Official White House Photo by Andrea HanksBy LIBBY CATHEY, ABC News

(WASHINGTON) — With the White House coronavirus social distancing guidelines set to expire Thursday, President Donald Trump says he’s eager to return to hosting mega rallies and attending sporting events, and more governors are looking to lift restrictions before the weekend.

“We’re gonna start to move around, and hopefully in the not too distant future, we’ll have some massive rallies and people will be sitting next to each other,” Trump said Wednesday at an event on “Opening Up America Again.”

The president on Thursday continued a pattern of not having an official coronavirus task force briefing but using other scheduled appearances to take questions and tout his administration’s response to the pandemic.

Trump’s continued push for a reopening comes as the country’s economy sees its largest decline since the Great Recession and unemployment claims breaking records — and as a November presidential election approaches.

 

We can’t let the Fake News, and their partner, the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats, get away with stealing the Election. They tried that in 2016. How did that work out?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 30, 2020

 

It also comes as the government’s top expert on infectious disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, shared what he called “quite good news” on Wednesday. In clinical trials for COVID-19 treatments, Fauci said recovery time and mortality rates have tended “better” with the drug remdesivir, adding that’s it’s “opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating.”

Here are the latest developments in the government response:
 

Trump signs proclamation to make May ‘Older Americans Month,’ outlines steps his administration is taking to protect seniors as nursing home outbreaks persist

President Donald Trump opened his remarks on “protecting America’s seniors” from the novel coronavirus by declaring the month of May “Older Americans Month.”

“I’ll sign a proclamation declaring the month of may to be Older Americans Month,” Trump, 73, said from the White House East Room. “I don’t know if I’m in that category. I have a feeling I am.”

The president outlined steps the federal government is taking efforts to safeguard nursing homes, including having FEMA send supplemental shipments of personal protective equipment to 15,400 Medicaid and Medicare certified nursing homes in the U.S. and increasing nursing home inspections with the CARES Act.

“That’s a spot that we have to take care of. I guess you could call it a little bit of a weak spot, because things are happening at the nursing homes, and we’re not happy about that. We don’t want it to happen,” Trump said.

He went on to say the administration is finalizing a rule this week requiring nursing homes report coronavirus cases directly to the CDC — “and testing data will be posted online, so everyone gets to see it” — along with a new “Coronavirus Commission for Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes” — calling it “a big deal.”

“This commission will be composed of leading industry experts, doctors and scientists, resident and patient advocates, family members, infection and prevention control specialists, and state and local authorities,” Trump said. It “will convene in May and issue recommendations for further steps we can take to protect our nation’s seniors.”

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma also said there would be a “great” announcement soon about lowering the price of insulin for seniors.

Trump also called up GOP Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to the podium, the fourth governor to visit the White House this week, and Lee took the opportunity to express confidence in his state’s testing capacity and the care they’re providing to its senior population.

“In Tennessee, we are committed to testing every resident in every staff and every one of our 700 long-term care facilities. It will be a great undertaking, but it honors the value of these lives in those facilities,” Lee said. “I haven’t hugged my own elderly mom in eight weeks, but we are doing right by the citizens.”

Separately, Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, announced all Los Angeles residents will be offered free COVID-19 testing, regardless of whether they have symptoms.

Meat packing plants could reopen in ‘days, not weeks’ Purdue says

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said meat packing plants could be prepared to reopen in days after the president’s executive order this week.

“I think we’ve had rolling outages, and the good news today is we are having these plants prepared to open in days, not weeks. Some maybe by the end of this week. Over the weekend, others, and early next week,” Perdue said in an interview on Fox News. “So I think we may have kind of saved the situation here with this announcement that gives these companies better coverage.”

Perdue said employee safety is “paramount” in reopening plants but that Trump’s order to classify them under the DPA allows companies to reopen quickly, which will provide relief to the meat supply chain and farmers facing the threat of having to cull their herds.

Union officials and worker advocates have sounded the alarm, however, saying workers are already at risk of getting sick and companies have not done enough to protect them.

The AP reported Monday consumers could face less selection and slightly higher prices as meat plants struggle to remain open.

Trump touts ‘spectacular job’ of federal response, New Jersey Gov. Murphy says his state needs billions in federal aid to keep essential workers on payroll

President Trump met with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey in the Oval Office Thursday morning, his third meeting with a governor this week, as Trump starts to shift his message from grim health statistics to economic recovery and puts pressure on some governors to lift restrictions in their states.

The president continued to tout his administration’s response after saying on Wednesday the U.S. has become the “king of ventilators.”

“The federal government has done a spectacular job,” Trump said. “To a point where we are building now — we are going to have thousands and thousands of ventilators, and we are helping other countries. Because Phil doesn’t need ventilators. You needed them very badly in the beginning.”

