When will happen if Trump gets his wish of reopening the economy next month before we have the testing and tracing infrastructure in place to make it safer to do so?
No one knows for sure and you may receive three different but equally-dire projections if you ask three experts, but we do know what the White House itself believes will happen.
According to internal documents dated yesterday and obtained by the New York Times, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) believe that lifting stay-at-home orders next month will lead to another wave of infections possibly even greater that the first and another surge in demand for medical equipment like ventilators.
Moreover, they believe lifting restrictions while still keeping a significant portion of the country at home would still lead to a wider outbreak.
The documents, dated April 9, contain no dates for when shelter in places orders were delivered nor do they contain specific dates for when spikes would hit. The risk they show of easing shelter-in-place orders currently in effect in most of the country undercut recent statements by President Trump that the United States could be ready to reopen “very, very soon.” [...]
The government’s conclusions are sobering. Without any mitigation, such as school closings, shelter-in-place orders, telework and socially distancing, the death toll from coronavirus could have reached 300,000. But if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is estimated to reach 200,000, even if schools remain closed until summer, 25 percent of the country continues to work from home and some social distancing continues.
Suffice to say, if the economy even partially reopens next month it could lead to a wider disaster according to the Trump regime's own internal projections.
As I write this at about 3 o'clock eastern time, Trump is currently holding one of his daily press briefings and he's ranting that we do not actually need to test the entire country. We don't need to test the population of Idaho, Trump said during his briefing, because it's a rural state. They should get back to picking corn (corn is not even in Idaho's top 5 exports -- I just checked), Trump said. But even in Idaho, 70 percent of the population lives in cities. I personally have a friend who is a manager at a McDonalds in Idaho and she just informed me two hours ago that she has the virus.
Trump is wrong and he's going to get people killed.
“You see what’s happening and where we are and where we stand,” Mr. Trump said. “And hopefully we’re going to be opening up — you can call it “opening” very, very — very, very soon, I hope.”
Many experts caution that growth will be slow when it returns, because people will be wary of resuming normal activities before the country has far more extensive testing for the virus to help people assess the risk of contracting it if they leave their homes. Such a system appears nowhere close to deployment.