Coronavirus deaths in US hit 10,000. When could the pandemic peak?
Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States hit 10,000 Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University.
More than 72,000 people around the world have died from COVID-19 and more than 1.2 million people have tested positive, Johns Hopkins reports. In the United States, more than 347,000 people have tested positive for the virus.
The pandemic in the United States will continue to get worse in the coming weeks before COVID-19 cases peak, public health officials said.
“We are struggling to get it under control, and that’s the issue that’s at hand right now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, part of the White House coronavirus task force, said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday.
Fauci said, “We’re going to continue to see an escalation. Also, we should hope that within a week, maybe a little bit more, we’ll start to see a flattening out of the curve and coming down.”
“It is going to be shocking to some. It certainly is really disturbing to see that. But that’s what’s going to happen before it turns around. So we’ll just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation because we got to get through this week that’s coming up because it is going to be a bad week,” he added.
Speaking Sunday on Fox News, U.S. Surgeon General Vice Adm. Jerome Adams said, “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”
But while things are likely going to get worse, places like Washington state and California are seeing improvements as the spread of the virus slows.
“As hard as this week is going to be, there is a light at the end of the tunnel if everyone does their part for the next 30 days,” Adams said.
In a separate Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Adams said the timeline and the forecast to flatten the curve of the virus depends on people isolating themselves.
“We really need to understand that if we want to flatten that curve and get through to the other side, everyone needs to do their part,” he said. “Ninety percent of Americans are doing their part, even in the states where, where they haven’t had a shelter-in-place.”
New York City has become the center of the pandemic in the United States, where more than 3,000 people have died from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins.
“The first thing we want to look for is to see on a daily basis: are the number of new cases starting to stabilize? We’ve seen that in Italy,” Fauci said on CBS. “We’re going to hopefully be seeing that in New York very soon. And that’s the first sign of that plateau and coming down.”
But public health officials have warned that more hot spots for the virus are emerging, pointing to growing numbers of cases in New Orleans and Detroit.
The surgeon general and Fauci said the best way to put the brakes on the spread of the coronavirus is for people to isolate and minimize any contact with others.
This story was originally published April 6, 2020 at 1:29 PM with the headline "Coronavirus deaths in US hit 10,000. When could the pandemic peak?."
