Trump: 100K Americans may die from COVID-19

May 4 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump said as many as 100,000 Americans may die from the coronavirus -- a significant increase from his forecast from a few weeks ago.

Trump made the comment Sunday during a virtual town hall hosted by FOX News at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., as the United States' death toll stood at more than 67,000. The president said if it wasn't for his administration more than 1 million Americans would die from the coronavirus.

"We're going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people. That's a horrible thing. We shouldn't lose one person over this. This should've been stopped in China," he said, adding, "If we didn't do it, the minimum we would have lost was a million two, a million four, a million five -- that's the minimum. We would have lost probably higher. It's possible higher than 2.2 [million people]."

On April 10, Trump told reporters that the death toll to the virus would be "substantially below the 100,000," and 10 days later he said the United States "was going toward 50- or 60,000 people" died to the coronavirus.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier remarked that Trump had increased his previous 60,000 number with the president responding that "it's going up."

"I used to say 65,000, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly," Trump said during the two-hour town hall. "But it's still going to be, no matter how you look at it, at the lower end of the plane if we didn't shut down."

Since reporting its first infection on Jan. 21, the number of cases in the United States has multiplied and as of Sunday, it had 1.1 million infections -- four times that of Spain, which has the second-highest number of cases at 217,466, according to a live tally of the virus by Johns Hopkins University.