The White House let its 2-week-old economic reopening guidelines expire on Thursday as dozens of U.S. states forged ahead with their own strategies for easing restrictions on restaurants, retail and other businesses shuttered by the coronavirus crisis, Reuters informs.
The enormous pressure on states to reopen, despite a lack of wide-scale virus testing and other safeguards urged by health experts, was highlighted in new Labor Department data showing some 30 million Americans have sought unemployment benefits since March 21.
The jobless toll amounts to more than 18.4% of the U.S. working-age population, a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Physical separation of people, by closing schools, businesses and other places of social gatherings, remains the chief weapon against a highly contagious respiratory virus with no vaccine and no cure.
However, with economic pain reaching historic proportions, agitation to relax stay-at-home orders and mandatory workplace restrictions has mounted, Reuters adds.
For the second time in two weeks, hundreds of protesters sieged Michigan’s state Capitol in Lansing demanding an end to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders.
The latest protest was sparked by the Democratic governor’s request, ignored by Republican lawmakers, to extend emergency powers she had invoked in a state hard hit by both the virus and closures to combat it.
Weeks after insisting he had “total” authority to decide when and how to reopen the nation’s economy, President Donald Trump has largely left it to each governor to decide on a state-by-state basis.
Although the White House declined to extend its April 16 reopening guidance, which recommended an economic restart in stages only after strict precautions are put in place, medical experts said those conditions remained unmet and that acting prematurely risked a resurgence of the outbreak.
Safely lifting social distancing rules, they insisted, will require vastly expanded virus screening and the means to trace close social contacts of infected people so they too can be tested and isolated.
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