The White House will hold its daily coronavirus press briefing on Thursday to update the nation on the latest information on the pandemic.
President Donald Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force will appear at 5 p.m. EST in the White House briefing room to make remarks and take questions from the press. The event will be live streamed on the White House’s official website as well as C-SPAN. Fox News airs the briefing in its entirety.
As of Thursday morning, the United States has over 432,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and more than 14,800 deaths, as well as 24,213 recoveries, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center. Health officials on the task force initially had death projections as high as 100,000 to 200,000, but they now say that due to social distancing guidelines being followed, those projections are now as low as 60,000 deaths.
Still, the Coronavirus Task Force warned that the next week would be “rough” in the amount of deaths the U.S. would see. There were 1,940 COVID-19 deaths in the country Wednesday and 1,971 deaths Tuesday, according to the Worldometer coronavirus tracking website.
“We know now for sure that the mitigation that we have been doing is having a positive effect,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at Wednesday’s briefing. “But you don’t see it until weeks later.”
“We need to keep mitigating. We know that this is something that is a strain on the American public,” Fauci said, adding that this is the “best tool” Americans have at their disposal to slow the spread of infections.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has led states across the country to issue strict stay-at-home orders and shutter businesses deemed non-essential in order to slow the spread of the disease. Over 17 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment in the past three weeks. Trump said Wednesday he would only feel safe opening the country back up when the U.S. is on the “down side of that slope and heading to a very strong direction that this thing is gone.”
“We could do it in phases. We can go to some areas, which you know some areas are much less affected than others. But it would be nice to be able to open with a big bang and open up our country, or certainly most of our country, and I think we’re going to do that soon…We’ll be sitting down with the professionals. We’ll be sitting down with many different people making a determination and those meetings will start taking place fairly soon,” the president said, adding that he would rely “very heavily” on the advice of health officials.
