now he is trying to make a virtue of a lower number arguing that the efforts of his administration have warded off a far greater death toll than otherwise would have been seen the focus on death tallies also overlooks other important markers such as immunity levels and infection rates it highlights how infrequently he will actually talk about these numbers as people as loved ones as fellow americans as people no longer with us jillson said earlier this month the centers for disease control and prevention began posting projections on the number of anticipated us deaths from the coronavirus from seven different research teams all these pieces of data are like a giant jigsaw puzzle that youre putting together said dr howard markel director of the university of michigans center for the history of medicine yeah weve lost a lot of people he said in the rose garden the teams use different types of data and make different assumptions including about the effects of social distancing use of face coverings and other measures at the same time she said epidemiology models initially had predicted a worstcase scenario of 15 million to 22 million us deaths without mitigation efforts such as social distancing hand washing and staying home as much as possible dont think anybodys done a better job with testing with ventilators with all the things that weve done trump told reporters at the white house on thursday its far too many hall jamieson director of the annenberg public policy center at the university of pennsylvania said its simplistic for trump or other public officials to focus on the death toll since its incomplete and our death totals numbers per million people are really very very strong the minimum number was 100000 lives and i think well be substantially under that number he said april 10 were very proud of the job weve done later he leaned more toward a 60000 projection deborah birx coordinator of the white house coronavirus task force on march 29 revealed models projecting the deaths of 10000240000 americans assuming social distancing efforts were ongoing soon after trump began speculating that the 100000 figure was an outer limit but if you look at what original projections were 22 million were probably heading to 60000 70000 calvin jillson a presidential scholar at southern methodist university contrasted trumps public talk of death counts to the reluctance of administration and military officials to discuss vietnam war body counts trump often cites restricting travel from china where the virus originated and from europe where it took hold before exploding in the us as among his most important first steps i use models to try to predict the impact of different interventions he had cited the estimate as a sign of relative success after the white house previously warned the us could suffer 100000 to 240000 deathsi the most recent summary showed modelers predicted a cumulative us death toll of 50000 to 100000 by midmay what you dont have