US cases rise but talk heats up on economy

Governors' responses

In a response, some US governors told Trump that he did not have authority to end their lockdowns and "reopen" their states. And Trump retreated on Tuesday night from his strong position of the day before when he insisted such decisions were solely up to him. He said he would leave these decisions to the governors.

"We don't have King Trump, we have President Trump," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in a CNN interview on Tuesday morning. "I know it's red versus blue. Not anymore. It's red, white and blue. I have 10,000 deaths in my state. This virus did not kill Democrats or Republicans, it killed Americans."

During a Monday White House news briefing on the pandemic, Trump said: "When somebody's president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. It's total. It's total. And the governors know that."

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned that the US is not ready to restart its economy. "We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," Fauci said.

Schooley said: "We will have to continue the distancing policies in places where the epidemic may be peaking as we prepare for new surges in which distancing was late. We are, unfortunately, far from out of danger."

Separately, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the global economy is on track to contract "sharply" by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, the "worst recession" since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

"This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period," IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual news conference on the latest World Economic Outlook report released on Tuesday.

Xinhua and agencies contributed to this story.