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California Governor Issues Stay at Home Order for Entire State to Reduce Spread of Coronavirus; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti Interviewed on Rules for Stay at Home Order Issued for California; New York City Mayor States Hospital Supplies being Depleted; Unemployment Claims in U.S. Increase Dramatically; California Governor Orders Entire State to Stay Home. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired March 20, 2020 - 08:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[08:00:00]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: With Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning and welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. It's Friday, March 20th, it is 8:00 in the east.

And this morning the entire state of California is on a kind of lockdown. Overnight, Governor Newsom enacted the most sweeping measures we have seen anywhere in this country to date, ordering 40 million people in his state, all people in his state, to stay home indefinitely. There are exceptions, important exceptions. You can go on and get food, go to the doctor or care for someone in need or perform an essential job, you can go for a walk to get exercise. But otherwise stay home.

The governor cited research showing that if nothing else is done, 56 percent of California residents, that's 25 million people, could become infected over the next eight weeks. That would just crush hospitals in the state, putting them nearly 20,000 patients over capacity.

And update on the number of cases right now, these are the ones we know about, the number is certainly higher, more than 13,000 confirmed cases in the United States, 195 Americans have died.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Governors across the country are sounding the alarm. We have been hearing this alarm all week. But we're still not sure why there is not more progress. Doctors need more medical and protective supplies. They say they are in desperate need of federal help. New York City's mayor warns that hospitals in this city are two to three weeks away from running out of much needed supplies.

President Trump is trying to outsource this for some reason. He's telling governors to get their own medical gear. He says the federal government, quote, is not a shipping clerk. The president also talked about getting new drugs to patients, but he gave out wrong information. He falsely claimed the FDA approved a treatment. That's not true.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have introduced $1 trillion stimulus plan, but at this point, it appears to be a nonstarter with Democrats who want different details in it.

BERMAN: Joining us now is the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti. My. Mayor, thank you for being with us. I know it's early for you out there. Please tell us why you think this statewide measure was put in place. You had announced one earlier in the day for Los Angeles, but why now is it statewide, and what exactly does it mean?

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, (D) LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: I think the numbers don't lie. And a very good morning and thank you guys for all you've been reporting. It is very clear in history that those who wait suffer more deaths and those who act quickly save more lives. This is an act of love, this is an act of saying every life is precious, and this is clear with the data.

Here in southern California, we're a little less hard hit than northern California, but we wanted to act quickly, and I'm so glad our governor acted for the entire state, because the data showed us very clearly two days for some cities, maybe six to nine days for others. We are all about to be overwhelmed in our hospitals. But things we can do right now allow us all to be first responders and potentially take this virus in a different direction.

BERMAN: Most of us in America have been told to stay home already. So how is this different?

GARCETTI: Well, and it is marvelous to see how many people -- I'm so heart warmed. Crime is down, acts of generosity are up, there is no traffic in Los Angeles, and that's a good thing. It shows that people actually listened on Sunday when we closed down all the social gathering points in the city. We saw some people, though, continuing to go out there, young people who think that they're just invincible. We have all been young and had those thoughts. But our message was clear that there is somebody you love, a parent or grandparent, somebody who has compromised immune system, and we wanted to make sure we went from a 60 or 70 percent to as close to 100 percent as we can. That adherence will save lives, that's our message. And this is the day everything changed.

BERMAN: It will be a misdemeanor of some kind? How exactly will that be enforced, and on whom?

GARCETTI: It is law and it is an order, but we know that somebody asked yesterday, is this if you see something, say something? And I said, yes, but say something to that person. Say something to that business that might not know they're supposed to be closed. In those very few cases where it requires us to pay a visit, we had one restaurant, for instance, after we banned dining in that kind of flaunted that, and we paid them a visit with law enforcement officer and they closed that very quickly with a smile and it was done.

This is really about reaching people's better angels. Very different than other unrests we have seen, this is not one in which we expect there to be a heavy arm of law enforcement. It is really about all of us coming together as a community.

BERMAN: It's not about going and driving the streets and rounding up people who are together. It is hoping, a, they won't be together, and if they are, telling them to stop. What exactly -- it is beautiful where you live. You're lucky enough to be the mayor of a city where the weather is almost always nice. What exactly, and I want you to be precise here, because there is so much confusion nationwide, are the rules for going outside, the rules for exercising?

[08:05:03]

GARCETTI: I'm so glad you asked that, because it has been misreported in different cities, lockdown or shelter in place. Shelter in place means stop wherever you are during a school shooting. Lockdown means you can't leave. Both are wrong. This is safer at home.

But we encourage you, get out, keep, as we just talked about, a physical distance, not social distance, but a physical distance of at least six feet. But you can go to the park, though we've closed the playground equipment.

