On Sunday, President Donald Trump extended federal guidelines on social distancing until 30 April following a warning by the government’s top infectious disease expert that US deaths from the coronavirus could reach 200,000 with millions of infections.
Former US Vice President and current Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has urged President Donald Trump to order the production of more face masks and other medical supplies over the next couple of days, warning that “lives are at stake”.
The remarks were the latest in a series of tweets in which he blamed POTUS for dragging his feet on responding to the coronavirus outbreak in the US, claiming that the Trump administration has “failed the American people”.
Biden argued that COVID-19 is “not Donald Trump’s fault, but his inept response is”.
Trump Extends COVID-19 Guidelines
As for the Monday tweet, it comes after Trump announced that he is extending nationwide social distancing guidelines for another 30 days, following a warning by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that the coronavirus pandemic could cause between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths in the US.
According to him, “the modeling estimates that the peak in death rate is likely to hit in two weeks, […] therefore, the next two weeks and during this period it’s very important that everyone strongly follow the guidelines”.
The guidelines, which stipulated people staying home and avoiding social gatherings, were due to expire on Monday. Last week, Trump said that he planned to relax the measures and even singled out Easter (12 April) as a potential date when the US could return to normalcy.
Also last week, POTUS attributed the drastic spike in COVID-19 diagnoses in the US to increased testing for the virus, referring to the “tremendous number of people” that undergo tests on a daily basis.
The statement came after The New York Times reported that according to its database, the US had become the country with the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, surpassing China, where the virus originally broke out in late 2019.
At the moment, the US retains the highest number of confirmed cases (more than 142,000), while the highest death toll has been registered in Italy (over 10,700 people), according to official data.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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