The White House has begun working through the problem of trying to facilitate a return to normal for parts of the country without seeing the coronavirus pandemic roar back the way it has spread in the past weeks.
President Trump has not yet laid out any plans for “reopening” the economy. But the administration is giving hints about how it’s trying to think through the issue.
One part of the approach is a new coronavirus task force focused on the problem, working independently of the task force now focused on halting the spread of the disease. Some of the names being floated for the group are Ivanka Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Kevin Hassett. Insiders told the Washington Examiner that leaders from the private sector, sports, and entertainment worlds will comprise the new task force.
Vice President Mike Pence said in a press briefing Thursday evening that “there’s a number of working groups that are looking at, not only how do we reopen the country, but how do we stay open?”
He then sketched out the sequence of events that would allow for most of the country to get back to work. First would be halting the spread of the virus in major cities. Second would be developing therapeutics to treat sick people. Third would be devising the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for businesses to allow them to operate while decreasing the risk of transmission. Lastly, testing would have to be ramped up.
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Top government infectious disease official Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the benchmarks would vary from region to region. For example, New York City, which has suffered by far the worst outbreak, would have to maintain much more stringent restrictions for longer, until it was clear that mitigation was no longer needed.
Then, Fauci said, it would need to be clear in each region that they have the capability to test for the virus, isolate infected people, and perform contact tracing — that is, have officials track down anyone who came into contact with the people known to be infected.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell cautioned in a virtual briefing hosted by the Brookings Institution that the country needs a plan for reopening parts of the economy that have effectively been shuttered, but that “we all want to avoid a false start where we partially reopen and that results in a spike in coronavirus cases, and then, we have to go back again to go to square one.”
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States surpassed 461,400 Thursday, and at least 16,513 people have died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Pence and the health officials, though, said Thursday that they are seeing more evidence that the situation is stabilizing.
Fauci said on the Today show that the projected number of coronavirus deaths is significantly lower now than what was expected in March. The final death toll, Fauci said, “looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000,” according to a projection model the White House has been using. Fauci added that New York, which has become the virus epicenter, has seen a dip in hospitalizations and intubations this week, which could indicate a flattening curve. “I don’t want to jump the gun on that, but I think that is the case,” he said.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is back in the regular ward of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London after spending three nights in the intensive care unit receiving treatment for the coronavirus. A statement from Downing Street said the prime minister is in “extremely good spirits” and his condition is improving. Prior to getting infected, Johnson had a cavalier attitude about the virus, which has infected over 61,000 people in the United Kingdom, and said he was “shaking hands continuously” with people at a London hospital last month.
The Fed unveiled new programs Thursday to lend up to $2.3 trillion directly to businesses as well as state and local governments to help them weather the pandemic shutdowns. The programs, authorized by Congress and capitalized by the Treasury, represent a new level of involvement by the central bank in the effort to aid businesses by ensuring they have access to credit more directly and at greater scale than in the 2008 crisis.
Mnuchin said that his next task as Treasury secretary would be extending emergency loans to the airline industry. Such loans were also approved by Congress as part of the CARES Act and are to be issued directly by the Treasury.
The Fed’s announcement came shortly after the Labor Department reported Friday morning that 6.6 million workers applied for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total to 17 million in the past three weeks. Those figures represent a pace of job loss that is far beyond anything the country has seen, one that would have been unthinkable before the pandemic.
