The coronavirus pandemic is continuing to escalate across the U.S., with 632,548 cases and 31,071 deaths in 55 states and U.S. territories as of Thursday and new outbreaks still emerging. So naturally, President Donald Trump thinks it’s time to get back to business as usual. The president revealed new guidelines Thursday for states to reopen their economies, pushing a phased plan to reopen various businesses and venues on governors’ timelines. “Now that we have passed the peak in new cases, we are starting our life again,” Trump said Thursday, making a claim that still appears dubious due to the lack of widespread testing. “We are starting rejuvenation of our economy again.”
After initially claiming in recent days that he had “total” authority to force states to reopen, Trump said Thursday that he would leave it up to the states to reopen on their own timelines, with criteria that requires states to have seen a 14-day decline in cases and have their hospital systems under control before relaxing guidelines. (The Washington Post reports that the decision to leave the reopening decisions up to governors was a “deliberate political calculation that [doing so] will better serve Trump’s interest.”) Though the plan sets out guidelines for reopening businesses, however, the White House fails to mention any coordinated strategy for ramped-up testing capabilities or contact tracing, instead seemingly leaving it up to states to implement the necessary infrastructure to enable a return to normalcy on their own. NBC News reports that the Trump administration is “exploring” how to dramatically ramp up testing in order for the economy to reopen, but it still remains “uncertain” how that would work or what the timeline would be. As Dr. Anthony Fauci recently told Vanity Fair contributor Peter Hamby, the government is also still “really far” from implementing programs like an immunity registry that could help get things back to normal. “This isn’t a plan,” former Ebola czar Ronald Klain wrote on Twitter Thursday about the White House guidelines. “It’s barely a powerpoint.”
While a potential national ramp-up in testing could take weeks, the president is still pushing for states to open up as quickly as they can nevertheless. Trump said Thursday that states without large coronavirus outbreaks should start relaxing guidelines May 1, though he suggested some could start easing restrictions as soon as Friday. (Fauci took a more measured view of the timeline during the Thursday press conference, saying, “We feel confident that, sooner or later, we will get to the point—hopefully sooner, with safety as the most important thing—where we can get back to some form of normality.”) Trump’s plea for normality came as the president claimed that everyone is clamoring to stop social distancing ASAP, insisting Thursday that Americans agree with him that reopening the country is necessary even while death tolls continue to climb. “We’re opening up our country, and we have to do that,” Trump said Thursday. “America wants to be open. And Americans want to be open.”
Trump’s insistence that Americans “want” to stop social distancing immediately, however, doesn’t actually appear to reflect the views of most of the country. However sick of staying at home people may be—and despite recent conservative-led protests against social distancing measures—most Americans are still wary of reopening the economy while the coronavirus is still present, according to a new poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. The poll found that 66% of Americans (including 51% of Republicans) are worried that state governments will lift social distancing restrictions too soon, as opposed to just 32% who were afraid the guidelines would not be lifted quickly enough. An overwhelming majority of Americans also disagreed with Trump’s assertion that the U.S. is over the peak when it comes to the coronavirus, with 73% of respondents believing that the worst of the coronavirus is still “yet to come.”