The Trump administration is privately predicting the daily coronavirus death toll will double over the next month, with new infections increasing from 25,000 per day to 200,000

• An internal Trump administration document predicts that the US's daily death toll will double over the next month, even as the president encourages states to return to business as usual, The New York Times reported Monday.
• The administration expects daily deaths to increase from 1,750, where it currently is, to approximately 3,000 on June 1.
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An internal Trump administration document predicts that the US's daily death toll will double over the next month, even as the president encourages states to return to business as usual, The New York Times reported Monday.

Daily deaths are expected to grow from 1,750 to approximately 3,000 by June 1, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency document, which uses Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers. And the administration predicts the number of new infections per day will jump from 25,000 to 200,000 — an eight-fold increase — by June 1.

The numbers illustrate that reopening the country's economy will only make the virus' spread much worse.

Some states are beginning to reopen, allowing many businesses and non-essential workers to return to life as normal. But, in many cases, infection rates are continuing to increase even as the states reopen. While urban areas like New York City have experienced the largest number of infections, rural areas have been hit with massive outbreaks in prisons and meat processing plants.

What's also clear is that the US isn't experiencing the declines in infection and death rates the government expected to see as a result of the widespread lockdowns.

Scott Gottlieb, the Trump administration's former commissioner of food and drugs, conceded during a Sunday CBS News interview that efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus "didn't work as well as we expected."

President Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday that as many as 100,000 people in the US will die from the virus.

"We're going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people," Trump said.

Those estimates are a large increase from the numbers the president mentioned just a few weeks ago; on April 20, he told reporters "we're going toward 50- or 60,000 people." The death told currently stands at over 68,000.

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