PRESIDENT Donald Trump on Tuesday said his administration likely would not try to close the southern U.S. border in a bid to contain the spread of the coronavirus, days after indicating that could be a possibility.
“We’re not looking at that very strongly,” Trump told reporters during a roundtable event at the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center regarding the spread of the virus, which causes a disease known as COVID-19. “We haven’t seen any great evidence of that area as a problem.”
Trump turned to Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most visible faces of the administration’s response to the spread of the virus, who was sitting next to the president at the roundtable and appeared to agree with his assessment.
The possibility that the U.S. would shutter its border with Mexico – halting transit that accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of trade and hundreds of millions of legal crossings every year – followed reports over the weekend that the Trump administration would impose travel restrictions on Italy and South Korea. Those two countries currently have the greatest number of confirmed cases of coronavirus outside of China, where health officials believe the epidemic originated.
“We’re thinking about all borders,” Trump said Feb. 29 at a press conference when asked about the border with Mexico.