Anthony Fauci downplayed President Trump suggesting the United States could potentially reopen on Easter.
“I think what the president was trying to do — he was making an aspirational projection to give people some hope,” Fauci said Thursday on CNN. “But he’s listening to us when we say we’ve really got to reevaluate it in real-time, and any decision we make has to be based on the data.”
“That’s no time to pull back,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said about the U.S. continuing to see an increase in coronavirus cases.
Trump gave the Easter date as a possible reopening deadline earlier this week. “I’d love to have it open by Easter. I would love to have it opened by Easter,” he said at a Tuesday Fox News town hall event. “I think it’s possible. Why isn’t it? We’ve never closed the country before. We’ve had some pretty bad flus, and we’ve had some pretty bad viruses,” he added later in the interview.
The U.S. has over 85,000 confirmed cases along with at least 1,200 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus.
