Heading Back to Business as Usual

"I'm going to have to make a decision, and I only hope to God that it's the right decision. But I would say, without question, it's the biggest decision I've ever had to make."
"I call it the opening-our-country task force, or opening our country council. [The group will include] very, very great doctors and business people." 
"In the midst of grief and pain, we are seeing clear signs that our aggressive strategy is saving countless lives."
"I think we will be substantially under that number [of projects that the infectious outbreak could cause between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths]."
"There's something good going to happen. I really believe that. There's something very good going to happen. We have to get back." 
U.S. President Donald Trump

"There are places around the country that have seen consistently low levels."
"And as we ramp up testing and can feel more confident that these places actually can do surveillance and can do public health follow-up, some places will be able to think about opening on May 1." 
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams 

President Donald Trump and Surgeon General Jerome Adams at Friday's coronavirus briefing. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

"[More than 600 CDC [Centers for Disease Control] employees are stationed around the country assisting with coronavirus response efforts, but the agency is] going to have to substantially amplify [that workforce to ramp up contact tracing]."

"Obviously, if we're going to try to get this nation back to work shortly after the end of this month, we're far along in those planning processes, as we speak."
Dr. Robert Redfield, director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"[New York recorded 777 deaths Thursday, but the statewide headcount at intensive care units was down 17.] That means there are fewer people in the intensive care units statewide than there were." "And again, that's the first time we've seen a negative number, so that's good. The three-day average of that is down."
"A change in intubations is a tick higher than it's been the last few days, but it's overall down. The three-day average is also down."
New York Governor. Andrew Cuomo

"[While] we are starting to see the leveling off and the coming down [of coronvirus-related metrics], Americans must keep up their social-distancing practices."
"This is not the time to feel that since we have made such [an] important advance in the sense of success of the mitigation that we need to be pulling back at all."
"Now is no time to back off. The virus will decide [when the country can re-open]."
Dr.Anthony Fauci, infectious disease expert, White House advisor

Like a racehorse champing at the bit, the man who is president of the United States of America, a man whose experience is that of a high-powered business executive focused on getting ahead, on competition, on fixing the best deal and forging full steam ahead, envisions a swift end to America's novel coronavirus lockdown and a smooth return to business as usual, lifting his country back up by the bootstraps of financial duress.

Yet he also makes due reference to his version of consultation, that his bold strike against the economically ruinous constraints on business occasioned by the need to shut down the communication corridors of the sinister coronavirus striking at will, can only proceed when the health professionals advising him give clearance to the resumption of the open economy. He will be guided, he assured the public, by facts and recommendations from health experts and it is they who will ultimately determine when steps are to be taken to reopen the economy.

Clearly, he has paid little mind to his own top infectious disease expert, Dr.Fauci, who hasn't hesitated in the past, nor the present, to gently 'correct' his president. The U.S. is facing a forecasted loss of jobs of up to 20 million by the end of April. That, to be balanced against the potential of a 200,000 death count with the precipitous lifting of the shelter-in-place orders. Figures provided by the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. On the other hand, should social distancing continue, the projected death count would be reduced by 60,000.

As matters now stand, the U.S. has recorded the world's highest confirmed COVID cases, at over 485,000, resulting in over 18,100 deaths from the virus. Italy alone has a greater number of fatalities. The epicentre in the U.S. of COVID-19, New York, tallied 777 several days earlier, down from799 deaths daily, Governor Cuomo reported yesterday. Intensive care unit admissions had declined "for the first time since we started this journey".

Drone images show bodies being buried on New York's Hart Island on Thursday.

Contract labourers have been burying two dozen bodies of COVID victims daily -- their caskets lowered into freshly dug trenches on Hart Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound. Ordinarily weekly, roughly 25 bodies are buried on the island, a number that tripled in recent weeks. The caskets are lifted out of refrigerated trucks by Rikers Island jail inmates. 

With over 90 percent of the U.S. under stay-at-home orders, Easter weekend saw religious services livestreamed or broadcast, with most churches empty instead of typically overflowing with worshipers. "Satan and a virus will not stop us", declared Rev.Tony Spell, pastor of Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana who expects over 2,000 people to gather at his evangelical megachurch on Sunday.

And that event may just turn out to be a wholesale new epicentre, spreading a new outbreak to scupper the president's May 1st cherished opening of the economy.