Dr. Deborah Birx, who serves as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, unloaded on the mainstream media during a press conference on Thursday for their COVID-19 reporting that is not backed up by factual realities.
Transcript
I am sure many ever you saw the recent report out of the U.K. about them adjusting completely their needs. This is really quite important. If you remember that was the report that said there would be 500,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million deaths in the United States. They’ve adjusted that number in the U.K. to 20,000. So, half a million to 20,000. We are looking into this in great details to understand that adjustment.
In the model, either you have to have a large group of people who are asymptomatic who never presented for any test in order to have the kind of numbers that were predicted. To get to 60 million people infected, or 6 million people infected, you have do have a large group of asymptomatics because in no country to date have we seen an attack rate over 1 in 1,000. So, either we’re only measuring the tip of the iceberg of the symptomatic cases and underneath it are a large group of people. So, we are working hard to get the antibody test because that’s a good way to figure out ‘who are all these people under here and do they exist?’. Or we have the transmission completely wrong. So, these are the things we are looking at because the predictions of the models don’t match the reality on the ground in either China, South Korea or Italy.
We are about 5 times the [population] size of Italy. So, if we were Italy and you did all of those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They are not close to achieving that. These are the kinds of things we are trying to understand. Models are models.There is enough data now of the real experience with the Coronavirus on the ground to really make these predictions much more sound. So, when people start talking about 20% of a population getting infected. It’s very scary, but we don’t have data that matches that based on the experience.
And then finally, the situation about ventilators. We were reassured after meeting with colleagues in New York there are still ICU beds remaining and there’s still significant, over a thousand or 2,000 ventilators that have not been used yet. Please for the reassurance of people around the world, to wake up this morning and look at people talking about creating DNR situations, do not resuscitate situations for patients, there is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion. You could be thinking about it in a hospital, certainly many hospitals talk about it this on a daily basis. But to say that to the American people, to make the implication, that when they need a hospital bed it’s not going be there or when they need that ventilator it won’t be there, we don’t have evidence of that right now.
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There’s no … reality on the ground where we can see that 60-70% of Americans are going to get infected in the next 8-12 weeks. I just want to be clear about that.
