Watch Dr. Tony Fauci explain that COVID-19 models were revised down because social distancing has been effective
Conservative media figures have used the revised models to sow distrust in public health experts
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From the April 10, 2020, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
BRIAN WILLIAMS (HOST): Doctor thank you very much for joining us and I’m going to begin with the president’s last answer, and a quote I lifted as he spoke, he said “we're talking 50, 60, 65 maybe." He was talking about a death toll of 50,000, 60,000, 65,000. People may very well latch on to that figure, does that match the best models and projections you have as of right now?
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: Brian, you might remember, and I have made the statement multiple times, that the original models that were fashioned were based on assumptions about a variety of aspects of the virus of the population of the exposure. Those original numbers said, that there would be anywhere between 100,000 and about 200,000 deaths in the United States. Well, as I have said many times when you collect data the way we have, mostly due to the fact that we've been doing mitigation very, very well, that when the data starts coming in, the data always trumps the model. In other words, you come back, you re-look at the model. And you say “wait a minute we have this data that's saying it doesn't have to be 100,000 to 20,000." It looks like if we do what we do and we're doing it successfully, and this is a big country and people are doing it differently and at different rates of intensity that we can do better than that.
So the most recent examination of the model with the new data that has been put in says about 60,000. I still think we can do even better than that. That's why I have always said sometimes to the dismay of my modeling colleagues that models are as good as the assumptions that you put in. and you could influence those assumptions by real data. So 60,000 is where the model is saying now. Let's see, maybe we can do even better than that.