TRUMP PUSHES FOR END OF LOCKDOWN

WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said on Friday he wanted to focus on battling the coronavirus in high-risk populations as he pushes to open the United States’ economy further.

“The best strategy to ensure the health of our people moving forward is to focus our resources on protecting high-risk populations, like the elderly and those in nursing homes, while allowing younger and healthy Americans to get back to work immediately,” Trump said in remarks at the White House Rose Garden.

Trump called for schools to reopen and a sweeping end to the stay-at-home orders instituted by states in a bid to curb the spread of the virus that has killed more than 108,000 in the U.S.

Nursing homes and the elderly have been particularly hard hit. In New York City, which was for a while the epicentre of the U.S. outbreak, the virus was deadliest in neighbourhoods with large African-american and Latino populations.