The Daily - The Latest: Why President Trump Changed His Tone on the Coronavirus

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

On Monday, President Trump announced sweeping new guidelines to control the spread of the coronavirus. Among them: encouraging Americans to work from home and to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. We look at a report that may have inspired the president’s change in tone — and whether U.S. hospitals are prepared for the potentially staggering projections.“The Latest,” from the team behind “The Daily,” brings you the most important developments on today’s biggest news stories.

The U.S. now has more than 4,500 reported coronavirus cases, but the actual total could be much higher. At least 90 people have died. The U.S. response to the deadly virus lags behind other developed countries. That is what the experts are saying. Life outside the home or apartment has virtually shut down. Schools and businesses are closed and the social fabric has been badly frayed. There are still worries based on the experience of other countries like Italy,

which has effectively been on a total lockdown for a week, that it might not be enough. enough. I'm Sherry Fink. I'm a correspondent at the New York Times in the investigations unit. I often report about health care and I've been covering the coronavirus. And in recent weeks, there has been a lot of focus on how President Trump communicates about this outbreak and the level of risk that it poses for the United States. It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle. It will disappear. And from our shores, you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows. The president's tone started to change probably in the last week or so, but it really seemed to change on Monday.

I want to thank everybody for being here today. There was this press conference. The president got on a podium with the members of the vice president's coronavirus task force around him. This afternoon, we're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow over the next 15 days as we combat the virus. Each and every one of us has a critical role to play. And he announced that there would be a 15-day period where Americans should observe some important new precautions to try to slow the virus. Therefore, my administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible, avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people, avoid discretionary travel,

and avoid eating and drinking at bars, restaurants, and public food courts. This really struck a lot of people as a real change in tone and content. I think that what we do, and I've spoken actually with my son, he says, how bad is this? It's bad. It's bad. But we're going to be hopefully a best case, not a worst case, and that's what we're working for. And so the latest is that we now know a big part of what may have led to that change in tone and to the new recommendations.

It was a new report out of London by disease modelers, people who study how epidemics spread, that was shared with the White House. And it showed that if nothing was done by the government and regular citizens to stop the transmission of the virus, that in fact, there could be 2.2 million deaths in the United States. be 2.2 million deaths in the United States. And what they said to combat that, to stop this just almost unimaginable death toll from a new virus, 2.2 million, they said that two types of interventions would be needed, two types of steps. One set of steps is sort of the basic public health steps. You test for people who might have the virus. You tell them to stay home, you isolate them, or they go into the hospital. All of their close contacts stay away from everybody else for 14 days. And

also keeping older people, people with chronic health conditions, away from other people. So their disease modeling showed that that would only cut the death toll by about half. And so they also recommended these disruptive steps to really distance the entire population, very much in the ways that were recommended by the White House. And only those two steps together, the modelers showed, would have a very, very significant impact. The other surprising thing about this report was that it wasn't talking about 15 days. It was saying that you might need to do that intermittently at least until you had a vaccine, which we know could take 12 to 18 months. And keep in mind there are guidelines. Nobody's forced to do this. Will Americans follow them?

How much effect will they have? This all remains to be seen. But if measures aren't effective, there will be a surge in patients. All of the models show this. So the question is, is our health care system ready? In many ways, we already know that we're not. We know we don't have enough ventilators. We don't have enough people to run those ventilators, even if we had more machines. So there is a need for real attention right now to expand the resources as much as possible in our health care system, substituting, conserving things that we're hearing about starting to go on so that there will be at least some more capacity while we also hopefully take these steps as Americans

to cut the transmission and slow the spread and lessen the load on the healthcare system so that we don't get in a situation where doctors have to choose who gets care. So that's the latest. Thank you.