Trump: COVID-19 task force not dismantling, just refocusing

President Trump said Wednesday that the White House Coronavirus Task Force will continue it's work "indefinitely" but shift to reopening the U.S. economy. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman breaks down the latest developments.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Rick, you have been watching closely the administration's handling of this crisis. There was a report that the Trump administration was considering disbanding its virus crisis team. But then the president said, no, that's not the case. What's your take on the latest?

RICK NEWMAN: Right, this is the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the group led by Vice President Mike Pence. Apparently, it's going to morph into something else. We don't know quite exactly what that's going to be or who the new members of this taskforce are going to be. I don't think anybody is going to miss the old taskforce because it's not clear how much it actually did.

But I think the takeaway here is that the Trump administration is basically shifting away from a containment strategy for the virus. They are now going to shift toward how do we reopen the economy, what can we do to incentivize governors, and, you know, ride hard on industry to get them to open their factories and things like this.

This is possibly bad news because the-- with the exception of the three northeast states-- New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut-- infection rates are still rising in most of the country. And basically, you've got the Trump administration saying, nope, we're not going to invest in a national testing strategy. There is not going to be a national effort for contact tracing. There's going to be no national army of contract tracers. That's going to be all up to the states.

So Trump wants to move on, and this is kind of an experiment. Can we actually move on? I don't think it's clear yet.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, even though the Trump administration has sort of laid out the criteria for which states can open, it seems like it doesn't really matter.

RICK NEWMAN: It doesn't matter. Those are-- those criteria are guidelines. Many of the states that are now allowing businesses to reopen do not meet the criteria. And that's things like you have to have a declining rate of infections for at least two weeks straight. You have to have a declining rate of hospitalizations and known cases of flu-like symptoms for at least two weeks straight.

And many-- like I said, I mean, you look at the number of reported cases, and in many states, they're going up, not down. And the governor of Texas has even acknowledged we are going to get more infections because we are opening up.

So we're moving into an uncomfortable phase here where we are going to have to figure out what's the right tradeoff between public health and the number of infections and deaths, additional deaths, that you're going to actually have to tolerate in order to get the economy reopened.

JULIE HYMAN: It was quite interesting earlier to hear Clay Dover of Velvet Taco say that they felt comfortable enough with Texas' reopening plan to reopen the restaurants, but not with the plan in Georgia as set out by the local government there. Rick Newman, thank you very much.