Coronavirus: Jerry Falwell Jr tells hundreds of students to return to his university despite outbreak

Trump ally says he's 'protecting' students by keeping them on campus after claiming US is 'overreacting' to virus

Hundreds of students are expected to return to campus from spring break after Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr announced that college dormitories will begin housing up to 5,000 students this week, despite a growing coronavirus pandemic.

On Monday, more than 1,100 students returned to the private Evangelical Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia, the same day that the state's governor announced that all K-12 schools will remain closed at least through the academic year. He also ordered the closure of all non-essential businesses.

Virginia had 290 confirmed Covid-19 cases, including 45 hospitalisations and at least six deaths, as of Tuesday.

Mr Falwell said he believes he's "protecting" students by keeping them on campus together.

He said told the university news service: "They were talking about being glad to be back ... I was joking about how they pretty much had the whole place to themselves, and told all of them to enjoy it."

Students who become sick will be moved to a nearby hotel owned by the university.

The university enrols roughly 100,000 students, nearly half of which are undergraduates. Nearly 60 per cent of Liberty's students live on campus.

Mr Falwell — a vocal supporter of Donald Trump who has shared several coronavirus-related conspiracies and echoed right-wing dismissals of the virus — told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the university has a "responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they've already paid for and to not interrupt their college life".

The decision to reopen the campus follows his praise of the Trump administration's response to the virus: "Thank God [Donald Trump] is managing this Corona Flu like you would expect from a successful CEO v a career politician!"

On Tuesday, the president doubled down on recent claims that the economic fallout from the virus is as damaging as the virus itself, saying that the economic lapse would "destroy" the US as he vowed to reopen the country next month, regardless of guidance from health officials and a skyrocketing number of confirmed US cases topping 40,000.

He also repeated a false equivalence to the flu, which unlike coronavirus has a vaccine and proves deadly in only a fraction of cases compared to the mortality rate of coronavirus.

"We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu, we don't turn the country off", the president said in a Fox News town hall. "We have to get back to work."

Earlier this month, Mr Falwell appeared on Fox News to make a similar assertion, saying that "it's just strange to me how so many are overreacting" and falsely comparing the virus to the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, which was a flu. "There was not the same level of hype. You just didn't see it on the news 24/7 and it makes you wonder if there's a political reason for that."