President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday disputed a leaked Centers for Disease Control report showing that daily coronavirus deaths would spike in June.
“That’s a report with no mitigation,” Trump said as he left the White House for a trip to Arizona. “So based on no mitigation, but we’re doing a lot of mitigation.”
The New York Times leaked the CDC study on Monday, suggesting that the president was ignoring the facts about the virus while pushing the country to reopen.
The White House disputed the document on Monday, noting that it did not track with the model used by the Coronavirus Task Force.
Trump said that it was possible to open up the country again and let Americans return to work with social distancing and increased hygiene.
“The fact that they’re out, they’re mitigating, they’re social distancing, they all know that, they’re washing their hands a lot,” he said. “But we have to get our country open.”
The president also disputed the IHME model showing 134,000 deaths by August, again claiming that the data used in the model assumed no mitigation.
“Look, models have been very inaccurate, I’ve seen models that are very inaccurate,” Trump said.
But the president defended the models that predicted up to 2 million deaths in the United States without closing down the country.
“We did everything right, but now it’s time to go back to work,” he said.
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