‘Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump said Thursday that he would not implement another shutdown—even if a second wave of the coronavirus struck in the fall.
“People say that’s a very distinct possibility. It’s standard. And we’re going to put out the fires,” Trump said of a possible second wave.
“But we’re not going to close the country. We’re going to put out the fires,” Trump told reporters during a tour of a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Trump said he is confident that the U.S. will be able to contain future outbreaks, referring to them as “embers.”
“Whether it’s an ember or a flame, we’re going to put it out. But we’re not closing our country,” the president continued.
Health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, have warned that a second wave of COVID-19 is more than likely.
“The virus is not going to disappear,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s a highly transmissible virus. At any given time, it’s some place or another. As long as that’s the case, there’s a risk of resurgence.”
But even Fauci has said that the outcome will be “very, very different” the second time around.
“Our ability to go out and be able to test, identify, isolate and contact-trace, will be orders of magnitude better than what it was just a couple months ago,” Fauci explained.
Trump has made it clear that he wants the country to get back to work and return to normalcy, even though advisers such as Fauci are hesitant to do so.
“We have to open our country,” Trump told Fox News last week. “Now, we want to do it safely, but we also want to do it as quickly as possible. We can’t keep going on like this. You’re having bedlam already in the streets. You can’t do this.”