“We did,” replied the governor of New Jersey, whose state had seen nearly 7,000 deaths at the time of the meeting.

Murphy emphasized to Trump the need for significant federal financial aid moving forward — something the president has resisted, saying the responsibility to handle the crisis, for the most part, is on the states.

“The financial assistance we need, and we need a significant amount, this is a big hit and this is somewhere, in New Jersey alone could be $20 to 30 billion. This is to allow us to keep firefighters, teachers, police, EMS on the payroll serving the communities in their hour of need. That’s something we feel strongly about,” Murphy said.

“We don’t see it as a bailout,” Murphy added. “We see this as a partnership, doing the right thing in what is the worst health care crisis in the history of our nation. I want to, again, thank the president for an extraordinary spirit of partnership across the whole spectrum of our needs.”

Murphy also said he’s allowing some golf courses and state parks to reopen in New Jersey starting on Saturday, but social distancing is required.

Two weeks ago, governors of seven states in the northeast, including Murphy, said they are working together to create joint recommendations on how they can reopen their economies in the coronavirus aftermath.

The National Governors Association has also called on Congress to ensure the next coronavirus relief package includes funding for states and local communities, but GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested states could declare bankruptcy rather than receiving a federal bailout.

Director of National Intelligence confirms U.S. looking at origins of theory coronavirus began in a Wuhan lab

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a rare statement Thursday morning confirming media reports that it continues to look at whether the novel coronavirus outbreak began at a Chinese government lab in Wuhan.

“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” it read.

 

Intelligence Community Statement on Origins of COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/MIPr6LVzU4

— Office of the DNI (@ODNIgov) April 30, 2020

 

The statement also says the intelligence community agrees with the “wide scientific consensus” that COVID-19 wasn’t man-made or genetically modified.

Two administration officials confirmed to ABC News Wednesday that the White House ordered intelligence agencies to review communications intercepts and other data to see whether China and/or the World Health Organization concealed information early on about the emerging coronavirus. It was first reported by NBC.

The idea that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab is unproven though pushed by some Trump administration officials.

Trump to travel to Arizona on Tuesday to visit a Honeywell facility making N-95 masks

President Trump said Wednesday he was planning to visit Arizona next week but didn’t specify what exactly he was going to do.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said Thursday morning that Trump planned to visit a Honeywell facility in Phoenix. The company announced last month the facility would be making N-95 masks, creating 500 jobs.

It will be an official visit with no campaign stops or events scheduled to be included on the trip, Deere said.

Local media in Phoenix first reported these details on Wednesday.

Fauci warns states against ‘tempting’ a coronavirus rebound, cautions that remdesivir is ‘not the total answer’

As states begin to roll back restrictions and reopen businesses, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned Thursday that new cases of the coronavirus are a certainty and advised states follow the guidelines for phased reopening laid out by the federal government.

“We will get blips … there’s no doubt,” Fauci told NBC.” “When you pull back there will be cases, and what we need to do is make sure (states) have in place the capability of identifying, isolating and contact tracing individuals.”

“The guidelines are very, very explicit, and very clear,” Fauci said. “There’s a lot of leeway because we give the governors the opportunity to be very flexible, but you have to have the core principles of the guidelines. You can’t just leap over things and get into a situation where you’re really tempting a rebound. That’s the thing I get concerned about. I hope they don’t do that.”

He also expanded on the initial results of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-sponsored trial of remdesivir, where he is the director, after announcing on Wednesday its results showed “good news”

“It’s the first step in what we project will be better and better drugs coming along, either alone or in combination, drugs of this type, and drugs addressing other targets of the virus,” Fauci said. “So it’s good news, but I was very serious when I said this is not the total answer, by any means. But it’s a very important first step.”

He noted that while the results were “clearly positive from a statistically significant standpoint, they were modest” — showing a recovery time reduced by 31% — or from 15 days to 11 days.

He also said he spoke with Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn about granting approval for emergency usage of the drug, and that while the FDA had yet to make a final decision, Fauci thought the approval would come “reasonably soon.”

Department of Labor: 3.8 million jobless claims filed last week

A record-shattering 30 million people have filed for unemployment in the last six weeks, wiping out a decade of employment gains and jobless claims reaching a number worse than the Great Recession, the key reason driving President Trump’s “Opening Up America Again” plan.

Last week alone, 3.8 million people filed for unemployment insurance, according to a Department of Labor report released Thursday morning.

The unprecedented influx in jobless claims has created a number of issues for those in dire need of benefits as businesses across the country are forced to close their doors and Americans report ongoing struggles in the unemployment application process.

Prior to the pandemic, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was at a historic low of 3.6%.

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