President Donald Trump said that states should start reopening their businesses if the spread of coronavirus cases is showing signs of slowing.
“I really do believe a lot of the governors should be opening up states that are not opening,” Trump said during a coronavirus briefing from the Bioprocess Innovation Center at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies in Morrisville, North Carolina. “We’ll see what happens with them.”
On Sunday, Arizona saw a 13% decline in the seven-day average of new coronavirus cases, recording 2,627 newly diagnosed Covid-19 infections over the previous 24 hours, a decline from 3,022 the previous week, based on a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Meanwhile, Texas saw a decline of almost 19% on Covid-19 cases over the previous week as of Sunday, while Florida has just started seeing signs of the curve flattening.
Trump hailed the new data at the press briefing. “Over the weekend, cases in Florida, Texas and Arizona held steady and are now heading down. In Arizona, they are heading down and very substantially down,” he said.
However, despite the slowing spread of Covid-19, public health authorities and infectious disease experts stress how reopening businesses too early could lead to another resurgence in new coronavirus cases.
Early in the outbreak, US coronavirus cases reached around 30,000 new infections a day before dropping and plateauing at roughly 20,000 new cases per day in mid-May. As some states started to reopen in late April through June, Covid-19 infections began to multiply, with the US now recording more than 60,000 new cases a day.
School reopening
Trump also told governors to push through with school reopenings in the fall amid an increasing number of coronavirus cases in many states.
He reiterated the plan of his administration to pressure state governors and educators to reopen schools in the fall.
“We’re very much going to put pressure on the governors and the schools to reopen,” Trump said at a White House event.
“Open your schools in the fall,” the president told attendees, who were seated close together despite the fact that very few were wearing masks.
There are over 50 million students who attend school in the United States, and the closure of schools forced millions of parents to teach their own children and do their jobs at the same time.
Safe reopenings
While a few plans to ensure safe school reopenings are in place, parents and educators are worried about making the school safe for both teachers and students.
Experts believe that the local leaders should be the ones to decide whether to reopen schools. They also note that schools will need additional funds in order to retrofit classrooms and common areas to make social distancing possible.
“We should try the best as possible to get the children back to school and the schools open for the simple reason that the secondary, unintended consequences of having children not being able to go to school has ripple effects for the family that might have deleterious effects that really override the so-called safety benefits,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s premier infectious disease specialist, during a livestreamed event with Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama.
