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President Trump took an initial step toward reopening the United States in time for Easter on Thursday, announcing his administration will rank counties by coronavirus risk and urge low-risk areas to relax rules.

Trump, pushing to reopen the country by the April 12 holiday, outlined the plan in a letter to governors after reporting that a record 3.28 million people — 2 percent of the US workforce — applied for unemployment benefits last week.

Counties will be ranked high-risk, medium-risk or low-risk, and federal guidance may recommend “relaxing social distancing,” the Thursday letter says. “There is still a long battle ahead, but our efforts are already paying dividends.”

He added: “As we enhance protections against the virus, Americans across the country are hoping the day will soon arrive when they can resume their normal economic, social and religious lives.”

Health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, have cautioned against artificial timetables.

“You’ve got to understand that you don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline,” Fauci told CNN on Wednesday.

But Trump said the rollout of additional testing plus ranking regions by risk will enable a faster return to normalcy.

The ranking system will “incorporate robust surveillance testing, which allows us to monitor the spread of the virus throughout the country,” he wrote.

New York state is hardest hit in the COVID-19 crisis with half of the 75,000 US cases — passing 37,000 Thursday. New Jersey is second with more than 4,400 cases, authorities said.

Trump says he wants at least some regions to restart life as normal in less than three weeks.

“I think there are certain people that would like [the economy] to do financially poorly, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls,” Trump said at a Wednesday press conference.

“I’m not going to do anything rash or hastily — I don’t do that. But the country wants to get back to work.”

With Post wires