Reports saying COVID-19 is the leading cause of death in the United States was disputed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which tracks such information.
“We have limited data on 2020 deaths by cause, and no final official numbers yet for 2019, but we do know by looking at the final death totals in 2018 for the two leading causes of death in the U.S., heart disease and cancer, there is no way that at this point COVID-19 comes anywhere close to those totals,” he explained.
Between January 2018 and April 2018, more than 234,000 people in the United States died of heart disease, while 199,000 died of cancer. During the pandemic, about 17,000 people in the United States have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The conflicting reports come as President Donald Trump and White House task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci have estimated that the number of people who could die in the United States might be far lower than initially predicted.
“I think the American public has done a really terrific job just buckling down and doing those physical separations and adhering to those guidelines,” Fauci said in a briefing this week.
“The minimum number was 100,000 lives and I think we’ll be substantially under that number,” Trump said on Friday afternoon, without giving a timetable. “Hard to believe that if you had 60,000, you can never be happy, but that’s a lot fewer than we were originally told and thinking.”
