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The story of Easter

President Trump has a new aspiration: to “have the country opened up” by Easter, on April 12. It’s a publicly announced goal that horrifies health experts. Andrew has pieced together how the president came to side with the business-minded “we can’t have the cure be worse than the problem” crowd.

It began late last week when Wall Street executives warned the Trump administration of another Great Depression if Americans didn’t get back to work soon. Financiers like Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn suggested that, based on reports coming out of China and Italy, younger people might be able to return to work sooner. None of those executives are doctors or scientists.

The White House also seized on opinion pieces like this NYT Op-Ed by David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, that questioned the guidelines about flattening the infection curve through extreme social distancing. (Mr. Katz’s piece has been rebutted by other experts.)