The contours of President Trump’s plan for easing the pandemic restrictions in place throughout the country came into view Thursday evening.
Coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said that the plan was to work county by county to track the virus and prevent its spread, a strategy that would allow for life and business to return more to normal in some areas.
“This is what we’re talking about: how to do surveillance, how to do contact tracing, and how to do each of these items to make sure that you prevent that spread,” Birx said in the last minutes of a White House press briefing.
She said that the strategy would be “a laser-focused approached rather than a generic horizontal approach” for the whole nation made possible by using data taken from extensive testing. Birx, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, said that it would be the same strategy that public health officials use to counter AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Vice President Mike Pence said that the coronavirus task force would review the data and present Trump with a range of options for updated guidance this weekend. “But we’re going to do that responsibly … we’ll do that based on the data,” he said.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to have business return to normal and people back working at their jobs, sooner, rather than later. His suggestion that the country could be “open” by Easter has worried public health officials and some allies.
“People don’t want to close,” he said Thursday. “I say it again and again.”
In fact, the vast majority of voters, at least, do want the economy shut down. More than 80% of voters say that people should continue social distancing for as long as needed, even if it means continued damage to the economy, according to polling released Thursday by Morning Consult.
And the choice is not Trump’s to make. State governors, not the federal government, have ordered millions of people to shelter in place and millions of businesses to close. The current White House guidance is far less restrictive than the measures in place in New York, California, and Illinois. It merely recommends avoiding large groups, staying home when feeling ill, and similarly nonintrusive measures.
In New York’s case, the strictest measures are likely warranted for the near-term. It accounts for more than half of the cases and more than half of the new cases in the country, Birx noted. In recent days, the federal government has tightened the recommend restrictions for New York, rather than loosening them, saying that anyone who’s traveled from the city should self-isolate for 14 days.
Birx noted, though, that other areas have few cases even though they are now being tested, suggesting that they do not face the same steep upward sloping curve of cases that New York does.
Trump told state governors Thursday that the federal government is working on new guidance that will categorize counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk.
Birx said that Wayne County, Michigan, the Detroit area, and Cook County, Illinois, the Chicago area, are of particular concern right now.
The strategy of aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantining exposed people has shown some success in other countries. In China, though, where commerce is slowly resuming along the lines of what Trump says he hopes for, the government has taken the added step in Wuhan, the worst-hit city, of sending even suspected coronavirus cases to makeshift hospitals and quarantine centers, separating them from their families.
It’s an approach favored by one of Trump’s top Senate allies, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican who lobbied the Trump administration in January for the restrictions on flights from China.
“We’ll need local personnel trained and prepared to do widespread contact tracing for those who test positive,” Cotton said in a floor speech Wednesday outlining his recommendations for the next steps in addressing the pandemic. “We’ll have to develop procedures for strict quarantines of those who test positive or those who’ve been exposed to the virus-with zero tolerance for breaking quarantine and endangering our fellow citizens.”
Democrat Elizabeth Warren, too, said Thursday that the country needed to dramatically scale up its testing ability in order to do the kind of tracking, isolating, and quarantining that South Korea does without shutting down its entire economy.
Even if that were to happen, the federal government guidelines for avoiding the disease, and some aspects of “social distancing,” will remain in place, Trump acknowledged Thursday.
“Maybe people aren’t going to be shaking hands anymore,” he said.
Those practices could serve the United States well in the not-too-distant future. Top government infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci warned Thursday that the coronavirus disease may be seasonal and could make a comeback in the fall and last well into early Spring 2021.
