Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said to CNN that she wants to reopen the city amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, offering the residents as a "control group" to lift lockdown restrictions in the United States.
"I offered to be a control group and I was told by our statistician you can't do that because people from all parts of southern Nevada come in to work in the city and I said, 'Oh, that's too bad because I know when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar and then you get those that actually get the shot", she remarked during an interview with CNN.
Goodman did not provide social distancing guidelines for how to safely get city business back to work, suggesting instead that it was "their job to figure it out".
"Right now, we're in a crisis health-wise, and so for a restaurant to be open or a small boutique to be open, they better figure it out. That's their job. That's not the mayor's job", Goodman asserted during the interview.
She claimed it is vital to open up casinos and bring conventions back to the Vegas Strip to help the "close to 900,000" unemployed Nevadans in the city and outskirts go back to work and make a living for their families.
“I want us open in the city of Las Vegas so our people can go back to work and that’s it because we’re putting children and families back out on the street,” Goodman said.
Although mourning the 150 people that have died from coronavirus-related complications in the state of Nevada, Goodman insisted that, given that the population of the state is over two million, "we have to open up". When the CNN host expressed concerns for how to practice social distancing in such conditions, Goodman suggested that he was "being alarmist".
Several states are planning to reopen businesses, as the governor of Georgia has decided to jumpstart non-essential businesses in the region - a move which US President Donald Trump verbally did not approve of during his latest White House coronavirus task force press briefing.
The pandemic has brought down the nation's economy as well as that of Las Vegas where the public places such as casinos, hotels and restaurants have remained closed. Currently, there are 3,218 confirmed coronavirus cases in Nevada state with 150 fatalities, as overall US numbers have surpassed 841,000 with over 46,000 deaths, shown in data collated by the Johns Hopkins University.
