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Seattle Public Schools Superintendent, Denise Juneau, Discusses School Closures & Remote Learning; NY Governor Cuomo Gives Update on Coronavirus Response; CNN's Chris Cuomo Diagnosed with Coronavirus. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired March 31, 2020 - 11:30   ET

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


[11:30:00]

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Take a look at your map right now. Schools are closed through every single state, including some that are shut down until further notice.

In Washington State, where there are nearly 5,000 coronavirus cases and nearly 200 deaths so far, schools have been closed since mid-March and will stay that way until at least April 24th.

Joining me is the superintendent of Seattle schools.

Denise, thank you for being with me, number one. I know it's a terribly stressful time for you.

Yesterday was the first day of mandated remote learning for your district. How is it going?

DENISE JUNEAU, SUPERINTENDENT, SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: You know, I think this closure across the country right now is really shining a light on the inequities in our system and the value of public education to our economy and to parents at home.

For the first time ever, we are actually relying on parents as co- educators at home, so it will be a little rocky at first as we roll these things out.

The other thing that's important to know is I think superintendents across this country are really dealing with, how are we going to approach this challenge and start working and looking toward the future about how do we make sure there's access for all considering technology going forward.

KING: On the technology point, you think of Seattle as one of America's tech hubs, one ahead of the curve.

Still, you talk about education disparity. What are you doing for families who might not be able to afford a computer or might only have one at home and parents are working from home, so you have this competing stress, if you will?

JUNEAU: Right. We're currently working with the tech industry in our city to see if there's a way to actually fill that divide. In the meantime, since we're not moving totally to online because of that access issue, we are providing paper and pencil packets across the city. We rolled out 7300 of those yesterday.

We are working with our educators in the system and videotaping them and sending them out on our broadcast channels. We have broadcast partners who are helping us to reach families who may not have Internet or computers but have TVs at home as well.

It's a multipronged approach to make sure we're reaching as many families and students as possible.

KING: How about the special needs community? And that can be such a broad definition. Children with different special needs across the spectrum. How do you deal with that in this incredibly difficult environment?

JUNEAU: We're trying to make sure we're working with our teachers. The usual process is that a general education teacher teams up with a special education teacher.

So we want to make sure those connections stay tight as they're approaching individual students across our system, particularly if there are accessibility needs at the other end in their homes. So we want to make sure that we are doing the work that's required for special education.

We know that we need to do a great job with our students who are experiencing homelessness, our students of color for education injustice. We just want to make sure we are looking to support all students no matter where they are, their economics. And it's a big struggle right now.

KING: As you know, this is your job. You understand it better than me. I have a third grader who is on his second day right now of remote learning. So far so good for him. He's into it. And the teachers are a blessing.

To all of you who are doing this across country, it won't be perfect, but the effort is amazing so far, per my experience here.

How are you dealing with the issue -- you know this better than I -- that some kids are independent. They learn independent. A teacher gives them a lesson and off they go. Other kids need the friends in the classroom to help them out or the teacher's attention to help them out. You have a very diverse set of students.

How can you tailor this remote learning, whether it's reaching out to their parents or it's the teacher reaching out to those kids who might need a bit more attention? How do you get through all that?

JUNEAU: I think it's important to realize teachers also have their own families they may have at home right now, so balancing all those needs as well as reaching out to the students in the classroom, we're asking a lot of our educators across the country right now.

So we are not only doing, you know, computer-based online reach outs, we are looking at different platforms. We have teachers who are calling students. If there are severe special needs happening in the home, we have educators reaching our, maybe in person, standing on the patio trying to visit with their students.

There are all different kinds of ways that educators are reaching out, but I think it's also important to remember they are dealing with their own family structure, teaching their students as well as trying to teach their kids at home, too.

KING: It's a very critical point.

Denise Juneau, thank you so much for your time and perspective. We'll learn a lot from this. You'll learn a lot from this challenge.

JUNEAU: Yes.

KING: I hope in time you can come back and tell us about those lessons learned --

JUNEAU: Yes. Thank you.

KING: -- as you address this challenge. And to and all the teachers trying to deal with this, just bless you, trying to get through this challenge.

Now we're going to the governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, having his daily briefing in Albany.

[11:35:02]

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): We're all in search of the apex and the other side of the mountain, but we are still headed up the mountain.

Number of people tested last night was a near record amount. We tested over 18,000 people. Near record amount. We tested over 18,000 people. We're testing more people than any state in the country, and I'm very proud of that. More per capita than China and South Korea.

