Speaking at his near-daily White House coronavirus briefing, President Trump said on Wednesday that he still has no plans to institute a national “stay at home” order that would apply in states whose governors have not mandated strict social distancing. “There are some states that don’t have much of a problem,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t have thousands of people that are positive.” The governors of Florida and Georgia belatedly joined most other states on Wednesday to tell their citizens to stay in their houses. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California implored the remaining states, including Texas, to follow suit. But the president will not demand the remaining states to fall in line. “It’s awfully tough to say, ‘Close it down,’ if they don’t have a problem. We have to have a little bit of flexibility,” Mr. Trump said. In response to a question, Mr. Trump said he was extremely reluctant to shut down domestic air and rail travel entirely, but suggested that he is considering limitations on travel between areas with high infection rates. “I am looking at hot spots,” Mr. Trump said. “But closing up every single flight on every single airline — that is a very rough decision. But we are thinking about hot spots where you go from spot to spot that are both hot.” “Those are very, very big decisions from the standpoint of the future of our country, in a way,” he added. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the social distancing and other stringent measures to combat the coronavirus could be stepped back in the coming months if the number of infections and deaths approaches zero. But that would depend, he said, on improved ability of public health authorities to identity new infections and isolate those who might have come in contact with people who become ill. “If you have a really good program of containment that prevents you from having to get into mitigation — we’re in mitigation right now. That’s what the social and physical distancing is,” he said during the Wednesday briefing. “The ultimate — the ultimate solution to a virus that might keep coming back would be a vaccine.”
5 Key Facts Not Explained In White House COVID-19 Projections April 1, 20202:22 PM ET https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/01/824744490/5-key-facts-the-white-house-isnt-saying-about-their-covid-19-projections President Trump and his top scientific advisers on the coronavirus task force gave a much-anticipated presentation Tuesday night, laying out the data behind the president's recent shift in tone regarding the outbreak, including his decision to extend national social distancing guidelines through April 30. Specifically, officials pointed to a computer model released weeks earlier by Imperial College London that, at the time, predicted that if no action were taken to slow the spread of the virus, about 2.2 million people in the United States would die over the course of the outbreak. Then administration officials described separate modeling that predicts that by imposing strict social distancing measures, the toll from the current wave of infections can be reduced to somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths. Although officials implied that this estimate was based on the administration's own in-house modeling, they did not provide further details about those calculations. Instead, officials discussed a model from an outside group – the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME — which produced projections very similar to the administration's findings, according to Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the coronavirus task force. NPR reached out to two researchers who helped put together IHME's model. We learned of four assumptions made by the model that administration officials did not mention. Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at IHME. "People will follow the rules of their own state." ... state action is what matters IHME's model forecasts the outcome for each state by taking into account not just which measures state officials have imposed, but also the date on which officials imposed the measures and how much transmission was already underway by that point, as measured by the number of COVID-19 deaths. The model also considers how strict the measures are, with the greatest weight given to states that have imposed all three of the following options: closing educational facilities, closing nonessential businesses and issuing stay-at-home orders. The model is then adjusted based on what portion of a state's residents those various rules have been applied to. For instance, are the measures limited to certain cities or counties? Or are they statewide rules? Governors that haven't issued statewide social distancing rules will do so in a week. A number of governors haven't issued any of the strict social distancing rules the model takes into account. Other governors have only issued such rules for select areas of their state. IHME's model assumes that seven days from now, all states that haven't already done so will impose the full range of social distancing rules statewide. States will keep the social distancing rules in place through June 1 By contrast, Trump's presidential guidelines only apply through April 30. The president has indicated that he may extend that date as the situation warrants. But at the briefing Tuesday, officials did not specify how long their modeling assumes social distancing measures would remain in place. Chris Murray, IHME's director, says the modeling team is working on a projection for exactly "what sort of rebound we will see," if social distancing was eased after April 30 instead of June 1. But he says there's no question it would be significant. If and when the current wave of infections is suppressed, the U.S. will remain vulnerable. Technically this is not an assumption in the model, but a prediction: Notwithstanding the large number of people who will get sick and even die over the roughly three months the model projects it will take to snuff the current wave of infections, the vast majority of Americans will not contract the virus. This means they will not have immunity against future waves of infection, which could be sparked by cases in the U.S. that remained undetected or by infected visitors from countries where the virus is still circulating widely. "Our rough guess is that come June, at least 95% of the U.S. will still be susceptible," says IHME's Murray. "That means, of course, it can come right back. And so then we really need to have a robust strategy in place to not have a second wave."
I don't think it's necessary. 71% of you have voted yes which I believe means 71% of you are actually staying home. I voted no, because i still believe in freedom, but you can add me to the staying at home list. If we're any indication of the general population, that means about 80% of us are staying at home without the order and who knows if the other 3 who voted are also staying at home. I think its very few people who are actually out in large groups. Most people will do whats right and those that don't weren't going to follow any stay at home orders anyway.
It is important that people need to stay at home considering how the situation has worsened. I can't people think saying no is better because they wanted a freedom? What even?