You can go for a hike here in Los Angeles, see the beautiful Pacific Ocean. Get up there, the air has never been cleaner because the cars that are off the road. Check in with people. You can go out, just don't go out with a group of your family to get things at the grocery store. Don't pack yourselves together in a car. Really abide by this. This won't just be a couple of weeks, in my opinion it will be at least a couple of months.

I know that's really jarring and tough for folks initially, but I do think people are going to come together in a way, remember those things that we love and those people we love in a way we haven't done for a long time.

BERMAN: What is the economic impact of this going to be? If everyone stays home, really, the economy is basically going to stall.

GARCETTI: No question. And there's critical sectors we'll continue doing, like our construction of our key infrastructure, obviously the hospital and healthcare sector, and you have things like the markets that are still hiring more people and need more people. But those folks aside, there is no question that people are going to be so hard hit.

And I'm also concerned not just about Washington and how slowly it's moving to get assistance to all working people on the edge. We have an eviction moratorium here, we're not cutting off anybody's gas, anybody's water, anybody's electricity. We're actually putting electricity back on for those who had it cut off recently.

But we also need to think about our immigrants who are the ones picking the food that we're going to be eating, who are driving the trucks, cleaning the hospitals. And I hope we can treat everybody equally as human beings during this period, put prejudice aside so that people don't perish, and make sure hat everybody gets the assistance they need economically. BERMAN: Look, if there is one thing we've learned is everyone can get

this, everyone can pass it on. So you have a self-interest in making sure everyone stays well and everyone stays healthy. We heard from the mayor of New York City that there is an alarming need for medical equipment. He needs millions of gloves, millions of masks, millions of gowns he says by April, or there will be an acute shortage. What are you seeing on this front?

GARCETTI: It's breathtaking. Whether it is testing equipment, swabs, can't get swabs to even do the tests as we increase our lab capacities. Here in Los Angeles we have a huge apparel manufacturing sector, so we're reaching out to them to see what they can manufacturer. We should never let our country be so woefully unprepared in our lifetimes.

And I hope that this new generation that is growing up with this, like my daughter who is eight, I'm referring to them as Generation C, I know some people call them Generation Z, but the ones we're explaining this to, I hope they can be the ones who make sure we never ever get it a place where we're days away from the most basic things for hospitals and medical personnel to save lives.

BERMAN: Mayor Eric Garcetti, we appreciate you waking up this morning. We appreciate the clear description of these measures so that people know what to expect for the next maybe month, maybe two months, maybe longer. Good luck, sir.

GARCETTI: Thank you and God bless you guys.

CAMEROTA: John, I've already heard people referring to that generation that he was just talking about, his daughter, as Coronials because this will be a defining moment of their youth.

BERMAN: I've told my kids to write down everything that they're experiencing, because 50 years from now people are going to ask them, what was it like to live through this? This is a moment.

CAMEROTA: Now to the economy. Unemployment claims are soaring because of coronavirus. The weekly jobless claims are, of course, a huge harbinger for the whole U.S. economy. CNN's chief business correspondent Christine Romans joins us with more. Christine, I have been so struck by the lightning speed with which we have gone from record-setting low unemployment to where we are today. Where are we today?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: It's just remarkable. The story really is entering a new phase. This is not just a stock market crash. This is now a job market crash. The last few days have been stunning. Alisyn, I've never seen so many layoffs so quickly. For the first time we're seeing it in the numbers.

The most unemployment claims last week since September, 2017, and Goldman Sachs looking at the numbers state by state, predicts 2.25 million Americans filed for unemployment this week. That would be the most in history. The numbers in California alone are already up 33 percent. The first

wave of layoffs is in leisure and hospitality. One survey finds, get this, 14 million jobs there are threatened right now because of mandatory closures across the country. The tip of the sphere is small business. More than half of small business owners say they won't last three months like this.

[08:10:02]

There is real alarm among economists who are trying to forecast how deep the recession will be. There is no playbook for deliberately shutting down and then rebooting an economy. Millions of Americans already live paycheck to paycheck, they have zero margin to support their families. I think, you guys, you can expect pressure on more states and the banks to press the pause button on Americans' bills because the government has pressed the pause button on the overall economy. John and Alisyn?

BERMAN: Look, we need to get through the day, we need to get through the week. But we have to have a discussion, I think fairly soon, Romans, about how the entire economy is going to be reshaped out of this. It is going to be different.

ROMANS: It will. And it reveals, I think, that it wasn't exactly the strong economy that we thought it was, that so many millions of people can be literally one month away from financial ruin.

CAMEROTA: That has been an eye-opener. Christine, thank you very much.

New York City's mayor says hospitals will run out of supplies in just a matter of weeks. So we'll talk to a doctor on the front lines, what they need, what they're getting next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: OK, we want to bring in Dr. Sanjay Gupta, because we rely on him every morning for all of the developments. And this morning, Sanjay, some of the developments are that California has taken the most strong measure in the country, which is to basically issue a stay at home order for 40 million people.

