As the number of coronavirus deaths mounts, the White House’s best-case scenario now looks out of reach.

The coronavirus task force projected in early April that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 would total 60,000, a vast improvement from original projections that as many as 200,000 would die, even if the country aggressively followed social distancing guidelines. Now, though, the number of deaths has surpassed 50,300 and will likely hit 60,000 by the first week of May.

President Trump has credited the “tremendous resolve” of the public for lower projections below the 100,000 mark, not to mention the projections for up to 2 million people to die in the absence of any social distancing.

“But we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead,” Trump said during Monday’s briefing . “I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people.”

As of 5 p.m. Friday, 50,890 people had died in the United States from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data , compared to about 35,790 on Monday and 30,290 on Thursday. The number of new deaths reported each day in the U.S. has hovered around 2,000, which only takes into consideration those deaths confirmed to be due to COVID-19.

That count is subject to revision, as data collection has not been uniform. The New York Department of Health, for example, made the decision in early April to count deaths in the state that were probably due to COVID-19, but the person was never diagnosed or treated for the disease. The addition raised the national death toll by over 3,700.

Throughout most of the U.S., the rate of transmission appears to have slowed significantly. “We are slowing the spread, we are protecting our most vulnerable,” Vice President Mike Pence said Friday.

Models often used by the White House, such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model assembled by researchers at the University of Washington, predict that coronavirus-related deaths will begin to taper off in the summer. However, researchers are not yet able to predict how many people will die as a result of a second wave of the coronavirus, likely to resurface in the fall and winter.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday at the White House that a resurgence in the fall would be “more difficult and potentially complicated because we’ll have flu and coronavirus circulating at the same time.”

Trump took heat throughout the day Friday for his remarks Thursday, suggesting that scientists explore somehow using disinfectant to kill the virus within patients “by an injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

His remarks prompted warnings from numerous physicians that people should not inject disinfectant or bleach into themselves. Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of Lysol, released a statement saying that “we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”

Trump’s FDA chief Stephen Hahn defended the president, saying, “This is a conversation that occurs every day in America between a patient and a doctor.”

Trump said Friday while signing legislation to provide additional pandemic economic relief that he was speaking “sarcastically.”

Unusually, though, he did not take questions later in the day during the White House press briefing.

The Food and Drug Administration issued a warning Friday against taking two malaria drugs touted by Trump as a possible remedy for COVID-19 outside of a hospital or clinical trial. The drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, have not been proven in clinical trials to be effective in treating the coronavirus and come with sometimes fatal side effects, such as an irregular heartbeat and or a dangerously high heart rate called tachycardia.