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Most of the curbs, however, including school closures and emergency orders keeping non-essential workers largely confined to home, flow from powers vested in state governors, not the president.

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Nonetheless, Trump has said he wants life to return to normal as soon as possible and that the measures aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19 disease caused by the novel coronavirus carry their own economic and public-health cost.

Speaking by telephone with Fox News on Saturday evening, Trump said he would make a decision “reasonably soon,” based on the advice of “a lot of very smart people, a lot of professionals, doctors and business leaders.”

He said “instinct” would also play a role.

“People want to get back, they want to get back to work. We have to bring our country back,” he said.

Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, told Fox News that “purist medical professionals” who took the position that the only way to minimize loss of life was to shut down the economy and society until the virus was “vanquished” were “half right.”

He said, “That will minimize the deaths from the virus directly,” but added that economic shocks also killed people, through higher depression and suicide rates and drug abuse.

“So that very tough decision this president is going to be making is to have to weigh the balance and figure out which path does more damage.”

In New York, the state’s governor and New York City’s mayor engaged in a fresh squabble over their efforts to combat the virus in what is now the global epicenter, in this instance over how long schools might stay closed.