President Donald Trump has been planning to open the United States economy after being shut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. But as this plan seems to be contingent for some, a lot of companies' CEOs see the need for mass testing to make sure that everyone is safe.
The POTUS recently revealed the guidelines that the states would use to start opening their economies as part of the "Opening Up America Again" plan. The scheme has three stages and will give the governors the authority to decide on how they will gradually lift the lockdown and continue business as usual with the help of the federal government, BBC News noted.
In Donald Trump's daily briefing on Thursday, he said that the next move in their war against the coronavirus is "opening up America again." He believed that the country and its people want to lift the lockdown, as they don't see the national shutdown as "a sustainable long-term solution" to fight the virus.
He went on to say that the prolonged lockdown "risked inflicting" a severe serious condition on the public. He even warned of the dramatic increase of drug and alcohol abuse, heart disease, and other physical and mental health problems that come with it. However, returning to work still depends on people's health.
Donald Trump told reporters that healthy citizens could return to work if only the "conditions allowed." They still need to practice social distancing and stay home if they feel unwell.
The U.S. economy's reopening will only be done "one careful step at a time," but he said the governors have to move very quickly, although it still depends on what they want to do. Anyhow, leading Democrat Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, called the president's new guidelines "vague and inconsistent."
She said that the new guidelines didn't solve Donald Trump's inability to listen to the scientists and failure to produce and distribute rapid national testing. According to USA Today, the deaths spiked a daily high of almost 2,500 on Wednesday. As of this writing, there are almost 31,500 across the country and nearly 700,000 confirmed cases, according to the data from Johns Hopkins University.
Hence, a lot of company CEOs stressed the need for expanded testing so that people could return to work safely, NBC News reported. So far, the U.S. has conducted over 3 million COVID-19 tests. However, this is far from the experts' recommendation to conduct millions of tests a week before they can safely return to work.