Total number of people tested, 200,000. Population of 19 million. It's not going to give you a random sample, but it's been helping us track down the positive cases.

Number of positive cases, 9,298. Total cases, 75,000 cases. You see the predominance in New York City, then Westchester, then Nassau and Suffolk, then Rockland. It spreads out from that area of density.

The march of coronavirus across the state of New York continues. We're down to just two counties that don't have a case.

The overall numbers, 75,000 have tested positive, 10,000 people in our hospitals, 2,700 ICU patients.

Good news, 4,900, almost 5,000 people discharged. That's up 771. So people come in, they get treated, they go home.

New York is at 75,000 cases. Next state is 16,000. California is at 7,000. You can see New York is a magnitude of difference more than any other state. 1,550 deaths. That's up from 1,218 yesterday.

Again, we're studying the charts. We're trying to study the data, follow the data. The data is uneven. It bounces, numbers often bounce, and any model, there are variables in this model. The hospitals are reporting it. So what every hospital reported that day, were they busy, are they combining a couple of days in one? It's an imperfect reporting mechanism.

But you see the basic line is still up. What the statisticians will tell you, you basically draw a straight line that the columns indicate. You see we're still going up, which is what we see on the overall trajectory, that we're still going up.

Number of intubations are going down. Not much but it was down. That's a good sign.

You also see the number of discharges going up, and that's consistent. The longer people are in, they either get treated and leave or they get put on a ventilator. And the longer you're on a ventilator, the less likelihood you will come off the ventilator. That is the blunt truth of this situation.

We have two missions overall that we are pursuing. One is the frontline of this battle is our hospital system. That's what this is going to come down to.

The second is social responsibility. Stay at home. Don't get infected in the first place. Don't get infected in the first place because it goes back to you're creating a burden on our health care system that our health care system cannot handle. We're talking about exceeding the capacity of our hospital system by some estimates two times.

So what does this come down to besides all the other issues? It comes down to not overwhelming the hospital system because those people who need acute care may not be able to get the acute care. So it's all about the hospital system. That is the front line.

What we're doing is we are following the mathematical projections of the experts. We're speaking to all the health care professionals, all the health care providers, world health organization, national institute of health, Dr. Fauci, CDC, the whole alphabet soup of experts.

And the mathematicians who then have different models. We talk to about five different models, and we compare the models and we try to find the median through the models. That's how we plan everything. Follow the data, follow the science.

People ask me, what do you think, what do you think? I don't think about this. What do I know? I'm not an expert. I'm not opining. I talk to experts and I follow people who know.

[11:40:10]

But for the hospitals, procure equipment, identify the beds, support the staff. That's what it's been all about. Of those priorities, number one is support the staff. They are the front line and they need relief. They are physically exhausted, even more they are emotionally exhausted.

This is unlike other disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods. They happen, they're fast, they're over. You start rebuilding. This is different. This is ongoing. And the duration itself is debilitating and exhausting and depressing.

I'm speaking to health care professionals who say, look, more than physically tired, I'm just emotionally tired. Seeing the pain, seeing the death that they're dealing with every day.

In general, I am tired of being behind this virus. We've been behind this virus from day one.

The virus was in China, we knew it was in China. Unless we assumed there was some immune system variation with Asian people, it was coming here. And we have been behind it from day one since it got here. And we've been playing catch-up. You don't win playing catch-up. We have to get ahead of it.

The second rule is never underestimate your opponent. And we underestimated this virus. It's more powerful, it's more dangerous than we expected.

And the third point is plan forward. Get ahead of it. Get ahead of it. Fight the fight today, yes, but anticipate the next battle and plan for the next battle.

And the main battle is at the apex. We're still going up the mountain. The main battle is on the top of the mountain. That's where the main battle is going to be. The apex of the curve. Then we come down the other side of the mountain.

We are planning now for the battle at the top of the mountain. That's what we are doing. Get a staffing plan ready now for the battle at the top of the mountain.

Equipment stockpile now. We're gathering equipment that we don't need today because today is not the day of the battle. The battle is when we hit the apex, depending on who you believe, 14 days to 30 days from today.

And also we need a social acceptance of the time expectation. We're all anxious. We're all tired. We're all fatigued. It's been all bad news for a long time. Our whole lifestyle has been disrupted. Everybody wants to know one thing: When is it over? Nobody knows.

Well, the president said by Easter. This one said by this. Nobody knows. You can have a hypothesis, you can have a projection, you can have an opinion, but nobody knows.

