Trump seeks to reopen 'large sections' of US by Easter, clashing with experts - The Guardian

By David Smith in Washington

US President Donald Trump is aiming to reopen “large sections of the country” by Easter, he told reporters on Tuesday, as officials advised anyone who has recently left New York to self-quarantine for two weeks.

The US president has put himself on collision course with his own health experts by floating a deadline for firing up the economy, claiming without evidence that the current shutdown would cause more deaths than the coronavirus itself.

“I hope we can do this by Easter,” Trump told reporters at an unusually brisk White House briefing. “I think that would be a great thing for our country.”

Asked if that timeline – 12 April – was realistic , he replied: “We’re going to look at it. We’ll only do it if it’s good and maybe we do sections of the country, we do large sections of the country.”

The president, known for his love of media spectacle, said he picked Easter because “I just thought it was a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline, it’s a great day”, adding: “It was based on a certain level of weeks from the time we started. And it happened – actually, we were thinking sooner. I’d love to see it come even sooner.”

He noted there were “large sections of our country that are doing very well” with only “small numbers” of coronavirus infections, pointing to the farm belt and swaths of Texas. “We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Trump trailed his Easter deadline, which starkly contrasts with measures in the UK, India and other countries, in an earlier virtual town hall on Fox News. In another interview on the network, he said: “You’ll have packed churches all over our country ... I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

The notion provoked widespread criticism. Rabbi Jack Moline, president of Interfaith Alliance, said: “The president’s insistence on an arbitrary deadline – symbolic as it may be – will only put further lives at risk. The suggestion that the danger of this pandemic will pass by Easter is not borne out by scientific evidence.”