President Donald Trump warned the nation Tuesday to brace for "a hell of a bad two weeks," as his top infectious disease experts projected that upward of 240,000 people will die from coronavirus in the U.S. even if current social distancing guidelines are precisely maintained.
Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, two of the country's top immunologists and senior advisers on Trump's coronavirus task force, offered the alarming estimate during a briefing at the White House.
The doctors stressed that the death toll could be lower if Americans radically change their lifestyles over the next few weeks.
However, they noted that the nation shouldn't be surprised if between 100,000 and 240,000 lives are lost before the COVID-19 pandemic is relegated to the past.
"As sobering as that number is, we should be prepared for it," Fauci said. "We have to prepare ourselves."
After at first saying he wanted to scrap his administration's social-distancing guidelines completely by Easter, Trump switched course Sunday and extended them until at least April 30.
At Tuesday's briefing, Birx warned that if those guidelines aren't now religiously followed, as many as 2.2 million people could die in the U.S.
Trump, who downplayed the severity of the virus for weeks and keeps making misleading statements about it, struck a somber note as he took questions after Birx and Fauci laid out the projections.
"This could be a hell of a bad two weeks ... or maybe even three weeks," he said. "This is going to be three weeks like we haven't seen before."
"This is going to be painful _ very, very painful," he added.
