Trump Moves Coronavirus Distancing Halt to April 30

As cases of Covid-19 continue to surge across the globe, President Trump announced Sunday that the government was extending its social distancing guidelines out to April 30. The United States currently as the highest number of overall cases of Covid-19 in the world, with 142,793 according to the coronavirus tracker at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/.

“We feel that the mitigation that we’re doing right now is having an effect,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is one of the leaders of the White House coronavirus task force. “It’s very difficult to quantitate it because you have two dynamic things going on at the same time. You have the virus going up, and you have the mitigation trying to push it down.”

Trump’s decision to backtrack away from his original plan of a resumption of some percentage of normal activities by Easter Sunday (April 12) was “a wise and prudent decision.”

This change will likely not drastically alter the live events space in the short term – there was minimal expectation that events in April would go off as planned, with most already officially postponed if not cancelled. When such events will actually be allowed to go off, and whether or not some will resume with no crowds to start, is likely not to be known until after new cases begin to subside.

“Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the war is won,” Trump said Sunday, indicating that the peak of deaths in the country is expected to hit in approximately two weeks. “That would be the greatest loss of all.”

New York remains the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, with 59,648 confirmed cases, more than four times the 13,386 confirmed cases in neighboring New Jersey, which is the second-highest number in the country. Per-capita, however, numbers are much lower than the raw numbers would indicate. New York (3.07) and New Jersey (1.51) are the only two states currently with more than one case per 1,000 residents. Six others (Louisiana, Massachusetts, Washington, Washington, D.C., Connecticut and Michigan) are between 0.5 and 0.76 confirmed cases per 1,000.

By comparison, Italy and Spain, the epicenters of Covid-19 in Europe, have 16.16 and 18.22 confirmed cases per 1,000 residents, respectively.

Confirmed Coronavirus Cases by State

Per 1,000 residents

New York	3.07
New Jersey	1.51
Louisiana	0.76
Massachusetts	0.71
Washington	0.64
District Of Columbia	0.57
Connecticut	0.56
Michigan	0.55
Colorado	0.40
Vermont	0.38
Illinois	0.36
Nevada	0.30
Rhode Island	0.28
Pennsylvania	0.27
Tennessee	0.27
Mississippi	0.25
Georgia	0.25
Delaware	0.24
Florida	0.23
Indiana	0.22
Utah	0.22
Maryland	0.20
Wisconsin	0.20
New Hampshire	0.19
Maine	0.19
Idaho	0.17
Alabama	0.17
California	0.16
Montana	0.15
South Carolina	0.15
Wyoming	0.15
Arkansas	0.15
Missouri	0.15
Ohio	0.14
Alaska	0.14
Oregon	0.13
North Dakota	0.13
Arizona	0.13
Hawaii	0.12
New Mexico	0.11
North Carolina	0.11
Kansas	0.11
Oklahoma	0.11
Iowa	0.11
Virginia	0.10
South Dakota	0.10
Kentucky	0.10
Texas	0.10
Minnesota	0.09
West Virginia	0.07
Nebraska	0.06