Sweeping U.S. social guidelines for the next 15 days, including avoiding travel, large social gatherings, and visiting people in hospitals or nursing homes were released by the White House and the CDC at a press briefing Monday.
included the usual public health recommendations about staying home if you are sick and keeping your children home, but there was an added element about anyone in the household testing positive for COVID-19, to "keep your entire household home."
In addition, social guidelines for the next 15 days included avoiding "discretionary travel," shopping trips and social visits, working or schooling from home wherever possible, and avoiding eating or drinking at bars, restaurants, and food courts.
"We made the decision to toughen the guidelines and blunt the infection now. With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly," the president said.
Part of these guidelines included avoiding social gatherings in groups of 10 people or more. Guidance released just a day prior had said to avoid groups of 50 people or more, but task force member Ambassador-at-Large Deborah Birx, MD, said the change was partly due to data from a model the U.S. had received from other countries:
"The biggest impact in the model is social distancing, small groups and not going out in public with large groups."
Birx noted that similar to the HIV epidemic, the COVID-19 epidemic was silent early on. But like the HIV epidemic was "solved by the community," officials are asking the same sense of community to come together against this virus.
"If everybody in America does what we ask over the next 15 days ... we won't have to worry about the ventilators and we won't have to worry about the ICU beds," she said.
Throughout the day, a number of states including New York, Washington, and California had started taking measures into their own hands, ordering the closing of bars, restaurants, and other non-essential businesses. In San Francisco, officials have ordered residents to to blunt the spread.
Supply of healthcare equipment was high on reporters' minds. When asked how many ventilators and masks the government had in its supply, the president said, "we ordered a lot. We have quite a few and it may not be enough."
He encouraged states and local health officials to look outside of the federal government to obtain respirators and healthcare equipment, if necessary.
"If they can get them faster by doing it on their own, because in normal times ... they are able to get certain things without having to go through the long process of the federal government. If they can get them directly, it's always going to be faster if they need them," the president said.
When a reporter asked President Trump if the government had considered using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build hospitals to help those who will be overwhelmed by a surge of COVID-19 patients, he said, "we're looking into it very strongly."
No briefing would be complete without an update on COVID-19 testing, and task force member Admiral Brett Giroir, MD, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, gave some numbers to satisfy reporters' curiosity. He said of the Roche test and the Thermo Fisher test produced last week, "1.9 million of those tests will be in the ecosystem this week."
Giroir added currently, 1 million tests are available, primarily at reference labs, and they expect "more than 1 million coming on board this week." This will be followed by 2 million next week, and 5 million the week after, he added. But he was unable to say how many Americans have been tested so far.
In terms of an update on drive-through testing sites, he added that gear is currently being shipped to over 12 states "to start augmenting local capacity as another way for people to get tested."
Trump defended the testing, which has come under fire in recent weeks, saying, "we took over a system that wasn't meant to do anything like this ... we broke down the system. Even now, we're testing tremendous numbers of people."
The president also touted the beginning of Task force member Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the first person received injections of the vaccine candidate on Monday.
"I said it would be 2-3 months, it has now been 65 days," which he said might be a record.
The phase I trial is comprised of 45 individuals ages 18-55 in Seattle, who will receive two injections at day 0 and day 28 in a dose-ranging trial, where individuals will receive different doses of vaccine. They will be followed for 1 year for safety and to measure the vaccine's protective response.
Vice President Mike Pence was mostly quiet at this briefing, though he did reiterate that he has yet to be tested for COVID-19, as he has "not been exposed to anyone that has the coronavirus."
Officials emphasized the community guidance is only in effect for the next 15 days for now. But when asked how long the outbreak will last, the president seemed to walk back some of his earlier statements, estimating a much more conservative and sobering timeline.
"People are talking about July, August, something like that where I say this washes through. Someday soon, hopefully it will end," he said.