The president highlighted a message on social media that called for the firing of Dr. Anthony Fauci. It comes after Fauci confirmed that if the Trump administration had acted earlier to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, it would have saved lives.
As far as reopening the country, Fauci suggested that it could happen as early as next month on a “rolling” basis.
The clock is ticking toward President Trump’s possible May 1st target to end the virtual national shutdown and Trump is seemingly growing anxious to declare the country open again amid the coronavirus pandemic. But some state leaders worry a push to ease social distancing could cause even more harm.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said, “I fear if we open up too early and we have not sufficiently made that health recovery and cracked the back of this virus, that we could be pouring gasoline on the fire, even inadvertently.”
New Hampshire Chris Sununu said, “There is still a long way to go. We are not getting out of this in a couple of weeks or months. We’ve got to keep this momentum going.”
In New York State, which has the highest number of cases anywhere in the world and the most deaths in the country, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the human cost of the crisis can’t be compared to any amount of money lost in the economy. “We need a public health strategy that is safe, that is consistent with an economic strategy,” Cuomo said. “The last thing we want to see is an uptick in the infection rate and the uptick we worked so hard to bring down.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested the easing of some restrictions could happen as soon as next month. He said, “It is not going to be a light switch that we say, ‘Okay, it is now June, July or whatever, click, the light switch goes back on.’ It’s going to be depending on where you are in the country.”
But the director of the institute that created models cited by the White House cautions that lifting social distancing protocols too soon could be detrimental. Director of the Institute for Health
Metrics and Evaluation Dr. Christopher Murray said, “I don’t think the capability in the states exists yet to deal with that volume of cases. And, so by July or August, we could be back in the same situation we are now.”
A New York Times report this weekend outlined cases of the president down-playing warnings from top health officials on the dangers of a possible pandemic, saying it took Trump three weeks after the first recommendation to implement national social distancing strategies.
Fauci admitted beginning mitigation efforts earlier could have saved additional American lives. He said, “But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit differently but there was a lot of push back about shutting things down back then.”
Fauci’s words come as a revealing New York Times investigation outlined how President Trump spent weeks ignoring warnings about coronavirus.
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