AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
- Dr. Tom Frieden warned the US could see 200,000 new COVID-19 cases a day in four to six weeks.
- That rate was last seen in January.
- He said it was due to people not getting vaccinated, and there would be “preventable deaths.”
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Daily coronavirus cases in the US could quadruple next month as a large number of people aren’t getting vaccinated, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned.
Dr. Tom Frieden, who led the CDC between 2009 and 2017, warned that US case numbers could surge like they did in the UK, where the Delta variant was dominant before it was in the US, CNN reported.
“We’re heading into a rough time. It’s likely, if our trajectory is similar to that in the United Kingdom, that we could see as many as 200,000 cases a day,” he said.
He said this could happen in the next four to six weeks.
The US is currently recording between around 30,000 and around 60,000 new cases a day.
Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the US last saw around 200,000 new cases a day in January, CNN noted.
Frieden said the US isn’t likely to see the same “horrific death tolls” that it did earlier in the pandemic as many vulnerable people have been vaccinated.
But he warned: “You will see a steady increase in deaths, and these are preventable deaths.”
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