Did FEMA Lie?

With all the trials and uncertainty of the COVID-19 out break this is not the time for dishonestly. Since the beginning of this outbreak there has been push back.

An internal paper containing charts created by FEMA predicts many more new coronavirus cases than the White House expected and nearly doubles the current daily death toll by the end of the month. But sources raised concerns about the reliability of the results.

In a tweet, White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere reiterated that the paper did not come from the White House and that it had not been sent to the Coronavirus Task Force.

Deere said in a statement. “This data is not reflective of any of the modeling done by the task force or data that the task force has analyzed.” It is also to be noted that Deere distanced the White House from the involvement in the FEMA reports.

Fox News verified the existence of a document first published by The New York Times. Sources told Fox News that while a large amount of the data comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the estimates of new infections and deaths come from simulations at Johns Hopkins University.

Such estimates indicate that there will be 200,000 new infections of coronavirus and 3,000 deaths per day by the end of May. This is a big change from the existing figure of nearly 25,000 new cases and 1,750 deaths per day.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Task Force Response Administrator, read the paper even though it was not publicly addressed to the entire task force.

While these forecasts are likely to raise questions about proposals – at national and state level – to begin the re-opening of areas of the economy, reports suggest that the analysis behind these estimates does not take into consideration the mitigation recommendations during the gradual re-opening. They also noticed that the evidence in the study were out of step with other predictions.
One model by the University of Washington, which contributed to most of the original study by the White House Task Force, estimates that by May 25 the average number of deaths would fall below 100.

In the meantime, many countries have started to slowly rebuild their markets and are easing limits on home-stay directives. However, neither of these states have agreed with the White House’s advice to wait for a 14-day reduction in cases until the re-opening process starts.