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Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the US could experience 300,000 coronavirus deaths by the end of 2020

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the US could experience 300,000 coronavirus deaths by the end of 2020

Taylor Ardrey

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, predicted that the US coronavirus death toll could hit 300,000 by the end of 2020.
In an interview with "Face the Nation" on CBS, Gottlieb said, "We're definitely going to be somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000. Whether we're closer to 200,000 or closer to 300,000 depends on what we do and how this evolves."
Gottlieb also predicts the country will possibly experience a third wave of the virus that will be more difficult to control.
"The concern now is that this has become so pervasive across the country that it could start to infect more rural communities that have largely been untouched to date and probably are a little bit more complacent because they have been untouched, but are still very vulnerable because the infection hasn't been there," he said.
Gottlieb also said children "are not immune to this virus."
"We have seen bad outcomes. The CDC recently documented 570 cases of the multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children," he said. "There's more cases that are occurring. We've seen children die. There's 86 kids who died from this and thousands that have been hospitalized. And so this is a risk in children."
According to John Hopkins University data, the US has so far reported more than 162,000 deaths and over 5 million cases of the coronavirus.