In his first tweet of the day Thursday, President Trump urged Americans to “keep going” with social distancing as a new model projects far fewer US deaths from Covid-19.
.@OANN A key CoronaVirus Model is now predicting far fewer deaths than the number shown in earlier models. That’s because the American people are doing a great job. Social Distancing etc. Keep going!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 9, 2020
Some background: The main model used by the White House and pretty much everyone else was updated Wednesday to show far fewer projected US deaths from Covid-19 — down to 60,415 people by August, from the 82,000 the model showed on Tuesday (which was already lower than previous projections).
New data on the pandemic’s trajectory — from the United States and around the world — has been fed into the model almost every day, driving the changes. And the downward adjustment suggests that social distancing may be working better than expected in some places.