Debbie Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said that federal scientists reviewed a dozen different models for how this pandemic might play out before constructing their own. Using techniques learned from tracking HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, she explained, “we went back to the drawing board over the last week or two and worked from the ground up.”
Simultaneously, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, led by professor Chris Murray, was doing something similar. “When we finished, the other group that was working in parallel, which we didn’t know about, IHME and Chris Murray ended up at the same numbers,” Birx said in the Rose Garden on Sunday evening.
President Trump said he was persuaded to extend social distancing guidelines through the end of April, retreating from his goal of seeing churches packed with people on Easter, after seeing a presentation about the government’s modeling from Birx and Tony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won,” said Trump. “Easter should be the peak number, and it should start coming down and hopefully very substantially from that point.”
The government is keeping its own projections private, but Birx twice said that people can study Murray’s work to better understand White House considerations. “If you go on his website, you can see the concern that we had with the growing number of potential fatalities,” she told reporters.