President Trump says he will defer to governors about lifting restrictions. At least 30,000 patients have died, and 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in four weeks.
Trump says governors can reopen sooner than May 1.
President Trump told the nation’s governors on Thursday that they could begin reopening businesses, restaurants and other elements of daily life by May 1 or earlier if they wanted, abandoning his threat to use what he had claimed was his absolute authority to impose his will on them.
On a day when the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus increased by more than 2,000 for a total over 30,000, the president released a set of nonbinding guidelines that envisioned a slow return to work and school over weeks or months. Based on each state’s conditions, the guidelines in effect guarantee that any restoration of American society will take place on a patchwork basis rather than on a one-size-fits-all prescription from Washington that some of the governors had feared in recent days.
“We are not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a briefing at the White House.
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said he was pleased to see that the president’s guidelines were “hands off” and would not intrude on the rights of the states.“The president recognized, finally, I think, that the rightful decision-making is with the states and the governors’ offices, both Republicans and Democrats,” Mr. Inslee said…
Mr. Trump essentially gave cover to mainly Republican governors of states in the South and West that have not been as hard hit by the pandemic to begin reopening sooner. The president, who has previously said that as many as 29 states could reopen soon, told governors on a conference call before his announcement that some of them were “in very, very good shape” and could move further and faster to resuming economic and social activities.
If they follow the guidelines, New York and other states in the Northeast, as well as states in the Midwest and West, that have seen large outbreaks would remain shuttered for weeks until new cases of the virus and death tolls fell and hospital capacity was restored…
To read the entire article from The New York Times, click https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/us/coronavirus-cases-live-updates.html#link-2d99dd83
