Washington,
US President Donald Trump has unveiled a three-phase plan to reopen the world’s largest economy, jolted by the COVID-19 pandemic, that allows governors to gradually ease the crippling lockdown in their states.
His announcement came on a day when the labour department said another 5.2 million workers filed for unemployment benefits last week. The job losses from the COVID-19 pandemic was 22 million in March, easily the worst stretch of US job losses on record. The International Monetary Fund this week projected that the American economy will shrink this year by 5.9 per cent amidst the pandemic that has wrecked havoc in the country.
“America wants to be open and Americans want to be open,” he said. “A national shutdown is not a sustainable long-term solution,” Trump told reporters at his daily White House briefing on the coronavirus outbreak.
Asserting that a prolonged lockdown, combined with a forced economic depression, would inflict an immense and wide-ranging toll on public health, Trump told reporters on Thursday that his administration is issuing new federal guidelines that will allow governors to take a phased approach to reopening their individual states.
Trump said healthy Americans will now be able to return to work if conditions on the ground allow.
“Instead of a blanket shutdown, we will pursue a focus on sheltering the highest risk individuals,” he said, adding that his administration is establishing clear scientific metric and benchmarks on testing new case growth and hospital capacity that must be met before advancing to each phase.
“If the virus returns in the fall, as some scientists think it may, possibly, these guidelines will ensure that our country is up and running so that we can likewise put it out quickly,” he said.
Currently more than 95 per cent of America’s 330 million population are under a stay-at-home order. More than 670,000 Americans have contracted the coronavirus, and over 33,000 have lost their lives, according to latest Johns Hopkins University figures.
A record 4,591 Americans died in the last 24 hours alone due to the novel coronavirus in the US, which has the highest number of COVID-19 casualties in the world. ( PTI )
