WASHINGTON: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the White House on Tuesday of being “afraid of the truth” as an internal Trump administration report warned that coronavirus infections in the United States could go up to 200,000 daily cases by June.

The memo, obtained by The New York Times, also warned that the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, a 70 per cent increase from the current number of about 1,750.

In a separate report, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that there will be nearly 135,000 deaths in the United States through the beginning of August — more than double of its previous forecast.

On April 17, the institute estimated 60,308 could die of this virus by Aug 4 but the country has already had more than 70,000 deaths.

US monitoring agencies had recorded about 1,225,000 coronavirus cases and 71,300 deaths by Tuesday afternoon.

Such grim predictions overshadow US President Donald Trump’s efforts to reopen the economy and announcements by more than a dozen governors that they plan to resume at least some business activities in their states by May 12.

Afraid of the media focus on rising death and infection data, President Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he will not allow members of the White House Coronavirus Taskforce to appear before the House of Representatives because it’s dominated by the Democrats. “The House is a setup. The House is a bunch of Trump haters,” he said.

The White House also has issued a memo to Congress saying that it will not allow members of its taskforce — including two leading experts on epidemics, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx — to testify before the House Appropriations subcommittee on Wednesday.

Speaker Pelosi accused new White House chief of staff Mark Meadows of blocking the two experts, saying “he knows that we will be […] very, very strictly insisting on the truth, and they might be afraid of truth.”

The Trump administration’s projection cited in the media is based on government modeling pulled together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It warns that daily infections could rise to 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

This coincides with warnings from some experts that ending the lockdown at this stage will make matters worse. “There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said that its own revisions reflected “rising mobility in most US states as well as the easing of social distancing measures expected in 31 states by May 11. “Growing contacts among people will promote transmission of the coronavirus,” the report warned.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2020