TheCable

President Donald Trump says up to 100,000 Americans may die from COVID-19, a figure 40,000 higher than his prediction in April.

According to Worldometers, more than 69, 000 patients have died from COVID-19 in the United States, while the country has a total number of 1,202,769 cases.

Speaking at a virtual town hall meeting, Trump said the disease has become more devastating than he thought.

The president said he was warned about the virus in his regular intelligence briefing in January, but the information was not presented as though it required immediate action.

“We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That’s a horrible thing. We shouldn’t lose one person over this,” Trump said.

“If we didn’t do it, the minimum we would have lost was a million two, a million four, a million five, that’s the minimum. We would have lost probably higher, it’s possible higher than 2.2.”

The US president had said emergency use of remdesivir has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for hospitalised patients who tested positive for coronavirus.

On Wednesday, Gilead Sciences, a biopharmaceutical company in the US, announced “positive data” in the clinical trial of remdesivir for the treatment of COVID-19.