[08:15:02]

There are exceptions. People can leave for food and for medicine, et cetera. But we're told that this is because the governor saw that in the next two weeks, 25 million people in California could become infected.

I assume if the stay at home order is not followed. It is not with the stay at home order or that would make no sense. What are you understanding?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, exactly, Alisyn. I mean, the goal is to try and not have the numbers get to that point.

And this is one of those things that a lot of people have been paying attention to, a way of calculating exponential growth. And people are going to look this up and they're going to start calculating these numbers.

But I've been looking at these all along and basically what it means is you take how many patients have been infected and then you figure out how quickly are those numbers doubling. And when you figure that out, you can start to say, look, when you -- when you say, let's say every week it doubles, in California, then at the end of eight weeks, you have about a quarter a million patients who'd be infected.

But if it doubles twice a week, for example, then the numbers go into the tens of millions which is why Governor Newsom, I think, he's by looking at the same numbers and arriving at that 25 million number.

We don't really know just how quickly this doubling ratio is right now, how often people are doubling their number of infections, because we haven't been testing enough. But we're going to get a better sense on that. It brings up an important point, this UW professor put this on Twitter, if we can show this graphic of this ship.

We keep focusing on a number of cases on any given day, but the idea that it starts to -- hard to see there, that ship is going towards a narrow area, when you think about the number of cases, you also got to think about the inertia, how quickly are the cases actually increasing. Not just the number on any given day, so you -- what you're trying to do by the social distancing mechanisms is essentially take away some of the fuel that is getting that ship inertia.

So, it's not just bringing the cases down, also taking away the inertia of how quickly those cases are doubling. It's complicated. And, you know, I hope people will start to grasp this concept over time, but there's many different factors that go into these social distancing measures, but to answer your question, Alisyn, I think it's very important, has to be very strict and early if it's going to work at all.

BERMAN: And I would not be at all surprised to see more places in the country doing it, using something of the same language. Look, they're not going to lock the doors on your house. But this is basically just the just do it, damn it order from the governor, correct?

GUPTA: Yes. Look, John, you know, people know what to do. I think at this point. I think people fundamentally get it, right? I mean, you got a virus, it is transmitting. You're trying to keep it from transmitting person to person. That's it.

How do you do that? You separate yourself. That's what you have to do.

You can read the language and parse the language and say, well, actually, I can go out at this point and I'm allowed to do X, Y and Z, fine. Read it however you want. This is happening and there are some strategies in place that we know can be effective. I'll show you really quickly, people have seen the 1918 sort of

example looking at what happened in Philadelphia, versus St. Louis. One of those two cities practiced social distancing. You can probably guess which one. It was St. Louis. Philadelphia had a big fair around that time and the numbers just skyrocketed.

My point is, this isn't conjecture or hypothetical in terms of the recommendations being made. There's evidence they work. But they got to be abided by. You know, people everyone is on it together and they've got to be consistent, they've got to be honest and they have got to be diligent about this and we have to do it now, because the longer you wait, the less impact it has.

CAMEROTA: Sanjay, President Trump said something yesterday that was not true, he said it more than once. He said that basically there is a treatment available now. The FDA has approved a new drug that can really ameliorate symptoms. No, they haven't.

GUPTA: Right. I mean, so this drug called chloroquine is an existing medication. It's been around for 86 years to treat malaria, a parasitic infection.

There has been some -- it is approved already. It is an approved drug, sometimes doctors will use things for off label sure for a different condition. But it isn't an approved drug, you're right.

The thing we don't know, Alisyn, is --

CAMEROTA: But is it approved for this? I mean, that's the point, is give us --

GUPTA: It's not approved for this. Yes, it's not approved for this.

CAMEROTA: And that's the different. So, in other words, can patients start taking it right now as he suggested?

GUPTA: No. Not unless they're part of a trial for this particular reason. I mean, there are patients who, again, take it for other reasons already. There's a derivative used for certain autoimmune diseases. But it's not approved for coronavirus.

People are engaging in trials, going to be some 10,000 person trials that are going to start taking place. But that's the way you get it specifically for coronavirus.

He also said it is a -- it is a game changer.

[08:20:02]

We don't know that. I mean, this hasn't been trialed. Only evidence it could have some benefit really was in the lab.

Very early evidence out of China, but nothing you can really extrapolate from. You know, I asked Dr. Fauci about this at the town hall last night. Listen to what he said.

(BEGN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: We're getting more and more information that someone can transmit even when they're asymptomatic. So in order to protect one's self, society and particularly the vulnerable people, we really have got to adhere to the physical separation.

