President Trump announced his new guidelines for “opening up America again” amid the coronavirus pandemic Thursday that allow for a push for normalcy in some areas even before the April 30 date previously set by the White House — in some states, as soon as Friday.
"Instead of a blanket shutdown, we will focus on sheltering the highest-risk individuals," he said.
Trump said the "curve" of new cases "has flattened" and 30 percent of the country hasn't had a new case in the past seven days. While some areas will reopen later, the president said it's necessary to have a working economy in order to keep food and medical supplies being delivered to where they're needed.
Rice primarily accuses China of a coverup of the early outbreak of the virus, which cost the world time that could have been used to prepare. It is "very hard to get answers from China," she said.
"The Chinese did what authoritarians do," she said. "They silenced those who were trying to sound the alarm, they wanted time to create the narrative that would be blessed by the Communist Party of China, which means it probably had to go to Beijing before you could say anything. It is just the nature of the system. It is a real problem."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated his call Wednesday for the Chinese government to "open up" and share the full story of how the coronavirus pandemic began in the city of Wuhan.
"What we do know is we know that this virus originated in Wuhan, China," Pompeo told "The Story". "We know there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was. There is still lots to learn. The United States government is working diligently to figure it out."
State officials reported this week that the ranks of unemployment insurance claimants in Minnesota soared nearly sevenfold in just the last month, with about 15% of state workers being idled more or less at once. Latest national estimates project the annualized rate of contraction in economic output at an unheard of 40% between April and June. We’ve achieved “easily the worst stretch of U.S. job losses on record,” according to news reports Thursday.
That’s a whole lot of sandbagging.
Now a new battle has been joined, this one against microbial imperialism. A climate of fear has taken hold, perhaps even darker than the one that prevailed after 9/11. Back then, we worried terrorists might be plotting behind the hedge rows; now the threat is literally impossible to see, with every one of our friends and neighbors a potential COVID carrier. This has given way to, among other things, a culture of snitching, with self-anointed hall monitors ratting out their fellow citizens for such depraved behavior as walking in parks. In Connecticut, one “mortified” woman bragged about alerting the public after she saw people gathering on a golf course. The snitch was so proud of herself that she gave the media her full name and hometown. “I threw some f-bombs,” she assured everyone.
China is not allowing American companies with factories in the country to ship desperately needed medical items like masks, gowns, and coronavirus test kits back to the US, it has been reported.
American companies operating in China are unable to import the critically needed supplies back to the states because the government in Beijing needs those high-quality items for their own efforts to stamp out the pandemic.
China imposed export restrictions on American companies with products that have long been approved by the Food and Drug Administration because they are superior in quality to the masks, gowns, and other personal protective items made by domestic Chinese firms.
