Members of the Coronavirus Task Force, charged with leading the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, are holding a briefing Monday at 5 p.m. following President Trump’s announcement that nationwide social distancing guidelines would be extended for another 30 days.
Mr. Trump had hoped that Americans would begin a return to normalcy by Easter Sunday on April 12, but the president told reporters in the Rose Garden on Sunday that date was “aspirational.” Instead, recommendations from the federal government for Americans to work from home, limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people and avoid travel will remain in place until April 30.
How to watch the Coronavirus Task Force briefing
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN in an interview Monday that he and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, approached Mr. Trump in the Oval Office with modeling showing the death toll from the coronavirus in the U.S. could be as high as 200,000 and “argued strongly” that the guidelines remain in place.
“We made it very clear to him that if we pulled back on what we were doing and didn’t extend them, there would be more avoidable suffering and avoidable death,” Fauci said. “It was a pretty clear decision on his part.”
There are more than 143,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., and more than 2,500 people have died from the deadly illness.
