Trump may ease restrictions to aid economy

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, desperate to turn around the cratering economy, indicated Monday that he is likely to ease within weeks extreme restrictions on commerce that were intended to stem the deadly coronavirus pandemic, resisting advice from public health advisers who have urged a longer shutdown.

Trump did not offer specifics but suggested he would modify the administration’s call to close schools and businesses, encourage people to work from home and avoid gatherings following a 15-day period that ends March 30.

“At some point, we’re going to open up our country, and it’s going to be fairly soon,” Trump told a White House news conference. “I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now.”

Any easing of federal public health guidelines may have little immediate impact on millions of Americans, including those working or sheltering from home in California and New York, two of the worsthit states, given the restrictions that numerous governors and mayors have imposed and the decision by many businesses to suspend operations.

But a change in federal policy could weaken public resolve and lead to uneven practices, with Americans in some areas returning to work or school while others stay home. Public health experts warn that a patchwork response could spur dangerous new outbreaks of the coronavirus, especially if the lag in testing and tracking continues.

Even as confirmed U.S. infections rose to nearly 44,000 and the death toll topped 500 Monday, Trump expressed frustration with the fastmounting economic carnage, including soaring unemployment and a plummeting stock market.

“If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down for a couple of years. Let’s shut down the entire world,’” Trump said. “And you can’t do that with a country, especially with the No. 1 economy anywhere in the world, by far.”

Some restrictions could be lifted sooner than next week. Speaking at the same news conference, Vice President Mike Pence indicated that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue new guidelines Tuesday to allow more people to resume work outside their homes if they wear masks.

Trump’s surgeon general, Dr. Jerome Adams, warned earlier Monday that the outbreak will worsen this week because “not enough people ... are taking this seriously,” citing those flocking to beaches in California or looking at cherry blossoms on the National Mall in Washington.

“We really, really need everyone to stay at home,” he said on NBC.

Allowing normal life to resume too soon could backfire in the form of lost lives and economic devastation, some experts warned. They said it could be weeks before the data show whether efforts to slow the pandemic have worked, especially since testing remains inadequate, limiting the data available.

“The worst thing for the economy would be to go back to work and see an upsurge in cases again,” said Jeffrey Levi, a public health expert at George Washington University in Washington. “That’s the balancing act that policymakers need to perform.”

Levi said other public health measures, including widespread testing and temperature checks, may be needed when people ultimately return to work.

Models that suggest the pandemic could cause hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths could be wrong, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at the

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, argued in a widely circulated op-ed for the health news website STAT.

If that’s the case, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational,” he wrote.

Although coronavirus infections have been reported in every state, urban areas have been hardest hit. For some of Trump’s supporters in rural areas, the threat remains more abstract for now.