Watch live: Trump says nationwide stay-at-home order is “pretty unlikely” at this point

President Trump said a nationwide stay-at-home order, like the ones states have been doing on their own, is “pretty unlikely” at this time. The possibility of such an order has been floated and discussed, but the president has been reluctant to take such a drastic step, such as the one Italy has taken. 

“Well we’ve talked about it, there are obviously there are some parts of the country that are in far deeper trouble than others,” Mr. Trump said during Monday’s Coronavirus Task Force, adding his administration will let people know if such a drastic step is taken, but it’s “pretty unlikely.” 

The president said the U.S. is “sort of putting it all on the line this 30 days,” after he extended his earlier Easter target for getting the country back to work to April 30. Mr. Trump has been eager to get the economy back on track, but said he was persuaded to extend social distancing guidelines after public health experts presented him with models showing as many as 2 million Americans could die without mitigating action. Mr. Trump had hoped that Americans would begin a return to normalcy by Easter Sunday on April 12, but the president told reporters in the Rose Garden on Sunday that the date was “aspirational.” Instead, recommendations from the federal government for Americans to work from home, limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people and avoid travel will remain in place until April 30. 

On Monday, the president revealed a new coronavirus testing system from Abbott labs that is expected to be able to deliver positive results within five minutes, a significant breakthrough as the U.S. endeavors to ramp up its testing. 

The president brought business leaders on stage, including the My Pillow founder, to share what they’re doing to manufacture tens of thousands of N95 masks. Honeywell is also opening facilities to produce N95 masks. 

Mr. Trump also took a rare personal moment to share that many of his own friends have fallen ill from COVID-19, and one of those friends is in a coma. 

How to watch the Coronavirus Task Force briefing

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN in an interview Monday that he and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, had approached Mr. Trump in the Oval Office with modeling showing the death toll from the coronavirus in the U.S. could be as high as 200,000 and “argued strongly” that the guidelines remain in place.

“We made it very clear to him that if we pulled back on what we were doing and didn’t extend them, there would be more avoidable suffering and avoidable death,” Fauci said. “It was a pretty clear decision on his part.”

There are more than 159,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., and more than 2,500 people have died from the deadly illness.