Ashish Jha says, mask wearing, social distancing and robust strategies of testing and contact tracing will be even more important.

Ashish Jha says, mask wearing, social distancing and robust strategies of testing and contact tracing will be even more important.

is about to hit — 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 — is far above the number of deaths seen from the pandemic in any other country.

I think for a majority of Americans, this doesn't quite feel real because the deaths have been concentrated in [a] few places.

But then, if you sort of look at the models of models — the ones that really sort of combine it all and put it together and make projections — the projections are that we're probably going to see 70,000 to 100,000 deaths between now and the end of the summer.

While the pace will slow down, because we are doing some amount of social distancing and testing is ramping up — we're going to, unfortunately, see a lot more sickness and, unfortunately, a lot more deaths in the upcoming months.

Whatever happens over the summer, do we face even more deaths as we head later in the year.

I'm hoping that the models of the summer of an additional 70,000 to 100,000 deaths are too pessimistic?

But we have to maintain a certain amount of social distancing.

I think mask wearing is really important.

The only other tool we have in our toolbox is a really robust testing, tracing, isolation program.

They have had a really aggressive testing, tracing, isolation program.

So I really think that still remains — and should remain — one of our priority areas.

I think this is a real missed opportunity and very unfortunate in many ways, because while states have a critical role to play, testing capacity and testing supply chains are national and international