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| Trump wants to reopen US economy by the Easter. |
Easter is April 12, less than three weeks away. Trump’s remarks in a Fox News “virtual town hall” event at the White House came as more states imposed extreme measures, including shutting down businesses and ordering residents to stay home, to try to slow the spread of the disease.
“We’re opening up this incredible country. Because we have to do that. I would love to have it open by Easter,” Trump said. “I would love to have that. It’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’d love to make it an important day for this. I would love to have the country opened up, and rarin’ to go by Easter.”
In a second interview with Fox that aired Tuesday afternoon, Trump said he offered the holiday as a deadline because “Easter’s a very special day for me.” “Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full?” Trump asked. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.” Trump added that “I’m not sure that’s going to be the day,” but “that would be a beautiful thing.”
At a press briefing Tuesday evening, Trump appeared to back off the idea even further. “We’ll only do it if it’s good,” Trump said, adding that he is “very much in touch” with White House experts. “I just think it would be a beautiful timeline.”
“Our decision will be based on hard facts and data as to the opening” of the economy, Trump said in that presser. “Every decision is grounded solely in the health, safety and wellbeing of our citizens.”
Medical experts had recoiled at Trump’s suggestion that Americans could gather en masse amid the coronavirus outbreak. “Obviously Trump is not rooted in reality,” said Dr. Tina Tan, a board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a staff member at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “This is the making of a major public health disaster. I am not sure where he is getting his information from, but it is extremely flawed,” Tan said.
With a growing number of Americans not willing to attend church, many churches have already canceled their in-person Easter services. “Our current plan is to have Masses and other Holy Week liturgies celebrated privately by the priests, with no congregation present,” a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York told CNBC.
The New York metro area has quickly become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other tri-state officials banned large gatherings of people last week.
Medical experts, including the Trump administration’s scientific point man in the crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have strongly advocated restrictions on people-to-people contact, saying it’s better to overreact now than to be sorry later. “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting,” he told NBC last week.
Asked at the White House on Tuesday about the Easter timeline, Fauci said there could be flexibility in different areas of the country where coronavirus cases are less prevalent. Fauci has been lauded across the aisle for his straight talk about the coronavirus, offering blunt risk assessments – even at times when Trump has downplayed the threat.
Fauci was absent from the White House’s most recent briefings on the virus, but appeared at the Tuesday evening briefing. A senior administration official told CNBC that Fauci was at the White House on Monday and had numerous meetings with the coronavirus task force earlier Tuesday.
Fears about the coronavirus — and the impact of government containment efforts on businesses and workers — have prompted a dramatic surge in unemployment and have sent stocks spiraling down in recent weeks.
The White House and leading lawmakers are working long hours on Capitol Hill to hash out the final details of a massive stimulus bill that would offer relief to those affected by the virus. The stimulus package is expected to cost at least $1.5 trillion and could include direct cash payments to Americans and around $350 billion in relief for small businesses.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he wants the coronavirus lockdown relaxed in the United States by mid-April, warning that keeping the measures in place could "destroy" the country.
"A lot of people agree with me. Our country -- it's not built to shut down," he said on Fox News. "You can destroy a country this way by closing it down. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter," Trump said. Easter is on April 12.
Social distancing and quarantine measures have been instituted across much of the United States, bringing the world's biggest economy to an abrupt halt. Health experts have advised the measures are the only way to prevent the easily transmitted, potentially fatal illness from multiplying uncontrollably.
In the chat show format interview with Fox at the White House, Trump made it clear that he thinks the shutdown has been an overreaction. "We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don't turn the country off," Trump argued. "We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn't call up the automobile companies to say, 'Stop making cars. We don't want any cars anymore,'" he said.
With his November reelection campaign also on hold, Trump is eager to get back into the fray. One of his main claims to a second term, prior to the coronavirus outbreak, was the strong economy and low unemployment. "We can't lose a Boeing, we can't lose some of these companies," he said. "If we lose those companies we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs."
