President Trump said he will make a decision “reasonably soon” on an effort to promote the reopening of wide swaths of the economy, which has struggled over the past month with widespread shutdowns meant to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
Describing it as possibly the “toughest” decision he’ll ever make, Trump told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a brief interview Saturday evening that he will make the call based on conversations with “smart” people, including doctors and business leaders.
“Whether we like it or not, there is a certain instinct to it. People want to get back to work. We have to bring our country back,” Trump said, adding that he is setting up a diverse council of leaders to oversee the effort.
Trump last month said he hoped to have the country open by Easter Sunday. Instead, churches will stand largely empty over the holiday weekend as he and his officials repeat warnings that now is not the time to ease safeguards.
“As you turn to reflection and prayer in your own relationship with God during this Holy Week, what is your prayer, and what is your message of faith for Americans?” Pirro asked in opening the interview, which lasted about six and a half minutes.
“Well, I love the people of our country, and we are bringing our country back,” Trump replied.
The president also offered his “deepest love and respect” to the families and friends of the people who contracted the coronavirus and died.
The U.S. death toll surpassed that of hard-hit Italy on Saturday, reaching more than 18,000 people by the evening, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. There have been more than 529,000 confirmed cases and 31,900 recoveries.
All 50 states, along with Washington, D.C., and most U.S. territories have received a federal disaster declaration, allowing access to federal funds.
The Trump administration has urged U.S. citizens to practice distancing guidelines, which have been extended to April 30, and states across the country have implemented stay-at-home orders to contend with the rapid spread of the virus.
While Congress and members of Trump’s administration are in talks about putting together another economic relief package, the president has felt pressure to encourage the reopening of a reeling economy as many businesses not deemed essential have been forced to close, and the stock market has taken a hit.
On Thursday, the Labor Department reported the number of workers claiming new unemployment benefits jumped to 6.6 million last week. More than 17 million new jobless claims have been made in the past four weeks. The numbers prompted swift action from the Federal Reserve, which announced $2.3 trillion in loans, including $500 billion that will go directly to states and municipalities.
A lengthy report by the New York Times published Saturday described weeks of warnings about the virus, which originated in China late last year, that Trump did not act on aggressively until mid-March beyond limiting travel from China. Trump insisted to Pirro the crisis caught him by surprise.
“It was so incredible how it came upon us, this invisible — I call it this invisible enemy. And it’s just a terrible thing,” he said.
Despite the grim death toll figures, there are signs that the worst of the crisis is over. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, predicted it would be a “bad week,” after which there would be a turnaround thanks to social distancing measures that have driven down new hospitalization rates.
In an interview with Fox News’s Jesse Watters which aired in the hour before Trump’s appearance, the member of the White House coronavirus task force highlighted New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, where he said there are promising signs.
“The engine that fuels the outbreak in New York, namely the number of new cases that lead to hospitalizations, that lead to intensive care, that lead to death, clearly are significantly less this week than they were the previous week,” Fauci said. “So it seems almost a paradox, but it really isn’t. At the same time that the deaths continue to go up, we are having indications that we are reaching that peak, that apex, and will start to come down.”
“If it acts the way we’ve seen it act in China, that decline will be very steep,” Fauci added. “So we may go from a significant number of deaths, even more than we’ve seen, to a situation where there’s a radical drop in the number of deaths, which will be the last to see, but the hospitalizations are already indicating that we’re going in the right direction.”
