Trump concedes 'herd immunity' strategy would have resulted in more deaths
President Trump's estimation of the U.S.'s eventual coronavirus death toll keeps growing, and so far, he maintains the country has made the right choices to mitigate it.
On Friday, Trump spoke at a meeting with Republican lawmakers about the growing coronavirus death toll, saying "so many people have died" but "that's the one thing we can't do anything about, unfortunately." "What I can say is if we did it a different way," perhaps by letting people go about their normal lives in hopes of building up herd immunity to COVID-19, "we would've been talking about numbers that would've been unsustainable," Trump continued. The ultimate death toll, Trump now posits, is "95,000 people" or "more than that."
That's one of the highest numbers of potential coronavirus deaths Trump has estimated so far. He suggested a few weeks ago that anywhere from 50-60,000 Americans would ultimately die, but those numbers were quickly surpassed, with 77,000 deaths reported as of Friday.
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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.
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