President Trump has indicated he's considering reopening the economy, amid the spread of the coronavirus. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins Zack Guzman to discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: We're hearing shifting language coming from the president and the White House overall regarding how quickly the economy might be able to come back online. Earlier today the president was tweeting about this, saying that we can do two things together. The cure can not be worse by far than the problem. Congress must act now. We will come back strong. We're still waiting to see if Congress will act now later on today. But I want to bring in Rick Newman for more on the shift in the president's thinking here.

Rick, it does sound like he's pushing for a quicker return and shift away from these lockdown policies we're seeing more and more coming from governors across the country. Now more than about 10 states in lockdown mode, or at least announced lockdown mode as those come into place, but what's the give and take when we're thinking about the hit to the economy overall as more businesses are shutting down and people are staying at home?

RICK NEWMAN: You can practically see President Trump pulling his orange hair out as he just watches the stock market tank and all the terrible economic news that's coming in, and we're getting terrible forecasts. We don't even know how bad the layoffs are going to be, and the decline in GDP. So you're hearing Trump-- and this is circulating in conservative circles at this point-- let's get the economy back to work. Maybe we're going to end up hurting more people with all of these stay at home orders than we're going to be helping by telling everybody to stay at home.

You know, I think we all kind of get the idea that you have to be able to take some risks in an economy, but frankly I think this idea is going nowhere. And there's one big thing that is missing from this theory of President Trump's. We need massive widespread testing for coronavirus. We need everybody to be able to be tested. That's the only way you can know who is safe, who does not have this virus and is therefore safe to move around, and who does have it and needs to be quarantined.

Right now in the states you're talking about where these stay at home orders are in effect, the basic assumption is everybody has it. Everybody is potentially a spreader, because we can't tell who is and who is not a spreader. So you know, we can get widespread tests. I mean, we have tests and we are ramping up here in the United States, but we have been woefully behind on testing. And right now we need a moonshot for testing. Testing is the thing that is going to enable us to start getting back to regular economic activity.

You know, Trump is trying to let the private sector handle this. The private sector will get to it, it's just going to take time. So if the government can do anything here, figure out a way, no matter what it takes, to do more testing so we can figure out who can move around and who cannot move around. Right now we just are saying nobody move around at all.

ZACK GUZMAN: And I mean, when we look at the numbers, too, 25,000-- more than 25,000 in New York state, and a lot right now in New York City alone, has more than 14,000 cases approaching 15,000. When we look at it-- so there is all that going on. You know, it's different across state lines when we think about how many cases have been mounting there. And I think part of that is because New York State has been leading the way when we think about testing. So obviously they're going to have more numbers actually reported here.

But the rate isn't slowing down either. And we hear Governor Cuomo talk about this, saying that the rate of new infections has been doubling every three days. That could be a function of just getting testing back online as well, but he says the apex isn't going to hit for another 14 to 21 days in terms of the stresses placed on the health system here, too. So I don't know how you could have people going back and traveling again when there is that playing out in hospitals around the country.

RICK NEWMAN: And I'll tell you, there's also an urban-rural divide here. I mean, I've been writing about this and I've been getting lots of emails back from people saying, you're exaggerating it, we don't even have any cases here. You know, Mario Cuomo, the New York governor, said today basically if you think you don't have any cases, you're going to have cases. We are an example here in New York of what's coming your way.

I know in the medical community here in the New York City area, doctors assume that the actual infection rate is probably 10 times what they reported infection rate is. That's just because of all the people who may be asymptomatic and cannot get tests and so forth. And this spreads exponentially. I mean, we know that by now.

So everybody who characterizes this as oh, it's just like the flu, it's not just like the flu, because the infectiousness of it is considerably greater than for the regular flu. That means if you're one person who has it, you're going to infect more people than you would if you had the flu. And that just leads to these exponential spikes in cases. So you know, the breaking point here in any locality, in any municipality, is the health care system. And no governor or mayor is going to do what President Trump apparently wants, which is to say OK, we encourage people to go back out again if that person knows that they're going to run out of ICU beds and they're going to run out of ventilators.

So President Trump, if he gets to a point where he actually does this, he can try all he wants to encourage people to go back-- to go back out and reopen restaurants and go to movies and things like that. Governors and mayors are not going to have it if they see that increasing the risk to the health care system in their area.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, Rick Newman bringing us that.