You know them well now, avoiding crowds, stay out of bars, stay out of restaurants, stay out of places where there is a congregation of people and particularly individuals who are elderly or individuals who have an underlying condition should essentially self-isolate themselves for the time being in order to shield themselves from what might be an innocent, unintended, inadvertent transmission of infection to them. That's the message I would really like to get out, particularly to the younger people who may not take it seriously.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GUPTA: Very important message from Dr. Fauci. He also talked about -- there was a different area where he talked specifically about this medication chloroquine and basically said, look, it's early days. This is -- we don't -- we can't call it a game changer or anything yet. Its not a magic cure, I think was his exact language. We have to trial it.

And that's going to be an answer you hear often when it comes to the new therapeutics and potential vaccines.

CAMEROTA: But just theoretically, how long would that take?

GUPTA: Well, you know, a vaccine would be more in the year frame. But a therapeutic, several months. I mean, it's not something -- you know, you still got to trial it, we know this is a safe drug pretty much because it is used in many places around the world with low side effect profile. But you still got to prove it works, and then you got to prove it works compared to what else is out there.

BERMAN: Sanjay, we're going to let you go, but we're going to demand you come back at the end of the show to answer more viewer questions.

GUPTA: You got it.

BERMAN: So, we'll see you in a little bit.

In the meantime, we want to bring in Dr. Megan Ranney. She's an emergency room physician in Rhode Island.

Doctor, thank you very much for being with us. We continue to hear the pleas for supplies from those on the front lines -- masks, gloves, gowns, not to mention the ventilators.

What are you seeing this morning?

DR. MEGAN RANNEY, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN, LIFESPAN/BROWN UNIVERSITY: Yes, so we absolutely feel like we are in this alone as doctors, nurses, paramedics and even hospitals. As you said, we need equipment, we need masks. We need gloves. We need

testing kits and ventilators.

But we also need organization, right? Trump said yesterday that he's ramping up production and we're thrilled by that. But as individual hospitals or even individual states, we can't procure that ourselves. That would be like saying you're sending your troop to war and that you're letting them get their own body armor and helmets. We need the federal government to stand up a response to distribute this appropriately.

My own hospital is taking donations from individuals across the country, to help protect my colleagues and my patients. But we shouldn't be looking at hospitals to do this. Hospitals should be taking care of their patients, right? We absolutely need a better response because right now we're desperate.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Ranney, what should people do if they feel sick? I hear from people all the time who are confused, are they supposed to go to their emergency room if they feel symptoms? Are they not supposed to?

RANNEY: Yes. So there are three things that average Americans can do to help out, so the first is Dr. Gupta and others have already talked about is to please stay home. Social distance, stay connected to people, but stay home.

The second is, don't hoard things. If you have supplies at home, feel free to donate them to local clinics or hospitals. We need them and we can use them to protect you.

But the third thing that you allude to is, if you are feeling sick, please don't just show up at your doctor's office or at my E.R. When you come in, you're putting yourself at risk because you're around other sick patients, but you're also putting staff and other patients at risk.

Call the doctor first, use telehealth, because we don't have testing, there is not much we can do for most patients right now. So, we're trusting you to stay home, monitor yourself, a lot of us are trying to roll out new programs. It has been so inspiring to see tech companies across the country rolling out self-monitoring programs.

But right now we need you to stay home, call your doctor, call telehealth first, don't just show up unless you're feeling really, really sick, because there's just not much that we can do right now.

BERMAN: You are in the situation now where you're helping each other. I hear from you and other doctors, there is this network of sort of we got to do this ourselves at this point.

RANNEY: Yes. It has been so inspiring. Even with all of the stress and anxiety that I and my colleagues are under, we have seen this dynamic growth of support.

[08:20:01] Over the last couple of days we created a website, get me ppe.org which people can go and sign, listing things that will help us. We have Facebook groups where people are exchanging ideas, we have a phone call just recently with colleagues from Seattle who are already dealing with overwhelming number of patients.

We're seeing stuff like my med students who have volunteered to help out healthcare providers by providing child care. There is this national network of people that are stepping up to try to help, but, again, we're the ones on the front lines, shouldn't be on us, we really need the national government to step up and provide direction and coordination.

CAMEROTA: We hear you, Dr. Ranney, we hear you. Thank you very much for all that you're doing.

RANNEY: Thank you. My pleasure.

(CROSSTALK)

RANNEY: I'm off to the E.R. this afternoon. Thank you for covering us.

BERMAN: Sorry. I lost her --

CAMEROTA: She is off to the E.R. this afternoon. So we really appreciate her and I'm sure she'll give us an update of what's happening.

BERMAN: Well, excellent, again, can't thank her enough for the work she's doing.

Governors have been pressing President Trump about shortages of the medical supplies, just Dr. Ranney has been saying. But the governors in the states have been told, you know what, in some cases they have to figure it out themselves. More on that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)