This archive report was first published on 4 May 2020.
As the United States continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, a grim milestone is looming on the horizon. According to several scientific models, the country is likely to reach 100,000 virus-related deaths by June.
US President Donald Trump made the prediction during a virtual town hall meeting on Fox News on Sunday evening. "We're going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people. That's a horrible thing," Trump said.
However, Trump's end-game figure is likely far lower than the reality. The White House has estimated that 100,000 to 240,000 Americans will die from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
The country has already seen 68,000 confirmed deaths, and has confirmed about 30,000 new cases a day since early April. The nature of the epidemic is such that more bleak figures are inevitable.
"My personal best guess is that we are going to reach 100,000 deaths around the beginning of June," said Nicholas Reich, an associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Massachusetts.
Reich's lab has looked at several major epidemiological models created by other institutions to come up with an average trajectory for the epidemic's development. That average curve indicates the United States can expect to hit 90,000 deaths by May 23.
"We're seeing pretty consistently somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a week -- there are not a lot of reasons to expect it's going to drop quickly," Reich said.
