The US is likely to have more daily COVID-19 deaths than 9/11 for the next 60 to 90 days, CDC director warns

• The director of the CDC on Thursday warned that the daily death toll from COVID-19 in the US is likely to exceed the number of deaths from major national tragedies in the coming weeks.
• "We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we're going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor," Dr. Robert Redfield said.
• The US recorded 3,124 new COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, the largest single-day total to date and higher than the death toll on September 11, 2001.

The US will "probably" see more COVID-19 deaths per day for the next two to three months than the total death tolls from major national tragedies like the 9/11 terror attacks and Pearl Harbor, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Thursday.

"We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we're going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor," Dr. Robert Redfield said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, per The Hill.

Though a COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer is seemingly on the verge of being approved in the US, Redfield suggested this would not have a major impact on the daily death toll over the next two months.

"The reality is the vaccine approval this week's not going to really impact that I think to any degree for the next 60 days," Redfield said.

The US recorded 3,124 new COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, the largest single-day total to date. It marked the first time the US reported more deaths in one day from the pandemic than the total number of people killed in the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.

2,977 people were killed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC, in the 9/11 attacks.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which launched the US into World War II, killed 2,403 Americans.

The COVID-19 death toll in the US had surpassed 291,000 as of Thursday evening, alongside more than 15.5 million confirmed cases of the virus, per Johns Hopkins University.

No other country in the world has reported more COVID-19 cases or deaths than the US. Public health experts have excoriated President Donald Trump's handling of the pandemic, criticizing his anti-science approach and repeated efforts to downplay the threat of the virus. Trump has routinely flouted recommendations from experts, pushing against the calls from medical professionals for people to wear masks or face-coverings to help mitigate the spread of the virus.