The White House’s Coronavirus Task Force will hold its daily briefing Thursday at 5 p.m. EST, joined by President Donald Trump. As in previous briefings, viewers can watch the press conference both online and on television. The White House will again provide a live stream of the event to its official website and YouTube page, while C-SPAN will air it for cable viewers.
Thursday’s briefing will take place as the nation grapples with grave milestones regarding the new coronavirus’ spread. The nation’s fatality count from the virus’ disease, COVID-19, reached 5,000 on Wednesday, with more than 200,000 people testing positive. According to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker, more than 16,000 new cases have been diagnosed since then, and 148 people have died.
During Wednesday’s task force briefing, Trump told the press that U.S. officials are working to provide “thousands of ventilators” in an effort to meet increasing demand from health care providers. “We’re soon going to have more ventilators than we need,” he said, adding that excess machines would be distributed to other countries also struggling to manage the increasing numbers of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care. The president did not provide a production timeline for the ventilators, saying they would be ready for use “fairly soon.”
The U.S. has reported the world’s highest incidence of coronavirus infections. Italy and Spain, with the second- and third-highest number of cases, have each reported roughly 110,000. More than 13,000 have died in Italy, while Spain’s death toll recently surpassed 10,000. Those countries are the only ones to have reported more coronavirus-related fatalities than the U.S., where between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths are expected to occur over the course of the pandemic, task force members said earlier this week.
On Wednesday, Trump addressed the nation’s containment measures, which included extending the federal social distancing advisory to April 30, and explained why the federal government has not issued a national lockdown, even as surging numbers of people continue to test positive for the virus.
“There are some states that don’t have that much of a problem,” he said. “If a state in the Midwest, or if Alaska, as an example, doesn’t have a problem, it’s awfully tough to say ‘close it down.’ So we have to have a little bit of flexibility.”
As of Thursday morning, 31 states had issued stay-at-home directives. After more than 4,000 coronavirus cases were reported in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp said he would sign a statewide shelter-in-place order on Friday.
