Trump now predicts that ‘75, 80 to 100,000’ Americans could die from coronavirus

President Trump spent the last several weeks predicting that the coronavirus death toll in the U.S. could be 60,000 people. Now he has shifted that estimate to “75, 80 to 100,000.”

Video Transcript

DONALD TRUMP: The minimum number was 100,000 lives. And I think we'll be substantially under that number. It's 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. And I think numbers are just coming out where they're estimating 60,000 people will die. So we're talking about maybe 60,000 or so. That's a lot of people, but that's-- 100,000 was the minimum we thought that we could get to, and we will be lower than that number.

It looks like we'll be at about a 60,000 mark, which is 40,000 less than the lowest number thought of. Now, we're going toward 50,000, I'm hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it. One is too many. But we're going toward 50,000 or 60,000 people. That's at the lower-- as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We Could end up at 50,000 to 60,000.

If we didn't do anything, the number would be 50,000 to 60,000. We're probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. And hopefully we're going to come in below that 100,000 lives lost. We're going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000, to 100,000 people. That's a horrible thing. We shouldn't lose one person over this.