President Trump: Coronavirus Scare Could Last Until July or August
President Donald Trump alluded to the possibility of the national scare surrounding the Chinese coronavirus lasting for an extended period of time during a press conference on Monday. When asked by a Fox News reporter “how long this might last,” the President spoke of the possibility of things returning to normal in July or August.
“It seems to me that if we do a really good job, we’ll not only hold the death down to a level that is much lower than the other way, had we not done a good job, but people are talking about July, August, something like that.”
Fox’s John Roberts asked if Americans would have to accept the ongoing national panic as the “new normal” until the summer months.
“We’ll see what happens. But they think August, could be July.”
There’s reason to think the federal government’s estimate of bringing the crisis under control by August is a very conservative estimate, judging from efforts to contain the virus in South Korea and China. The latter has brought new spread of the virus to a trickle around three months after it started surfacing in force in Hubei province.
Even the most hard-pressed Trump critics would be hard pressed to claim that the United States is going to incur more difficulties in containing the Chinese coronavirus than its country of origin.
However, the announcement from Trump may have played a role in the decline of the Dow Jones index by nearly 3,000 points on Monday, the largest single-day decline in the index in decades.
This crisis isn’t going to be over in a hurry, and while the economic disruption to American life is damaging, it’s for the best that the federal government is planning for the worst-case scenario.
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