The NPR Politics Podcast - President Trump Issues New Travel Restrictions As Coronavirus Spreads

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

In remarks from the Oval Office Wednesday night, President Trump announced actions aimed at curbing the spread and economic downfall of coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has classified as a pandemic. The efforts include a ban on travel from European countries to the United States in addition to proposals attempting to ease the financial strain on workers and businesses. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, science correspondent Richard Harris and chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And we are doing our second podcast of the day. It is currently 10 p.m. on the 11th of March. And we have a couple of guests with us, Scott Horsley and Richard Harris. Hey, guys. Hi. Hi. Scott, of course, Chief Economics Correspondent. Richard Harris is Hey, guys. Hi. Hi. Scott, of course, chief economics correspondent. Richard Harris is a science correspondent here at NPR. And we are all gathered here because tonight, President Trump went to the Oval Office and addressed the nation on coronavirus.

Today, the World Health Organization officially announced that this is a global pandemic. We have been in frequent contact with our allies, and we are marshalling the full power of the federal government and the private sector to protect the American people. And Richard, I want to start with you because there are a number of health measures that he announced, and he also announced travel restrictions. Right. The most dramatic thing was saying that for the next 30 days, travel would be sharply limited between the United States and Europe. And this is sort of following on the Trump administration's initial reaction to this, which was to limit travel from China. There were some carve-outs in this new travel restriction, which is going to take effect, I think, at midnight on Friday. It's not going to apply to American citizens or the immediate family members of American citizens or green card holders. And it's also not going to apply to the UK, which is obviously an island, but is usually thought of as part of Europe.

And which has hundreds of cases of coronavirus as well. Yeah, I mean, so the thing that I'm wondering about this is, these are travel restrictions. Initially, when the US banned travel from certain parts of China and then China more broadly and put people in quarantine, that was seen as halting the advance of the virus in the United States, at least temporarily. But Richard, at this point, as more testing is being done,

I mean, we have well more than a thousand cases in the United States here. Yeah, over twelve hundred and thirty six deaths. Last time I looked, it is. Yes, it's growing very fast. And we know that that's just a fraction of the cases. So really the focus now, most public health officials say what we really need to do right now is focus on stopping the movement of this virus within the United States. And it seems like there have been some fairly human consequences to this already so far happening in places like Seattle. And they're particularly in the nursing homes there. Is that right? Absolutely. Of course, that's where many of the deaths have

been in that area. And the rules today that were suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were to really crack down even much more on not only nursing homes and limiting visits and so on, but to businesses, too, doing things like checking people's temperatures when they show up for work and so on. These are a big, big notch up from what's been happening thus far. As people and businesses make decisions, as people separate and socially distance, as it's called, to try to reduce the spread of this virus and possibly as the government does more to reduce the spread of this virus. Scott, the president did talk about economic measures, right? Yes, this pandemic is obviously playing havoc, certainly with the stock market,

and it's beginning to show up in the real economy as well. We've seen a steep slide in stocks for the last two and a half weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now in a bear market, meaning it's fallen more than 20% from its peak. So the president is trying to respond to that. And he laid out a number of ways he hopes to kind of shore up the economy, which he still brags is a very strong economy, against the harm of this virus. He talked, for example, about having the Small Business Administration offer more low-cost loans to businesses that have been affected. He talked about letting those who've been hurt by the coronavirus postpone paying their taxes, which are going to otherwise come due next month. He's talking about offering payroll tax relief, which

is something that Congress has not shown a lot of interest in. And then the biggest thing he's talked about is providing some sort of unprecedented help to workers who aren't able to work, either because they're sick, because they're under quarantine, because they're home caring for somebody else. So he wants to find a way to help workers who don't ordinarily have the advantage of sick leave stay home and still get paid. Yeah, Kelsey, this is sort of a remarkable thing in that many Democrats in Congress have been talking about wanting universal paid sick leave for American workers for a long time. And now, because of this crisis, it's being discussed.

But where do things stand with Congress? I mean, a lot of what the president's talking about would require Congress. Yeah, and there's a bit of a split here between what Congress is willing to do and what the president wants. We're sitting here now after 10 o'clock at night, and we still have not seen the House bill that we were expecting to see today that they say they're voting on tomorrow. We do know from talking to Democrats as they came out of a briefing today that the bill will include sick and family leave paid for from the federal government, federal reimbursements to states for expanded unemployment insurance, some sort of expansion to testing coverage and some way for coronavirus testing to be free, and some additional food security for low-income families who may be affected by this virus. What is not on that list

is that payroll tax relief that Scott was just talking about. That's because Congress doesn't like it. Republicans and Democrats I talked to both say that this is just not something that they want to do right now. They're not ruling out the possibility of some additional stimulus type action, which payroll tax relief would fall under. They're just saying they don't want to do that right now. They need to see the greater scope of what the coronavirus does to the economy before they're willing to sign off on something like that. Well, we are going to keep watching what happens with Congress, but let's take a quick break. And when we get back, more of what President Trump had to say. On a secret military recording, a sound so haunting, one scientist believed it could change the world.

