Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade called for the American economy to quickly reopen amid downward revisions of some models projecting the coronavirus death count, saying Thursday that a now-expected 60,000 victims shows just “how good we are doing.”
With one influential and highly respected modeler moving its projections down over the past few days, Fox News hosts have been clamoring for President Donald Trump to quickly reverse social-distancing restrictions in order to jumpstart the economy, claiming public health experts exaggerated the impact of the virus.
Noting that Trump had originally expressed hope that the country could get going again at Easter, Kilmeade said that one model shows that the peak of the coronavirus infections will now come around that time. He then seemed to downplay the possibility of tens of thousands of more deaths.
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“The fact is, when someone says 200,000 people die, oops, I mean 60,000,” the Fox host declared. “And it's not going to be right away, it's going to be in August. That's how good we are doing and how off the models were.”
“You have to wonder, as much as social distancing is working, I wonder if the economists are going to get in that room and say we have to stand up this economy in some way before we're not going to be able to stand when this is all said and done,” he continued.
Co-host Steve Doocy, meanwhile, reminded his colleague that 60,000 coronavirus victims is still a “staggering number.”
“It's a high number,” Kilmeade reacted. “But how many people are going to die as the country goes flat on its back for three months. We’re not going to look like the same country. So the economists have to have a say in this.”
As of publication, per the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the United States has over 430,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and nearly 15,000 have died.
