Public health scientists spent the past week constructing a model that could predict how widely the virus would spread in the coming months and how many people who get infected would succumb to the disease. Dr. Birx said the result was clear: The only way to minimize deaths is to continue the difficult restrictions on American life.
“There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors,” Dr. Birx said. “Each of our behaviors, translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic over the next 30 days.”
The new government estimates came to the same conclusion that other researchers have: that even with the isolation efforts already underway to limit the spread of the virus, infections are almost certain to soar, straining the ability of hospitals to care for infected patients and leading to a growing number of deaths.
One of those models, created by scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, predicts that deaths from the virus in the United States will rise rapidly during the month of April, from about 4,000 to almost 60,000, even with the many restrictions on movement now in place. The study suggests that the pace of deaths will eventually slow down, reaching a total of about 84,000 by the beginning of August.
The model assumes that social distancing measures will be broadly effective across the country and uses the severe lockdown in Wuhan, China, to calibrate how the outbreak might play out in the United States.
That approach has some critics because control measures imposed in the United States have generally been less stringent than those in Wuhan. While officials have told more than 250 million people to stay at home, some parts of the country, especially in the South, have resisted or delayed similar measures for fear of the economic consequences.
“Their model gives us the range of possible outcomes if we manage to successfully slow the spread of disease,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. “If we fail at those measures, we face outcomes far worse than any included in the range of possibilities predicted by their model.”