NEW YORK: United States President Donald Trump insisted there was no need for a national lockdown, arguing that other parts of the US weren’t hurting as much as its most populous states.

Despite the surge in cases, Trump said the world’s number one power was “winning” and “going to win this war.” Trump said this after New York and California and Illinois declared a total lockdown less than 24 hours apart beginning Friday night.

“Those are really two hotbeds. Those are probably the two hottest of them all in terms of hotspots,” Trump told the daily White House news conference, adding that states in the American Midwest were not registering as many confirmed cases.





Meanwhile, New York and Illinois followed California Friday in locking down to stem the coronavirus pandemic as President Donald Trump declared the US was already “winning” the war despite a rapid rise in confirmed cases and deaths.

The move effectively seals off America’s largest cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — with the states of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Nevada following suit.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered non-essential businesses to close and banned gatherings in New York state, a day after his counterpart Gavin Newsom told California’s 40 million residents to stay home.

“We’re all in quarantine now,” Cuomo told reporters, warning of civil fines and mandatory closures for anyone violating the order, which takes effect on Sunday evening.

The restrictions so far imposed in seven states now cover around 100 million people.

The escalation came as the coronavirus-19-linked deaths in the US rose to 249 — more than doubling in three days — with more than 19,000 confirmed infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Among the new cases was a staffer in the office of Vice President Mike Pence, the pointman for Washington’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

“Neither President Trump nor Vice President Pence had close contact with the individual,” Pence’s press secretary Katie Miller said of the latest confirmed case to brush the inner circle of US leadership.

“So no, we’re working with the governors and I don’t think we’ll ever find that necessary,” he added.

But shortly afterwards Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced an immediate stay-at-home order for the state “to avoid the loss of potentially tens of thousands of lives.”

“The only strategy available to us to limit the increase in cases… is to mitigate the spread of coronavirus in the most robust manner possible,” he said. The order is in place from Saturday evening until April 7, Pritzker added.

The head of the US Army Corps of Engineers, Todd Semonite, said the agency was working on refitting more than 10,000 hotel and dormitory rooms in New York into temporary hospitals to alleviate the burden on health centers.

“We would like to think we can do this in three or four weeks and try to go as fast as we can,” he said.