But I can say this. It is not going to be soon. If our apex is 14 to 21 days, that's our apex. You, then, have to come down the other side of the mountain once you hit the apex. So calibrate yourself and your expectations so you're not disappointed every morning you get up. Yesterday, we met with the entire state hospital system. Dr. Zucker

and our team. First time they were all in one place. The first thing I said to Dr. Zucker, we're dealing with a war, a war we've never dealt with before. We need a mindset and organizational transformation. We can't do business the way we've done business. We need flexibility, communication and speed.

That's what we talked through yesterday and we have to do it now.

The health care system is one of those balkanized system. It's like our state education system, it's like our criminal justice system. It's in place, it's fragmented. They have their own identities, their own associations. It's regionally organized.

That all has to change. We don't have the ability to meet the capacity of our health care system as an entirety. That assumes the health care system is working as an entirety. That's not how the health care system is organized now.

[11:45:06]

We have New York City hospitals, and then we have Long Island hospitals, and then we have Westchester hospitals, then we have upstate hospitals. That has to go.

Even in New York City, you have two basic hospital systems in New York City. You have the private hospitals, voluntary hospitals, about 160 of them, which are some of the finest health care institutions in the United States of America, you know. This is Mt. Sinai, Columbia Presbyterian, et cetera.

Some of their members are also upstate, but they're the large private institutions, Greater New York Hospital Association. Ken Raske runs that association of 160.

You then, in the state of New York, have the public hospitals, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. They are 11 public hospitals. They are a universe. And then you have the private hospitals as a separate universe.

The 11 public hospitals are the hospitals that, in many ways, have always been under greater stress and greater need. We have to get those two systems, the private system and the public system, in New York City working together in a way they never did before.

The distinction of private/public, that has to go out the window. We are one health care system.

On top of that, it can't be the downstate hospitals and the upstate hospitals and the Long Island hospitals. When we talk about capacity of beds, when I say we now have 75,000 beds, that's a statewide number. That means those beds have to be available to the people in New York City or Nassau even if those beds are up in Albany.

So combining that whole system, and you're no longer just the western New York hospitals or the central New York hospitals. It's one coordinated system. It's much easier said than done, but we have to do it.

On top of that, you have to overlay the new federal beds that came in that are an entirely new component. We have Javits Center, 2500 beds, we have the "USNS Comfort," 1,000 beds. We're planning other federal facilities. These all have to be coordinated on top of the existing hospital network. So you see the organizational situation that we're dealing with.

And let's be honest, and let's learn from the past. We know where we have to focus. We know where we're going to have problems in the next hospitals. Because the hospitals that have the least capacity that have already been stressed are the hospitals that are not going to be able to handle the additional load. That is a fact.

You know which hospitals were struggling. We do reports all the time about the financial capacity of hospitals and what hospitals are in stronger versus weaker position.

The hospitals that are in the weaker position are the hospitals that are going to suffer when they then carry that added burden. That was Elmhurst Hospital. It happened to be a public hospital. It happened to be a public hospital in a place of density, it happened to get overwhelmed. And that's what -- then you saw the burden on the staff, you saw the emotion, you saw the stress. That can't happen.

And that's what we talked about yesterday. And people said, well, Elmhurst isn't my responsibility. Elmhurst is a public hospital. The city runs it. I don't run it. It's New York City. It's not a private hospital.

I don't care which link breaks in the chain. The chain is still broken. It doesn't matter which hospital, which link. Any link breaks, the chain breaks. The health care system is a chain. It breaks anywhere, it breaks everywhere. That has to be our mentality.

[11:49:52]

We laid out a full plan on how to do facility development, how to move people among hospitals so nobody gets overloaded, shifting patients, shifting staff, shifting supplies. None of us have enough supplies. OK, then let's pool our supplies and let's put them out, our supplies, and let's put them out to the people who need them. Let's share those masks. We talked about that yesterday.

We also talked again at length about ventilators, which everybody knows it is a key piece of equipment. Identify all the ventilator in the state, who has them and who ordered orders them and who expects it to come in, and we'll have one stockpile of ventilators that we can distribute for everyone who needs them.

We talked about splitting of ventilators. Because that's a technology that does exist. It has been used before. It is not ideal. You take one ventilator and it is used to two patients.

The federal government is a partner in this, obviously. I spoke to the president again yesterday about this situation and I spoke to the vice president and I spoke to Jared Kushner. The White House has been very helpful.

We have to get the federal agencies on the ground to understand how this operates, especially FEMA. We have to be coordinated and people have to know what they are doing. This is no time for anyone to be learning on the job and we'll be working through that today.

