“President Trump’s best decision was stopping travel from China early on,” Mr. Graham tweeted on Monday. “I hope we will not undercut that decision by suggesting we back off aggressive containment policies within the United States.”
And on Monday morning the U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, issued a stark warning in an appearance on NBC: “This week, it’s going to get bad,” he said, urging more Americans to take social distancing seriously.
Governors of both parties, fearing that the fast spread of the virus will soon clog their hospitals and leave them with too few ventilators to keep critically ill patients alive, continued to take action on their own, following in the footsteps of states including California, Illinois and New York that moved last week to try to keep residents home and close nonessential businesses.
“If we all do our part and simply stay home, we have a shot,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said at a news conference on Monday, citing a study that projected that 70 percent of Michigan’s 10 million residents could become infected if nothing changed.
Ms. Whitmer, who is among a handful of Democratic governors who have exchanged jabs with President Trump over the virus, said that the action was necessary, in part, because of a lack of response from the federal government.
“Without a comprehensive national strategy, we, the states, must take action,” she said.
On Monday morning, Mr. Trump posted a video on Twitter in which members of his coronavirus task force called for more social distancing — but then retweeted his earlier post about not letting the cure be worse than the problem itself.
A growing number of officials have urged Mr. Trump to use the Defense Production Act to compel industry to produce desperately-needed masks and ventilators, or to take over the distribution of critical goods so states are not forced to compete against one another in bidding wars.