President Trump late Saturday said he would not seek a quarantine on New York, New Jersey and parts of Connecticut after raising the idea earlier in the day and said his administration would instead issue a “strong travel advisory” for the area, as the nation’s largest city quickly becomes an epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Trump said he had directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue the travel advisory and that more details would be released later in the evening. He said he had made the decision in consultation with the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
The president’s assertion earlier in the day that he was considering imposing a quarantine on those states for a few weeks drew swift and harsh blowback from governors, who questioned why they hadn’t been consulted first and suggested they didn’t believe the move would be legal.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had called the quarantine idea a “declaration of war on states” that would crash financial markets and results in legal challenges.
“A lockdown is what they did in Wuhan, China, and we’re not in China,” Mr. Cuomo said on CNN Saturday evening.
The president had indicated he didn’t plan to physically prevent people from leaving those states, telling reporters earlier in the day that it wouldn’t be necessary to bring in the military or the National Guard. The president’s advisers have told him that most people would listen to an order from the president not to leave the states, and that it wouldn’t be necessary to “bring the hammer” by physically blocking their exit, a person familiar with the discussions said.
A quarantine restricting people’s movement across state lines would have represented one of the toughest measures the federal government has taken yet to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Mr. Trump already has blocked flights from China and much of Europe and asked Americans to adhere to social-distancing recommendations, but the stay-home measures that affect people most deeply have been ordered by governors.
New York City alone has more than 23,000 cases, nearly a quarter of all the cases in the country. Overall, New York state leads the country in infections, with 52,318 confirmed cases and 728 deaths as of Saturday, Mr. Cuomo said during an afternoon briefing.
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