ANALYSIS: Dr. Debora Birx says number of US coronavirus deaths could have been "decreased substantially"

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, reveals her chilling conclusion in a new CNN documentary that the number of coronavirus deaths could have been "decreased substantially" if cities and states across the country had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge toward mitigation last spring, potentially preventing the surges that followed.

 

It is a bracing retrospective from one of the top doctors who was tasked with halting the pandemic, and it comes at a time when many grieving families are still trying to understand how one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world was unable to prevent the loss of nearly 550,000 lives.

 

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked six of the doctors who ran point on the pandemic response, including Birx, to provide their insights on what the US could have done differently in the new documentary, "COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out," which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. The doctors all painfully dissected the country's missteps that led to the enormous loss of life.

 

But Birx saw it most starkly, stating that the vast majority of America's deaths could have been prevented, a painful interpretation of the last year for a nation still trying to come to terms with the ongoing loss of life...