Gottlieb: Mitigation ‘didn’t work as well as we expected’

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Sunday that measures put in place to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus did not work as well as public health experts expected. 

“When you look across the country, it’s really a mixed bag,” Gottlieb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” 

NEWS: There are about 20 states where cases are rising on a daily basis, @ScottGottliebMD tells @margbrennan, saying that mitigation wasn’t as effective as anticipated. “While mitigation didn’t fail… it didn’t work as we expected,” he says pic.twitter.com/nT6oqDhxAM

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 3, 2020

He said cases are falling in the tri-state area around New York City, which he noted is driving much of the national statistics since the region has such a large outbreak.

“But when you back out what’s happening in New York…around the nation, hospitalizations and new cases continue to rise. There’s about 20 states where we see a rising number of new cases,” he said. 

Gottlieb also named a handful of states where the number of cases are still rising, including Tennessee and Texas, which have started lifting restrictions. 

“While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say it didn’t work as well as we expected. We expected we’d start seeing more significant declines in new case and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that,” he said. 

Gottlieb said there may be 100,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S. by June. There have been 66,415 deaths in the U.S. so far, based on data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. 

“It’s really hard to predict beyond June,” he said.