Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti painted a bleak picture of the fight against coronavirus on Wednesday, saying that people should not have “premature optimism” or “false hope,” and that the city would be shut down for two months.

In an interview with Business Insider, the second-term mayor sounded a fatalistic note:

In an interview with Insider, Garcetti pushed back against “premature optimism” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying leaders who suggest we are on the verge of business as usual are putting lives at risk.

“I can’t say that strongly enough,” the mayor said. Optimism, he said, has to be grounded in data. And right now the data is [sic] not good.

“Giving people false hope will crush their spirits and will kill more people,” Garcetti said, adding it would change their actions by instilling a sense of normality at the most abnormal time in a generation.

“This will not kill most of us,” he said. “It will kill a lot more people than we’re used to dying around us.”

Read the full interview here.

Garcetti is currently facing criticism for moving homeless people out of encampments and into recreation centers in residential areas, against the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which warn against doing so in the middle of “community spread” of coronavirus. He has also threatened to shut water and power off to businesses that fail to comply with orders to stay closed during the pandemic.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.