WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would issue a travel warning for the hard-hit New york city area to restrict the spread of the coronavirus, withdrawing from an earlier recommendation that he might try to cut off the region entirely.
” A quarantine will not be required,” he stated on Twitter.
Trump’s statement came as the U.S. death count crossed 2,100, more than double the level from two days ago. The United States has actually now tape-recorded more than 122,000 cases of the breathing virus, one of the most of any nation worldwide.
Given that the infection first appeared in the United States in late January, Trump has actually vacillated between soft-pedaling the dangers of infection and prompting Americans to take steps to slow its spread.
Trump said on Saturday afternoon that he may enforce a restriction on travel in and out of New York and parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, the U.S. epicenter of the disease, to secure other states that have yet to bear the brunt. He provided few specifics.
Critics without delay called the concept unfeasible, stating it would cause turmoil in a region that serves as the financial engine of the eastern United States, accounting for 10 percent of the population and 12 percent of GDP.
” If you began walling off locations all across the country it would be totally unusual, counter-productive, anti-American,” New York Guv Andrew Cuomo said on CNN.
Hours later on, Trump dropped the concept, saying he would rather ask the U.S. Centers for Illness Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a “strong Travel Advisory” that would be administ