WASHINGTON: A senior US scientist issued a cautious prediction on Sunday that the novel coronavirus could claim as many as 200,000 lives in the United States, as state and local officials described increasingly desperate shortages in hard-pressed hospitals.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who leads research into infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, told CNN that models predicting a million or more US deaths were “not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

He offered a rough estimate of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths and “millions of cases.” But Fauci, a leading member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force and for many Americans a comforting voice of authority, quickly added, “I don’t want to be held to that ... It’s such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.” By way of comparison, a US flu epidemic in 2018-19 killed 34,000 people.

Covid-19 has hit the US with explosive force in recent days and weeks, following a path seen earlier in parts of Asia and Europe.

It took a month for the US to move from its first confirmed death, on Feb 29, to its 1,000th. But in two days this week that number doubled, to nearly 2,200 on Sunday. The case total of 124,763 — as tallied by Johns Hopkins University — is the world’s highest.

“This is the way pandemics work, and that’s why we all are deeply concerned and why we have been raising the alert,” Dr Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House task force, said Sunday on NBC. “No state, no metro area will be spared.”

In the US, the epicentre has been New York City, with 672 deaths so far.

Hospital staff have issued desperate pleas for more protective equipment.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said that his city’s hospitals have enough protective equipment — but not enough of the life-saving ventilators — for only another week.

He said he had made a direct request to President Donald Trump and the US military “to find us immediately more military medical personnel and get them here by next Sunday.” De Blasio credited federal officials with being “very responsive,” but added, “we’re talking about a sharp escalation ahead.”

From Washington state, where the disease first struck with force, Governor Jay Inslee described “a desperate need for all kinds of equipment.” He said the nation needed to be put on an essentially wartime footing.

Inslee pushed back against the notion, advocated earlier by Trump, that the country could begin returning to work by Easter.

“There are some hard realities we have to understand,” he said on CNN.

“Unless we continue a very vigorous social distancing programme in my state, this will continue to spread like wildfire.”

Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan also described a deteriorating picture, especially in her state’s largest city, Detroit.

“We had a thousand new cases yesterday,” she said. “We know that number will be even higher today... The dire situation in Detroit is getting worse by the minute.” Whitmer bemoaned a system that has states competing against one another for desperately needed supplies.

“We’re bidding against one another, and in some cases the federal government is taking priority,” she said.

“It’s really, I think, creating a lot more problems for all of us.” House speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Trump’s “continued delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly.”

Asked on CNN whether she believed that Trump, by initially downplaying the severity of coronavirus, had cost American lives, she replied bluntly, “Yes, I’m saying that.”

Dr. Birx declined to say what her recommendation would be to the president about an eventual easing of work and travel restrictions, but she offered this advice: “Every metro area should assume that they could have an outbreak equivalent to New York, and do everything right now to prevent it.”

Published in Dawn, March 30th, 2020