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President Trump said he’d like to open the economy with a “big bang” and suggested that may first happen in regions of the country where the coronavirus outbreak has begun to subside.

“I’d love to open with a big bang, one beautiful country, but it’s very possible,” the president said Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

“So we are looking at two concepts, we are looking at the concept we open up sections and also looking at the concept where you open up everything,” the president explained. “I think New York is getting ready if not already, but getting ready to peak and once it peaks, it will start coming down and it’s going to come down fast.”

Unlike New York and New Jersey, Trump said some states haven’t had the same level of coronavirus spread.

He said parts of Michigan and Detroit have been “hit very hard” – “so there are some places hit very hard in other places that have not been hit very hard frankly by comparison, very little.”

The president has kept an eye on the economy and the stock market during the battle against the pandemic, watching the financial tailspin as lockdowns were expanded in states across the country and workers were laid off or furloughed.

He had initially said he wanted to open up the economy by Easter Sunday but then decided to keep the mitigation guidelines – like social distancing – in effect until April 30 to stop the spread of the virus.

The president said he has “some great people” working on getting the economy up and running.

“We have to get our country open again. This wasn’t designed to have this. You crack it – you crack it in half, it’s no good. And we’ll be open again much sooner rather than later,” he told Hannity. “And we are going to be coming up with some ideas in the very near future, probably putting them out to the public, putting them out, but, you know, we’re going through April – as you know, April 30 – and we are going to make a decision from there.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that 731 people died of coronavirus in New York – raising the death toll to 5,489 – after a two-day lull that had some officials believing the spread had reached its apex.

The number surpassed the previous high of 630, Cuomo reported on Saturday.

But he noted that hospitalizations and intensive care admissions are beginning to slow because social distancing measures are working.

In the US there are nearly 400,000 cases and more than 12,000 deaths. By April 2, almost 10 million Americans had filed for unemployment benefits.