Defending his response to the coronavirus, President Trump said Thursday at the final 2020 presidential debate that everyone cannot afford to lock themselves in a basement like Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger.

Biden criticized Trump's handling of the virus and said certain areas with a spike in COVID-19 cases should consider keeping bars and gyms closed until cases go down.

"We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does," Trump responded. "He has the ability to lock himself up – I don’t know he's obviously made a lot of money someplace. He has this thing about living in a basement. People can't do that. By the way, I, as the president, could not do that. I would love to put myself in a basement or in a beautiful room in the White House and go away for a year and a half until it disappears – I can't do that."

"Every meeting I have, and I meet a lot of families, including gold star families and military families – every meeting I had – and I had to meet them. It would have been horrible to cancel everything. I said, you know, this is dangerous. You catch it. You know, I caught it. I learned a lot. Great doctors. Great hospitals, and now I recovered; 99.9% of young people recover; 99% of people recover. We have to recover. We can't close up our nation. We have to open our schools, and we can’t close our nation or we’re not going to have a nation," Trump also said.

Biden responded, saying, “He says we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it.”