Trump defends extending virus outbreak guidelines
WASHINGTON — Siding with public health experts’ dire projections, President Donald Trump on Monday defended his decision to extend restrictive social distancing guidelines through the end of April, while bracing the nation for a coronavirus death toll that could exceed 100,000.
“Challenging times are ahead for the next 30 days,” Trump said during a Rose Garden press conference. He called refraining from public outings “our shared patriotic duty” during the outbreak.
The comments came a day after Trump made a dramatic course reversal and announced that he would not be moving to ease the guidelines and get the economy back up and running by Easter, as he said last week he hoped to do.
In the face of stark projections from his team and searing images of overwhelmed hospitals in his native New York City, Trump instead extended to April 30 the social distancing guidelines, which had been set to expire Monday. Many states and local governments already have stiffer controls in place on mobility and gatherings.
“The worst that could happen is you do it too early and all of a sudden it comes back,” Trump said during a nearly hour-long call-in interview with “Fox & Friends” as members of his coronavirus task force fanned out across other media outlets to warn the virus’ spread was only just beginning.
Trump’s impulse to reopen the country, driven by pleas from business leaders, met a sober reality check from health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, who on Sunday said the U.S. could experience between 100,000-200,000 deaths and millions of infections from the pandemic.
That warning hardened a recognition in Washington that the struggle against the coronavirus will not be resolved quickly even as Trump expressed a longing for normalcy.
“It would not have been a good idea to pull back at a time when you really need to be pressing your foot on the pedal as opposed to on the brakes,” Fauci said Monday on CNN, describing how he and Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus task force coordinator, had convinced Trump to reconsider.
“We showed him the data. He looked at the data. He got it right away,” Fauci said. “It was a pretty clear picture. Dr. Debbie Birx and I went in to 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.’”
Americans are now being asked to prepare for at least another 30 days of severe economic and social disruption, with schools and businesses closed and public life upended. A majority of Americans remain under state or local government orders to stay at home to slow the spread of the virus, and employment claims have already skyrocketed.
Trump said it was “pretty unlikely” that he would need to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order, adding he was in touch with governors on their actions.
Trump spoke with the nation’s governors Monday, as did other members of his administration. Birx told the governors that it’s “several weeks away from the peak of the curve for the United States.” Trump said that modeling projected substantially more deaths if the nation did not incorporate social distancing.
“I thought that was a very important study they did and it sure solved a lot of problems in my own mind and maybe in your minds,” Trump said in an audio that was obtained by The Associated Press.
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland voiced appreciation for the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill that Trump signed into law last week and the president’s acknowledgement that states will need more help, but he also emphasized that governors are “still frustrated” about a scarcity of medical supplies.
Governors also remain unsatisfied with the availability of testing kits to screen patients for the virus. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the U.S. had now tested more than 1 million samples for the coronavirus.
But it wasn’t clear if that figure represented actual patients or samples processed. With a population of over 330 million, 1 million patients tested would represent about one-third of 1 percent of all Americans. By comparison, South Korea has tested roughly twice as many people as a percentage of its population. Still, Trump boasted testing was “at a level that no other country has reached.”