President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to “reopen” the United States as soon as possible to reduce the economic damage caused by widespread social distancing rules implemented as a response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” Trump has said repeatedly. “This is not a country built for this.”
However, public health experts caution that safely restarting the economy will be time-consuming, and evidence from China, where the virus appears to have lost steam, suggests that the process will not be as simple as flipping a switch.
Within the administration, there appears to be a growing realization that the U.S. economy may be idled for a considerable amount of time — far longer than the president has sometimes suggested.
His stated desire to see “packed churches” on Easter Sunday, April 12, is now generally regarded as wildly unrealistic. And calls to limit social distancing because of the economic harm it is causing — many echoed by the president in past weeks — have been mostly silenced.
On Tuesday, Trump’s top economic adviser said public health experts will guide U.S. decisions about how and when to ease efforts to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“It is the health people that are going to drive the medical decisions here, the medical-related decisions,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in an interview with Politico.
Kudlow said he was being optimistic and hopes that “in the next four to eight weeks, we will be able to reopen the economy and that the power of the virus will be substantially reduced.”
In an interview with Fox News, Kudlow said, “The president would like to reopen the economy as soon as he can, and we are planning internally,” but he shared few details about the deliberations.
Asked about the plans to encourage businesses to reopen, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday that some of the “best minds” in the White House are working on such guidance. However, he did not offer a time frame and stressed that “the president’s decision in that regard is going to be informed by what the data shows and about decisions about when we can responsibly reopen America and put America back to work.”
Pence made the announcement flanked by two public health experts — Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
Fauci and Birx have, at times, seemed to serve as a counterweight to the president’s more unlikely statements and predictions, and their dedication to a data-driven approach to combating the virus now appears ascendant in the White House.
On Tuesday, Birx said that the information the task force is receiving is getting more thorough each day, and that “data analysis is allowing us to make very intelligent decisions about need, but also really understanding what’s happening across the country.”
If the administration really intends to be guided by public health experts, the guidelines for reopening the country could make even the outer limit of eight weeks suggested by Kudlow look overly optimistic.
Multi-phase proposal
Over the past week, the conservative American Enterprise Institute published a pair of reports authored by a group of public health experts, including Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner from 2017 to 2019, offering a “road map” for reopening the country.
The study recommends a step-by-step approach in which the country would only slowly return to a semblance of normality as the capacity to test people for the virus and treat those who have it are improved. The authors propose a four-phase process to reopen the country and prepare it to deal with future pandemics.
