The White House is leaving the pandemic response to governors.
The Trump administration’s “Stay at Home” guidelines will quietly expire Thursday with little fanfare — letting states decide what’s next.
But as President Donald Trump repeatedly declares that “we’re opening our country again,” the inconsistent patchwork of state, local and business decision-making is exactly what could drive a second wave of the coronavirus — or potentially prolong the current outbreak.
Instead of the national campaign to get people to stay home, the White House is leaving states with a set of CDC recommendations. They aren’t binding, and they aren’t all specific. That could lead to unexpected spikes across the country — sometimes in new places that didn’t see a bad outbreak, but also in cities that were recovering, only to suffer a setback.
“It’s going to take a long time for us to really wrestle this one down,” said Anne Schuchat, the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a brief online conversation with a medical journal Wednesday. “The extent to which this [disease] is challenging, it’s hard to overstate.”
The U.S. death toll is still rising, often by 1,500 to 2,000 a day. It passed 60,000 on Wednesday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, a number that Trump had until recently predicted the country would not exceed.
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Trump’s “Stay at Home” guidelines quietly expire today while the U.S. death toll is still rising, often by 1,500 to 2,000 a day https://t.co/zcTLiEj4c0
— POLITICO (@politico) April 30, 2020
Maryland @GovLarryHogan on whether he was concerned that the federal government would seize the tests the state procured from South Korea. He says the tests are being guarded by the National Guard at an undisclosed location. https://t.co/uGcUi6U5rL pic.twitter.com/15BhHmLzql
— Washington Post Live (@postlive) April 30, 2020
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