
As the US passes the grim milestone of more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said at the beginning of the pandemic, he never thought this many people would die from the virus.
He said when early models were predicting even 60,000 deaths by August, he thought that was a high number.
"I really thought we would rise more to this challenge, but sadly, we haven't," Gupta said. "No one likes to hear that these deaths were preventable," he said on CNN's Anderson Cooper Full Circle.
Comparing the coronavirus pandemic to the 1918 influenza pandemic, he said there are a lot of parallels.
In 1918 there were three major peaks of infection. One of them was in October when thousands of people died in a single month as people started gathering indoors again, Gupta said.
"That model for 1918 is a little bit of a cautionary tale," he said, pointing to the importance of wearing masks and continuing safety measures as we enter into the fall season.
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