These four states are set to reopen businesses this week, governors ignore Trump’s reopening guidelines
Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alaska are set to reopen businesses this week, as long as they follow distancing and sanitary guidelines. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman discusses.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: And I want to talk now about what's going on with reopening around the country. Just saw a headline that the administration is talking about, perhaps, starting to reopen the national parks-- this as some states are starting to reopen as well. Rick Newman has been following that. And, Rick, these states that are reopening are perhaps doing so even though the national guidelines from the administration don't really pave the way for them to do so.
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, there are four states that are essentially leading the way here, if you can call it leading the way. They're really conducting kind of an experiment to tell us what happens. So the four states that are getting ready to reopen-- and actually reopening this week-- are Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alaska. All four have Republican governors.
And I looked at the data on confirmed coronavirus cases in those states-- it's tracked by the COVID Tracking Project-- and none of them-- not one of those four states is anywhere close to meeting the guidelines that the Trump administration put out just a couple of weeks ago. So one of-- there are several guidelines there for when it is safe to begin reopening gradually. One of those is you have to have a declining number of cases-- a downward trajectory-- for 14 days in a row.
And none of those states do. They've all seen recent peaks in the number of cases. So if everything went exactly right in those four states and they had a declining number of cases for 14 days for most of them, we'd be talking about early May or mid-May when it would be safe to reopen. And the governor of Georgia Brian Kemp, he even said, we're going to have more cases as we reopen. So we're gong to find out what exactly happens as you tell people it's OK to start going back to stores, you let some stores open. They're doing this with precautions, but they're doing it before public health experts say it's really a good idea. So this is going to be a model for all the other states to either follow or make sure they don't make the same mistake.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Is it the right model in the sense that several people may-- even though Georgia is slowly going to open up, hair salons and stores-- are going to say, not me. I'm sitting this one out-- so that we won't get an accurate picture about what happens when you start to remove these restrictions?
RICK NEWMAN: I mean, this is actually quite interesting, because one of the big factors here is consumer behavior and also worker behavior. So I mean, there are polls that show a solid majority of people across the country say even if the governor in my state says we can begin to reopen businesses, I'd rather just take my time, wait at home for a little while, and see what happens. We've got only 20% who say they're ready to go back to work and go back to normal life immediately.
And you know, we had a couple-- we've had a couple of meat processing plants-- a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa is now closed, partly because some people got coronavirus there, but a lot of other workers just stopped showing up. So they had absenteeism problems because people didn't feel it was safe to go back to work. So if you open-- you know, start to open some of these places, are all the employees going to go back? Probably not, but maybe some of them will go back, and probably not a lot of consumers will go back right away. But maybe some consumers will go back. And I guess it's possible that if all of this activity is at a subdued level, that maybe this will work. But again, this is not what the epidemiologists and what Dr. Fauci recommend. They recommend waiting longer.
JULIE HYMAN: They do. Rick, thank you. And when it comes to the issue of reopening, just wanted to mention some news from the daily briefing by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. He announced that Michael Bloomberg will help the state develop and implement an aggressive program to test for COVID-19 and also contact tracing, which is something that a lot of folks have been talking about.
And according to Cuomo, he's going to design the program, Bloomberg will-- design the training, and will make a financial contribution in cooperation with folks from Johns Hopkins University. So we'll have more on that as we do get it.
