Navarro: Locking Down Economy 'Indirectly Kills Americans'

President Donald Trump had a "very tough choice" to make when deciding to work to reopen the economy at a time when coronavirus deaths continue to grow, but had to deal with the fact that locking the economy down "indirectly kills Americans," Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, said Monday. 

“We’re trying to simultaneously protect the American people from the effects of the China virus killing them directly, but it’s also true that the lockdown indirectly kills Americans through the economic effects with higher suicide rates, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and all that," Navarro said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom." "What the president has been trying to do is to thread that needle, and really, it’s the most difficult decision that a president’s ever had to make."

Navarro pointed out that the original projections were that up to 2 million Americans would die if no mitigation or containment efforts were made. Over the weekend, Trump had revised current death estimates up, going from 60,000 to saying up to 100,000 Americans could die.