CDC projecting SURGE in deaths, hospitalizations by early June: 3,000 deaths and 200,000 new infections per day

The long-dreaded “second wave” of infections and deaths may emerge sooner than we had predicted. The CDC is now internally projecting shocking new increases in infections and deaths just one month away. But are they reliable numbers, or just another example of the CDC playing politics with the virus? By early June, according to the projections, America will see coronavirus deaths surge to 3,000 per day, vastly surpassing “peak” deaths we all witnessed mid-April.

Similarly, the number of new infections per day — currently hovering around 29,000 per day — will balloon to 200,000 per day, according to the internal guidance that was shared with the White House by the CDC. (We disagree with these projections, see below…)

The New York Times posted the documents at this link, adding:

The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

The cost of complacency and the pro-Trump media lying to America

If these projections turn out to be accurate, they would indicate the shocking cost of complacency in America, where both independent and conservative media outlets have repeatedly lied to their own audiences over the last two months about the severity of the virus.

Pro-Trump independent media pundits and talking heads have falsely claimed again and again that “the coronavirus is no worse than the flu,” whipping up wildly inaccurate numbers to try to “prove” that the flu has a higher fatality rate than the coronavirus. Such arguments are rooted in a toxic cocktail of scientific illiteracy and politically-motivated narrative engineering, yet they persist because many readers of such media outlets want the virus to be a hoax so they don’t have to deal with reality.

Both Michael Savage and myself have openly called out the scientific illiteracy of the pro-Trump media, by the way. It’s probably no coincidence that we are both highly trained in the sciences.

The misleading, low-IQ reporting of the pro-Trump media has resulted in conservatives and Trump supporters largely ignoring the basic precautions of social distancing and mask wearing, causing the coronavirus to continue to spread and infect perhaps hundreds of thousands of additional people so far. It also speaks to the serious dangers of reopening economies without enforcing adequate precautions among the public.

“The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded,” adds the New York Times.

TheHill.com further explains, “The report warns that the Great Lakes region, Southern California and parts of the South and Northeast are all seeing increasing case loads.”

Trump is now revising his numbers higher… does the CDC have early warning numbers to support the new projections?

Don’t forget that the CDC also has an early warning alert system tied into all the emergency rooms in hospitals across America. If they are seeing an increase in the number of coronavirus-related symptoms in emergency rooms, they may already have the data to support their June projections. We just don’t know yet if those data exist, since the CDC isn’t sharing. Perhaps they’re just trying to bluff the president into pushing for an extended lockdown in order to extend the economic damage that they hope will unseat Trump. Make no mistake: the CDC is a criminal enterprise, and they have always been anti-Trump from the start. Would they fudge the numbers to hurt Trump? No question about it.

The White House disagrees with the CDC’s projections and insists that reopening the economy will continue to protect the health of the American people, even if there are no mask mandates in place. It’s difficult to take seriously anything the White House says about this pandemic, however, since Trump remained in a state of bizarre denial for two full months, even after being briefed from the intelligence community about the severity and transmissivity of the virus. At one point in February, the White House even claimed they had the coronavirus “contained” in America. Since then, there have been over a million new infections and more deaths than the entire Vietnam War. If that’s the White House definition of “contained,” I sure don’t want to see their “not contained” scenario.

As you might have concluded on your own, essentially every “official” source is full of crap when it comes to the coronavirus, and that includes both the White House and the CDC. If you want to know what to believe, follow the state-by-state fatality numbers published by Worldometers.info. Those seem to be the most exhaustively sourced numbers.

Even Trump was recently forced to raise his projections of dead Americans from 60,000 to now as many as 100,000 by August. “I used to say 65,000. Now I’m saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly. But it’s still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the lower end of the plane if we did the shutdown,” Trump stated over the weekend.

He added during a Fox News event, “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people…”

Trump is now reportedly pushing the pharma giants to develop 300,000 doses of a coronavirus vaccine so he can push for mass vaccinations across America before the end of the year. Suddenly, Trump has become the “vaccine president.” It’s not yet clear how Trump pivoting to a vaccine zealot is going to play with his followers, but we anticipate it won’t be a cozy outcome.

Why we disagree with the new projections

For the record, our own calculations show the new CDC projections to be too aggressive. Our models show that the coronavirus will need most of May and June to build back up to its previous infection numbers, so we anticipate the “second wave” will begin to surge in August, not June.

Here’s a graphic summary of our current projections:

And for June through 2021:

These projections are summarized in the following detailed podcast:

However, it’s worth noting that our own projections have been consistently too low in terms of predicting infections and deaths. It is possible we are being far too optimistic for America and that the virus is still circulating at such high levels (mostly thanks to people who refuse to wear masks in public) that a resurgence could begin in just 30 days.

If that’s the case, June may look a lot like March in terms of new coronavirus fatalities, and many regions of the country could be looking at a second round of lockdowns in June or July. These are not our current projections; they are the projections of the CDC. And it’s certainly possible the CDC is playing politics with the numbers.

The CDC is not wrong, however, in warning that complacency will lead to a renewed round of infections. It is abundantly clear at this point that the pandemic denialists who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing will end up spreading the coronavirus to the point where a second wave of lockdowns is eventually put in place in certain regions.

This, in turn, will likely result in a stock market crash and another round of economic collapse, and those events will very likely result in Trump being defeated in the November elections. I’ve outlined the full details of that scenario in this analysis article.

In effect, Trump supporters who deny the severity of the virus are likely to cause Trump to lose the election because they have largely become #covidiots who suffer from “stupid-19,” a disease of the mind that makes people deny biological reality. This disease has spread like wildfire across the independent and conservative media, and it persists to this day, even as the coronavirus has now killed twice as many people as the number killed by the regular flu in an entire year. Yes, twice the number. (Remember when everybody kept telling us the coronavirus was “just the flu?”)

This is the cost of widespread mathematical illiteracy across the pro-Trump media, where we’ve all been witness to the most bizarre parade of bad math, science illiteracy and a stunning inability of so-called “journalists” to even calculate simple fractions. To this day, most of the pro-Trump independent media still fails to understand false positives in antibody testing, as they prefer to live in a fairy tale dreamland where “herd immunity” has already been achieved and all lockdowns can be ended with no negative repercussions at all. They are delusional.

In truth, we’re far from herd immunity. This pandemic has only just begun, and by the Fall, many Americans who previously believed the coronavirus was no big deal will be forced to face up to the new reality they desperately fought to ignore: That the Wuhan coronavirus is a deadly, highly contagious biological weapon, and even aggressive lockdowns just barely prevent it from exploding across the nation in a devastating wave of new deaths.

The moment you let up on this virus, it will explode in your face and cause mass casualties. And, as it turns out, denial is not a strategy for defeating it.