The White House is looking into when and how it can begin to reopen the country, which is largely at a standstill because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
White House task force briefing on coronavirus response
By Philip Ewing/NPR
Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
The White House is looking into when and how it can begin to reopen the country, which is largely at a standstill because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The White House’s coronavirus response task force scheduled a briefing for Friday afternoon as the conversation in Washington turns toward how America could reactivate after going dormant to slow the pandemic.
President Trump is expected to receive recommendations about when and how the nation could reopen for business. He and advisers must make difficult decisions about how to balance economic, social, public health and other priorities.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top immunologist who has been advising the White House’s disaster response, suggested at a briefing on Thursday that normalization might look different for different parts of the country.
Friday’s briefing is scheduled for 1 p.m. Watch the briefing live:
“I don’t think there are going to be benchmarks that are going to be consistent from one [area] to the other,” Fauci said on Thursday.
Trump has been under pressure to at least announce an end date to the countermeasures that call for staying home and avoiding large groups — which have amounted to a medically induced coma for much of the U.S. economy.
Restaurants, brick-and-mortar retailers, travel and other industries have been poleaxed; some 17 million people are out of work.
With at least a theoretical decrease in sight to new infections and deaths, Trump and Vice President Pence say they’re eager to begin assessing how sections of the United States could return to something like normal, permitting people to move more freely and return to work.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NPR this week that his agency is working on a plan to get from here to there, but his comments suggested the necessity for a major and as yet incomplete effort.
First, the nation needs more coronavirus testing, Redfield said, especially testing with rapid results to render quicker diagnoses. Public health authorities also are looking ahead to new tests that can show whether a person had the virus in the past and may be carrying antibodies.
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