A top infectious disease expert on President Trump’s coronavirus task force urged the White House to maintain social distancing measures for as long as necessary, even as the president mulls an end to health precautions that are savaging the economy.
Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and other leading public health officials told the White House that ending social distancing too early could overwhelm U.S. hospitals, warning that the worst is yet to come, the Washington Post reported.
Governors have said their states lack adequate medical resources to fight the spread of infection and are calling on the administration to help coordinate supplies.
Appearing on NBC’s Today show on Monday, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, urged the public to follow the guidance to self-quarantine.
“I want America to understand this week, it’s going to get bad. We really need to come together as a nation,” Adams said. “We really, really need everyone to stay at home.”
Trump began to question when the public might return to work three days after the White House announced its 15-day guidance. The plan to “slow the spread” would come to an end on March 31.
On Sunday night, Trump reiterated that the administration would soon reassess the current measures.
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”
The president shared his message again early on Monday afternoon amid other retweets that said to “Flatten the curve NOT the Economy” and warned how “fear of the virus cannot collapse our economy.” Another retweet said, “15 days, then we keep the high risk groups protected as necessary and the rest of us go back to work.”
In a Fox News appearance on Monday, task force member and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Trump was right. “The cure can’t be worse than the disease. And we’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs,” he said.
Other Republican lawmakers and White House advisers have expressed concern over the program’s potential economic devastation, and that by the end, there may be little left to save.
Fauci said he is considering the impact on the economy.
In an interview with Science Magazine on Sunday, Fauci said that limiting the virus’s spread without causing undue economic harm was a balancing act.
“There’s a compromise,” Fauci said. “If you knock down the economy completely and disrupt infrastructure, you may be causing health issues, unintended consequences, for people who need to be able to get to places and can’t. You do the best you can.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, advised against shifting course, calling it “a major mistake” in an interview with the Washington Post. “I just spoke with Dr. Fauci — he believes that, if anything, we should be more aggressive and do more.”
Graham continued: “You can’t have a functioning economy if you have hospitals overflowing.”
More than 40,000 confirmed cases have been reported in the U.S. as of Monday afternoon and 573 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Health experts believe these numbers will scale rapidly in the coming days.
