"
"From a public health standpoint, we felt strongly that it would have been the wrong decision to pull back," he said.
On his estimates of potential deaths, Fauci pointed out that 60,000 people died of influenza over the 2017-18 winter, so he would not be surprised if there were 100,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United States.
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