White House pandemic adviser Dr. Scott Atlas in an interview with Russia's state-affiliated RT dismissed predictions that COVID-19 would kill hundreds of thousands more in the United States, and also asserted that lockdowns "are killing people."

In the extensive satellite interview, Atlas said the pandemic was improving in the US even as the country's daily new infections and deaths remain at a high.

"We see a lot of cases. We do not see an explosion of deaths," CNN quotes him to have said.

The US remains the hardest-hit country globally by the COVID-19 pandemic, having reported 9,140,734 confirmed cases and 230,626 deaths, according to a tally from the Johns Hopkins University.

The country accounts for 19.74 percent of the world's infections and 19.26 percent of the global deaths.

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the US may have 399,000 COVID-19 deaths by 1 February under current conditions.

But Atlas dismissed this model.

"The IHME model is really sort – it's absurd to start looking at this model at this point," Atlas said. "At this point in time anybody who's even focusing on models has not learned from the past," he said.