After I read an article on Politico, I left a comment. Most of what's below is that comment.
The only reason he is including business people on the council is so that they can vote to re-open the country. They're not epidemiologists, they have no idea when the country can reopen. It's great that he'll include some governors and doctors, but I have a bad feeling that the business people will out-vote the others and recommend opening the country. And Trump saying he'll close it back down if there's a resurgence of COVID-19 is stupid. That means he'll wait until AFTER a bunch more people will have gotten an often deadly disease and THEN close the country again.
What we need is for him to use the Defense Production Act to dramatically ramp up the production of masks and whatever is needed to test for COVID-19, and maybe AFTER we have enough masks and everyone is getting tested frequently, then we can reopen the country.
The thing is, the decrease in cases, when it comes, is because of social-distancing. COVID-19 isn't becoming less communicable. We need masks and testing before it's even sort of safe to return to normal. And even then, restaurants and such will have to stay closed (you can't take your mask off) but a lot of non-essential businesses can open again, including many that can't do stuff on-line.
What we really need a is an effective treatment- not the ones that Trump recommends. And from what I've heard, a lot of health-care people think his obsession with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is requiring effort that could be better spent on other stuff. If you think that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are treatments, you should read this, this, and this.
You should also read the other post I did about COVID-19.
UPDATE 4/14/20 Trump's real reason for not encouraging people to wear masks and and ramping up production of them is that he thought it would look bad if there were a bunch of people wearing masks and it would be bad election-year optics.
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