My mind was racing as I listened to this, and I thought, this, this is the way. Join NPR's Invisibilia for the first episode of our new season. And we're back. And I want to talk a little bit about tone. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, President Trump has at many times tried to downplay the significance of it, to emphasize that the numbers are really low.

As those numbers have gone up, his seriousness in the last few days, his approach to this has notably changed. Even with a more somber approach to it, he is still sort of taking on that cheerleader role. The virus will not have a chance against us. No nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States. We have the best economy, the most advanced health care, and the most talented doctors, scientists, and researchers

anywhere in the world. The most prepared country in the world, I don't think that that actually stands up to scrutiny. Several countries have really done a good job of beating back this virus, particularly in Asia. And so far, we have not taken the steps that are necessary to do that, partly because we've not really been able to do adequate testing to really identify how this virus is spreading. So I think that is clearly top of the agenda for public health, and maybe the situation will change. But saying we're the best prepared right now is a little bit optimistic. is clearly top of the agenda for public health, and maybe the situation will change. But saying we're the best prepared right now is a little bit optimistic. One of the questions that I've had for a while is, did the lack of testing hide the severity of the problem? And as more testing

is becoming available, it's becoming pretty clear that there was something hiding. Absolutely. And we're seeing, so we're seeing a big increase right now. And it's partly because testing is ramping up, but it's also partly because the virus is spreading very rapidly. And we don't really know exactly how that sorts out, but we will know in a couple of weeks, I guess, really what that means. But it's accelerating very rapidly right now. And it is why public health officials are increasingly wringing their hands and saying,

now is the time to step in and take some very serious actions on the ground here in the United States to try to stop it in its tracks if we can. What does that look like? Does that look like what's happening in Seattle? Yes, it does. And certainly when once the situation gets like Seattle or New Rochelle, New York, or in Silicon Valley, California, then these actions really spring into place. We're also starting to see it in places like Washington, D.C., where there's so far been a handful of cases, but businesses are starting to tell workers to stay home, to telecommute. School districts are talking about closing. So we're starting to see other areas now stepping in and stepping up before things are as bad as they are in Seattle and New

York and the Bay Area. We also just found out that the Capitol will be suspending public tours in Washington, and that is a fairly unprecedented move. And President Trump himself has decided not to hold a couple of campaign events that he was planning to hold this week. I want to hear some tape, and this provides a little bit of a contrast that has existed for the last several weeks between sort of the message coming from public health officials and people with experience with viruses like this and with the president. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Anthony Fauci with the National Institutes of Health, is an infectious disease specialist. He's been at NIH since 1984 in this role. He's become the public face of many outbreaks in the past, a messenger on it. And he was up on Capitol Hill today, and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney asked him, is the worst yet to come? We will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now. How much worse we'll get will depend on our ability to do two things,

to contain the influx of people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. The administration has been quick to do the first of those things, to try to keep those who are outside of our borders from coming in. A little bit slower to do the second, that is to warn Americans to take measures to stop the spread within our borders. The real work and the real hard work is going to be doing things within our own communities, whether it is employers telling people not to come to work, nursing homes telling family

members not to come visit, schools deciding to close under certain circumstances, and things like that, that really make a difference, sort of old-fashioned public health things that really are what we'll ultimately need to do to stop this virus. But we should point out that this is a relatively low risk for healthy individuals, younger people who may experience this just as a bad cold. The risk really starts to ramp up after the age of about 60 and people with complicating health factors. And this is a real challenge for the political and public messaging on something like this. On the one hand, if you're asking people to change their behavior and take this seriously, you want to underscore this is a serious virus and should be taken seriously.

On the other hand, you don't want to just scare people into paralysis and make the economic threat of coronavirus even worse. I do wonder if the president's inclination to say that everything's going to be okay eventually underplayed the part about how it might be difficult before it's all okay. And he again downplayed the health risks of this virus, saying, you know, basically the risk is very, very low to the general public. And these are kind of dismissive tones that you don't hear the public health officials saying. And you absolutely are not hearing that same tone from Congress, who says that this is a public health emergency, and that is the exact rationale for trying to get an emergency package of benefits passed. The thing that I heard from most members of Congress who are trying to work on this package to kind of meet some of Trump's requests and some of their own expectations

of the best way to approach this is that they feel like this could be, while it could be temporary, it could be devastating for some people who just simply do not have the ability to skip work and go get tested or may fear that getting tested will prevent them from going to work or will prevent them from doing the jobs that keep their livelihoods going. So there's a very serious tension here. And that's something that the Democrats I've talked to say they're trying to remove those barriers to testing and to remove the threat people feel to basically staying home if they need to. Okay, well, that is a wrap for today. We will be back tomorrow. And until then, you can learn more about coronavirus by listening to Up First, our sister podcast.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the economy. And I'm Richard Harris from the Science Desk. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.