Former FDA commissioner anticipates 'persistent spread' of coronavirus, 100,000 deaths in U.S. by end of June

Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottleib, who's become a regular guest on CBS' Face the Nation, told host Margaret Brennan on Sunday that while coronavirus cases are no longer growing at an exponential rate in the United States, the country may have to prepare for "persistent spread," in which there are somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 new infections and 1,000 new deaths, per day.

Gottleib didn't want to look beyond the end of June because it's too hard to predict (though he does expect a bit of reprieve later in the summer before potential flare-ups in the fall), but for now he doesn't seem optimistic that the decline will be as fast as the rise was in March. That means by the end of June, there could be more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country.

He also cautioned that the national decline can be misleading since it relies so heavily on the New York City metro area, which is indeed trending downward, but because the outbreak there was so large, it masks smaller outbreaks across the rest of the country. Tim O'Donnell

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