Trump would NOT shut down US again to stop coronavirus spread and says ‘we have to open’
TRUMP will not shut down the country again over the coronavirus pandemic, because the government understands the situation “much better”, he said during an interview on Sunday.
The president made the remarks during an interview with weekend news show Full Measure, when asked if the initial COVID-19 projections were “startling”.
“So I was hearing millions of people, and it would have been millions of people if we didn’t shut down,” he told host Sharyl Attkisson. Now, would I shut it down again? No, because we understand it now much better. We didn’t know anything about it, it was new, it was fresh.”
Attkisson then asked the president to clarify if he was talking in retrospect, to which he responded: “I would have done exactly. We’ve done the exact moves that I would have done. And I did it early.”
Trump said the shutdown had saved “millions of lives”, and also “hundreds of thousands”.
“Hundreds of thousands of lives are saved,” he said. “We had to save millions of lives, which we’ve done with the shutdown.
The pandemic so far has killed 97,495 people in the US, and the numbers are still rising. America has had more than 1.6 million cases of coronavirus.
During Memorial Day weekend, maskless revelers packed into popular spots, ignoring social distancing guidelines.
Thousands descended on beaches in Florida, California, and other states on Saturday, vacationers flocked to Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, while unmasked crowds crammed into the Ace Speedway in North Carolina.
The coronavirus death toll is on the cusp of 100,000 in the US where some states are suffering coronavirus surges as they reopen.
Reports highlighted the lives lost this week as the country neared the grim milestone, with over 98,000 deaths and more than 1.6 million COVID-19 infections.
Almost all of these fatalities occurred within a three-month period and amounted to 1,100 lives lost per day.
During his interview on Sunday, Trump was asked whether an earlier lockdown could have saved “almost all” of the lives that have been lost, after Columbia University analysts found that had measures been implemented sooner, the death toll would have been far less.
The president called the analysis “fake news”.
“Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me, they said we shouldn’t close it.
“I took tremendous heat, you know this. When I ban China from coming in, first time anything like that ever happened, I took tremendous heat. Tremendous, like a level that I’ve never seen anything like it. And that went on for months.
He added: “I saw that report. It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.”
While thousands of people enjoyed the sunshine in states like Florida, South Carolina, Texas, California, and others, North Carolina and Arkansas saw major spikes in coronavirus cases.
North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services noted on Twitter that the state experienced its highest single-day surge in COVID cases on Saturday with over 1,000 new infections reported.
Officials in Texas are also warning of a sudden surge in infections after thousands took to the streets of Austin to celebrate the public holiday on Saturday.
According to a grim new projection from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Policy Lab, Harris County could have 2,000 cases daily by June, which Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said they’re “not equipped” to handle there.
The Policy Lab’s stark predictions showed that Southern states like Alabama and Tennessee could also see a spike.
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After a slew of revelers gathered at beaches in their thousands in The Sunshine State, walkers overwhelmed trails in California, and a 1,000-person Memorial Day party in South Carolina ended in two deaths on Saturday, Dr Deborah Birx, the government’s coronavirus adviser, issued a stark warning.
Speaking to FOX News’ Chris Wallace today, she said: “We now have excellent scientific evidence of how far droplets go when we speak, or just simply talking to one another.
“We know it’s important for people to socially interact, but we also know it’s important that we have to have masks on if we’re less than six feet, and that we have to maintain that six feet of distance.”
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