PPE, same thing, we want to know what everybody has. One stockpile we'll distribute fairly.

Testings? When does this end? This ends when we get a fast track test, at-home-test, 15-minute test and people can find out when they can go back to work because they are negative. We are working on additional testing. As I have said the Department of Health has a new test. But that's when this ends.

We are working on new medications. We are leading the country. We have saliva testing now and we are working on the antibody testing and plasma testing right now. We are putting together a coordinated team. It is going to be led by the Department of Health. New York City is on it and Long Island is on it.

If the federal government is going to participate, they have to be a part of this team. We have to know what we are doing. I don't want FEMA coming in and blowing the coordination of what everyone is trying to do.

The coordinating team is going to organize upstate/down state transfers, set patient loads for hospitals, right? So if one hospital gets stuck with overload capacity, let's call it, those hospitals start to send patient to other hospitals before they get up to their max.

Within the New York City public hospital systems, within the Greater New York private system, and then among the difference system, two different mentalities but we have to do it.

We said two missions. One was hospital and second was individual responsibilities. Individual responsibility is about discipline and selflessness and be informed.

The point is to stay at home. The point is to stay at home. I know it is hard to stay at home. I know everyone thinks, you know, I can go out and I can be smart and I won't get infected because it is me, I am a superhero, it is not going to be me. That's not true.

And, it is not just about you. It is not just about your health and your life that you are playing with here. You can infect other people.

So I have been trying to communicate this in many different ways for many days. We still see people coming out who don't need to be out. Even for essential workers, people have to be careful. I have been trying to communicate that.

Everyone, everyone is subjected to this virus. It is the great equalizer. I don't care how smart or how rich or how powerful you think you are. I don't care how young or how old. This virus is a great equalizer.

[11:55:10]

My brother, Chris, is positive for coronavirus. Found out this morning. Now he is going to be fine. He's young, he's in good shape, he's strong. Not as strong as he thinks. He'll be fine.

But, there's a lesson in this. He's an essential worker, a member of the press, so he has been out there. You go out there, the chance that you get infected is very high.

I spoke to him this morning. And he's going to be quarantined in his basement at home. He's just worried about his daughter and his kids that he hopes he did not get them infected.

You don't really know Chris. You see him. He has a show at night, 9:00, on CNN. You just see one dimension. You just see a person in his job. In his job, he's combative and argumentative and he's pushing people. That's his job. That's really not who he is. He's a really sweet and beautiful guy. And, he's my best friend. My father was always working so it was always just me and Chris.

He's a lawyer also, Chris. He's a lawyer because growing up the decision point came to what he wanted to do after college and my father was a very strong personality. My father basically suggested forcefully to Chris that he should be a lawyer. It was as different time and different place.

Now my daughters are here, they're following their individual star. this is their destiny. If he said to my father, I want to follow my individual star. He would say, you can follow your individual star right out that door. So Chris went to law school but he never had a desire to practice law.

He calls me when he was about 26. He's at a law firm. He said, I don't want to be a lawyer. I said, yes, but you are a lawyer now. He said, I don't want to be a lawyer. I said, what do you want to be? He said, I want to be a journalist. I said, you want to be a journalist. Too late, you are a lawyer, you have to pay law school bills. You didn't go to journalism school. Too late. Too late. No, no, I think I can do it.

God bless him, he quit the law firm. He went to work for FOX TV, which is a separate conversation in the house. And, worked his way up. He's at CNN and does a beautiful job.

But a sweet guy. And now he's quarantined inside the basement. But he's funny as hell. He says even the dogs won't to come downstairs. But, he's concerned about his wife and kids.

But the reason I raise this is he's smart, he's social distancing and, yes, but you wind up exposing yourself. People wind up exposing you and they find out they're positive a couple of days later.

I had a situation with Christopher two weeks ago that I even mentioned that my mother was at his house. I said that is a mistake. My mother is in a different situation. She's older and she's healthy.

But I said you can't have mom at the house. He said, no, mom is lonely and she does not want to be in the house. I feel bad. She's cooped up in the apartment.

I said, yes, I feel bad she's cooped up in the apartment, too, but you bring her to your house, you expose her to a lot of things. You have the kids there and wife there and you are coming and going and your wife is coming and going. And, you can expose mom to the virus. And, the love is -- sometimes needs to be a little smarter than just reactive.

We had a whole discussion. In truth -- and he's informed and I am informed. Was it dangerous or was it not dangerous? So I went back to Dr. