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Law360 (March 24, 2020, 10:18 PM EDT) -- Americans who have contracted the novel coronavirus are departing the outbreak's epicenter in New York City and fanning out across the country, White House officials said late Tuesday, jeopardizing containment efforts and President Donald Trump's push for a rapid return to normal.
During a Tuesday night briefing, several members of the White House's coronavirus task force described emerging evidence that people are leaving NYC — which has more than 25% of the nation's roughly 55,000 confirmed infections and 700 deaths — for areas that haven't been hit as hard.
"What we're seeing now is that, understandably, people want to get out of New York," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at Tuesday's briefing. "They're going to Florida, they're going to Long Island, they're going to different places."
Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, echoed that observation at Tuesday's briefing: "We are starting to see new cases across Long Island that suggest people have left the city."
NYC had more than 15,500 cases as of Tuesday night, while the main counties on Long Island — Nassau and Suffolk — had a combined total of about 5,000 cases. Florida — which has an older population that could be more vulnerable to the coronavirus — had almost 1,500 cases, of which nearly 100 involved out-of-state residents, according to Florida health officials.
Speaking at Tuesday's briefing, Vice President Mike Pence urged people in NYC to avoid nonessential travel. The vice president added that "anyone who has traveled out of the New York City metropolitan area to anywhere else in the country [should] self-isolate for 14 days."
The NYC metropolitan area includes Long Island and parts of upstate New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.
During the White House briefing, President Donald Trump appeared to back away from statements he made only hours earlier about sharply relaxing social distancing guidelines by Easter, which is April 12. Asked at the briefing if Fauci and Birx have told him that the timeline is realistic, the president demurred.
"We're going to look at it — we'll only do it if it's good," Trump said.
Fauci was also asked on Tuesday night for his thoughts on again allowing large gatherings in less than three weeks. He replied, "That's really very flexible. We just had a conversation with the president in the Oval Office talking about, you could look at a date, but [you've] got to be very flexible."
At a separate briefing on Monday night, Trump hinted that guidelines might be loosened only in certain parts of the country, noting that some states — such as Iowa, Idaho and Nebraska — have had relatively few cases so far. He was more explicit on Tuesday night, saying that social distancing recommendations might be eased in "sections of the country."
Fauci suggested Tuesday night that geographic variations might be feasible, observing that "the country is a big country."
Trump has increasingly asserted that economic misery related to social distancing efforts, including temporary business closures, might actually lead to more fatalities than the virus. At a Fox News event earlier Tuesday, he went so far as to declare that a "massive recession or depression" could cause "suicides by the thousands."
At Tuesday night's briefing, the president also suggested that restoring a sense of normalcy right before Easter would give the country — and perhaps his political standing — a helpful lift.
"I just think it would be a beautiful timeline," Trump said.
As the White House nervously eyes rising infections in new places, NYC is already bracing for a crushing wave of ill patients. With help from the Trump administration, city and state officials are racing to expand treatment resources by adding beds at existing hospitals and transforming Manhattan's enormous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into a medical complex with at least 1,000 beds.
Writing on Twitter, Empire State Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that the crisis in New York will likely reach its peak in two to three weeks.
"We are scaling hospital capacity as fast as humanly possible," Cuomo wrote.
--Editing by Emily Kokoll.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
