Most of the United States has hunkered down for the past seven weeks, but the spread of the coronavirus has not stopped. It has slowed a bit in some places, including the hard-hit New York area, while accelerating in others.
Even so, governors in state after state are easing stay-at-home orders and allowing some businesses to reopen — which public health experts say could put us right back where we were in mid-March, when the virus was raging unchecked.
Related: The US just reported its deadliest day for coronavirus patients as states reopen
Despite optimistic talk from the White House, the Trump administration is privately projecting that 3,000 people a day will be dying from Covid-19 by the beginning of June, nearly double the current toll. And with wider testing, the new-case count will surge to 200,000 a day, eight times the present pace.
Those figures, based on government models, are summarized in chart form in an internal document obtained by The New York Times. The charts show that the “flattened curves” of U.S. diagnoses and deaths never did turn downward — and are now likely to bend more steeply upward as restrictions are eased.
“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected,” Scott Gottlieb, President Trump’s former commissioner of food and drugs, said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point. And we’re just not seeing that.”
Also read: Up to 100,000 Americans may die from coronavirus?
Mr. Trump, who has frequently understated the impact of the disease, said on Sunday that “we’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people” in all. That estimate is as much as twice what he was saying two weeks ago, but it is still far below what his administration now projects by the end of May, never mind the months thereafter.
The rise of social-distance snitching
Some frustrated Americans have turned into citizen informants, reporting other people’s violations of social-distancing edicts or stay-at-home orders to the police, public health authorities and even their employers.
Tips from the public have prompted officials to issue citations and have helped shutter nonessential businesses like dog groomers and massage parlors that defied closure orders.
The vigilantism has also taken the form of anonymous public shaming, like scolding fliers left on cars at weekend destinations, or posters rebuking people who go maskless.
Some cities and counties have set up phone numbers and websites for people to report infractions, which have attracted a flood of tips — along with complaints about encouraging citizens to inform on one another the way authoritarian regimes do.
The problem with pictures: We’ve all seen images of jammed beaches and parks held up as evidence of heedlessness. But Vice notes that some public spaces may not really be as crowded as they seem in photos, which tend to foreshorten distances toward or away from the camera.
@ Compiling from The New York Times