Trump vows to reopen US economy even as deaths from coronavirus rise

Donald Trump has said he was eager to reopen the US economy in weeks, not months, even as the death toll from the virus continued to rise.

The president, who has been anxious about the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the US economy, made the remarks at a White House press briefing Monday in which he repeatedly refused to confirm that he would listen to public health authorities if they advised him to keep restrictive public health measures in place, even at a cost to the economy.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said.

White House officials announced at the briefing that New York City, New Jersey and Long Island were emerging as a concerning hot spot for many new coronavirus cases.

The US reported more than 100 deaths on Monday, the first time the daily death toll has entered the triple digits. There have been 557 deaths and nearly 44,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the US, according to figures from Johns Hopkins.

But in his remarks, Trump focused on states across the country that had seen few confirmed coronavirus cases so far, rural states like Nebraska, Iowa, and Idaho. The president argued that it was essential to the economy be “opening up our country” again as soon as possible.

“Our country was not built to be shut down,” Trump said. “This is not a country that was built for this.”

During the briefing, White House officials praised Americans for their “selflessness” in the first week of widespread restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus, and for making sacrifices like staying at home, or ordering takeout instead of going to a restaurant. Trump’s top advisers referred to current government restrictions as a “15 day challenge” and pledged to revisit the need for sweeping measures to prevent the spread of the virus in just another week.

The president said he expected life to return to normal very soon, much sooner than in three or four months. Asked if he meant the country would be re-opening in “weeks or months”, Trump said: “I’m not looking at months, I can tell you right now.”

Asked if Dr Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who has become the public face of the American scientific community during the pandemic, agreed with him on potentially re-opening the economy, Trump said: “He doesn’t not agree.”

“He understands there’s a tremendous cost to our country,” the president added.

Fauci, who has spoken publicly about the challenges of focusing on facts about the pandemic even as Trump’s White House has sometimes undermined those facts, was not present at Monday’s White House briefing.

As the record-high stock market plummeted and then plummeted again, Trump has raised concerns that the “cure” for the coronavirus pandemic could be “worse than the problem itself.” During the press conference, Trump repeatedly argued that a damaged American economy could create “more death” than potential deaths from the coronavirus, because of an association between economic crisis and suicide.

“People get tremendous anxiety and depression and you have suicide over things like this, when you have a terrible economy, you have death, definitely … in far greater numbers than we’re talking about with regard to the virus,” Trump said.

While it is reasonable to suggest that a recession can increase the risk of a rise in suicides, experts caution that there is no single cause of suicide.

According to research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, North America and Europe experienced 10,000 more suicides during the 2008 recession. The outbreak of Sars in Hong Kong in 2002 and 2003 also led to a “significant increase” in suicides in those over age 65, according to 2010 research.

But early projections for the toll of coronavirus in the United States suggest it could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, even at the lowest end of ranges of estimates. While the figures for the mortality rate of coronavirus continues to evolve, recent research from Wuhan, China, the city where the outbreak began, indicates the mortality rate there was around 1.4%. Experts at Harvard University have projected an infection rate in the US of between 20% and 60%, meaning that while it is impossible to reliably estimate the American coronavirus death toll, a reasonable scenario might result in hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

At the press briefing, Trump said that he found the emerging data on mortality rates of coronavirus encouraging. Asked if he was concerned that if he eased government restrictions to prevent coronavirus “too early”, the virus might continue to spread unabated, he said that the mortality rate for coronavirus was not as bad as had been initially feared.

At the beginning, “nobody knew anything about this particular virus”, and Trump said he heard numbers that the mortality rate for the virus might be as high as 5%, compared with “.001 or 2 or 3” percent for the normal flu.

Now, Trump said, he was hearing potential mortality rate numbers that were lower.

“The whole concept of death is terrible, but there’s a tremendous difference between something under 1% and 4 or 5 or even 3%,” the president said.

On one issue, Trump expressed some interest in the possibility that coronavirus might reshape American life forever.

As he looked out at the much-more-empty than usual White House briefing room, with journalists carefully spaced out to follow public health guidelines, Trump noted that the briefing room had once been full of lots of “angry people who don’t like me”.

“Will we ever have that again, or … it will look like this forever?” Trump asked his coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx.

Attorney general Bill Barr, who was standing behind Trump, chuckled.