Surgeon General Jerome Adams has compared some of the darkest moments in U.S. history, including the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, which also exclusively happened on American soil, to the COVID-19 pandemic.
What We Know:
- Adams told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, “This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized. It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”
- His comments reiterate what leading health care officials have said for days in an attempt to prepare the nation for what they call the “peak week”. They also hope to minimize the impact by pushing the most aggressive social distancing measures yet.
- The most current statistics stand at over 325,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the USA and more than 9,200 had died from the disease as of 3 p.m. EDT Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
- On Saturday, Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force Dr. Deborah Birx, stated she expects the three major “hot spots” of New York, Detroit, and Louisiana to have a rapid rise in deaths this week.
- When asked for specific timing in those three areas, all that was shared was the fact that deaths will reach their peak numbers per day from the virus, all in the span of the next six to seven days.
As far as the death projections, Birx referred reporters to healthdata.org which predicts a grim peak of 855 deaths a day on Friday, based on the Christopher Murray model. As a means to legitimize this projection, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reported Sunday there had been roughly 594 coronavirus-related deaths in his state in a single day.
