President Donald Trump on Thursday laid down new guidelines for US states to recover from a shutdown of coronavirus in a stalling three-phase strategy aimed at reviving the US economy as the US continues to battle this pandemic.
“We are not opening all at once, but one careful step at a time,” Trump told reporters at the White House. The president had said earlier this month he wanted to reopen the economy with a “big bang.”
“This isn’t a plan. It’s barely a powerpoint,” he said on Twitter, noting it did not include provisions to ramp up testing or set a specific standard for levels of the disease before economic opening.
In the first phase of re-opening, the guidelines say groups of more than 10 people should be avoided if appropriate distancing measures are not practical. Non-essential travel should be minimized, telework should be encouraged, and common areas in offices closed.
Schools remain closed in phase 1, but large venues such as movies theaters, restaurants, sports stadiums, and places of worship can open with “strict physical distancing protocols.”
Hospitals, which have been hit hard by the health crisis, may resume out-patient elective surgeries and gyms can re-open with new protocols. Bars should remain closed, it said.
In the second phase, applicable to states and regions with “no evidence of a rebound” in cases, the guidelines recommend groups of more than 50 be avoided where social distancing is not practical. Non-essential travel can resume, while schools and youth camps can reconvene and bars with “diminished standing-room occupancy” may re-open. Hospitals may also resume in-patient elective surgeries. Such procedures are critical to hospitals’ income.
Phase three includes unrestricted staffing of workplaces, but Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force who took a lead role in designing the guidelines, said that a “new normal” would remain in place: a need for higher hygiene standards and more space between people to prevent asymptomatic spread of the virus.
Trump has been pushing to get the U.S. economy going again after the coronavirus shutdown left millions of Americans jobless. More than 20 million people have filed for unemployment in the U.S. in the past month and over 90% of the country have been under stay-at-home orders.
