Fox News’ Steve Hilton had a message Sunday for governors who have yet to issue a stay-at-home order in their states as the coronavirus spreads: Do it now.
“Last week I said, ‘Open where possible, close where necessary.’ Shutdowns do slow the spread. Look at the difference between the Bay Area which had the nation’s first stay-at-home orders and New York City,” said the host of “The Next Revolution.”
“So, right now, in the absence of a better antivirus policy, it is necessary to shut things down everywhere, and that includes Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, South Carolina, where there are no statewide stay-at-home orders,” he went on. “Tonight, I’m asking those governors — including a great friend of this show, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds — to put in place a stay-at-home order at least for the duration of President Trump’s ‘Slow the Spread’ guidelines.”
His comments come at a time when other notable figures are calling for the opposite. On March 24, Hilton’s Fox News colleague Brit Hume defended comments from Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, saying it is “entirely reasonable” that elderly Americans could be fine with dying amid the coronavirus outbreak to save the U.S. economy.
“The utter collapse of the country’s economy — which many think will happen if this goes on much longer — is an intolerable result,” the 76-year-old told primetime host Tucker Carlson at the time “[Patrick] is saying, for his own part, that he would be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that’s what it took to allow the economy to move forward. He said that because he is late in life, that he would be perhaps more willing than he might have been at a younger age, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint.”