At the coronavirus task force briefing, President Trump said he didn’t want to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order to fight the pandemic because there are some states that don’t have a large number of positive coronavirus cases.

Video Transcript

- Not every governor has issued a stay-at-home order. All of you have made it very clear how important it is to stay home, that we are in a dire situation here. And that's how you stop the spread, the staying home.

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah. Sure.

- Why not take the power out of the hands of the governors and you just issue a stay-at-home order for every state in this country?

DONALD TRUMP: Because states are different. States are different. And I understand that governor of Florida, a great governor, Ron DeSantis, issued one today. And that's good, that's great, but there are some states that are different.

There are some states that don't have much of a problem. There are some-- well, they don't have the problem. They don't have thousands of people that are positive, or thousands of people that even think they might have it, or hundreds of people in some cases.

So you have to look-- you have to look at-- you have to give a little bit of flexibility. I mean, if a state in the Midwest, or if Alaska, as an example, doesn't have a problem, it's awfully tough to say close it down. So we have to have a little bit of flexibility.

Look, we're helping governors. We're really here to help governors. They're the front line of attack. And that includes in purchasing, by the way. We're here, and we're backing them up. And there's never been a backup like we've given them.

We're giving them billions of dollars' worth of things, medical supplies and ventilators, thousands and thousands of ventilators. We have thousands under construction right now. We have thousands ready to go in case they need it.

There's never been anything like this. I mean, we've-- they've done, really, the people have done incredibly. We're building hospitals all over the country. We're building hospitals right now at a rate that has never even been contemplated before. They're mobile hospitals, but they're really not mobile. I mean, they're incredible structures.

But we're building many hospitals. Louisiana, New Jersey. New York, we just finished a massive hospital complex. And we also have medical centers built in New York. I mean, we're building hospitals at a rate that this country has never done before. And hopefully it's all going to work out.