Coronavirus experts thwart Trump’s plans

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response team gathered at the White House Sunday to discuss reopening the U.S. for business by Easter, his top health experts painted a troubling picture of what lay ahead.

Deborah Birx, an immunologist picked by Vice President Mike Pence to weigh the ailment’s impact, cautioned that the U.S. outbreak was still two weeks away from its peak. Her reading of the data also led her to an even more worrisome conclusion: that the nation was likely tens of thousands of hospital beds short of the anticipated need.

The conversation moved into the Oval Office, where aides presented Trump with their harrowing findings. Birx and her longtime mentor, Anthony Fauci, told the president that the virus could kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans and infect millions. The fresh information — and unanimity among Trump’s top public health advisers — set the stage for a remarkable reversal on Sunday by the president, who had said a week earlier that he wanted to relax by Easter, April 12, the strictest social-distancing rules that were smothering the U.S. economy.

Birx’s data, which had converged by the weekend with projections by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, showed Trump’s approach could be disastrous. Cities such as Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Miami could soon see a spike in hospitalizations mirroring the situation in New York. Surgeon General Jerome Adams told the president that the country needed more time to mitigate the spread and test the ill.

By Monday morning, Trump and Birx were pointing to the IHME data in a call with most of the nation’s governors, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Trump weighed messages from top Senate Republicans, who spent days privately warning the president and other White House officials that reopening the country could cause more deaths and trigger a political backlash, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Even aides who were most vocal about the economic impact of a prolonged shutdown, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, agreed that the country was not yet ready to reopen.

A consensus emerged. There was no way the country could reopen by the president’s Easter target without massive casualties.

“We showed him the data. He looked at the data. He got it right away,” Fauci said during an interview with CNN on Monday. “It was a pretty clear picture. Dr. Debbie Birx and I went into the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, ‘Here are the data. Take a look.’ He just shook his head and said, ‘I guess we got to do it.’”