Sunday, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the coronavirus pandemic could cause “between 100,000 and 200,000” deaths in the United States.

Fauci said, “You know, Jake, to be honest with you, we don’t really have any firm idea. There are things called models. When someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good or as accurate as your assumptions. Whenever the models come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario. Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I’ve never seen a model of the diseases that I’ve dealt with where the worst case came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, million and a half, 2 million, that almost certainly is off the chart. It’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

He added, “I mean looking at what we’re seeing now, you know, would say between 100 and 200,000 cases. But I don’t want to be held to that because — excuse me, deaths. We’re going to have millions of cases. But I just don’t think we really need to make a projection when it’s such a moving target that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.”

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