President Trump declared a national emergency today at his news conference on the coronavirus, also announcing an array of things the administration is doing.
The national emergency itself will give the Trump administration access to around $50 billion in disaster relief funds that they can send to states to help with their responses to the coronavirus.
Trump also added that he’s pulling the private sector together to respond to the need for testing. This will include biomedical laboratories like Labcorp and Roche who will be doing much of the testing, along with retail stores like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and others who will make their parking lots available a quicker ‘drive-thru’ style testing. Trump also noted that Google has 1,700 engineers working on a website that will link all of this coronavirus testing for the public.
As far as the testing itself, Trump said they would be testing a lot of people in the next week or two, to the tune of half a million, and predicted that in about a month’s time that they will be able to test up to 5 million people through this new system.
Given that the oil prices are dropping, Trump announced that he’s ordered the federal government to buy enough oil to fill up our reserves. He’s also ordering his administration to suspend student loan interest on federally owned student loans.
As to negotiations with the House on a coronavirus funding bill, Trump said there is no deal yet and blames Democrats for not doing enough for the country. He didn’t get specific as to what the exact problems where but seemed optimistic that they would be able to come to agreement.
I should also note that the stock market has responded very well to this news, up almost 2,000 points since yesterday. It had rebounded some today, but really took off after the news conference began.
I must say this is the press conference that the American public needed to see, one that will no doubt provide much optimism and hope for people who are worrying about the spread of the virus here in the US.
Watch the full news conference below for more: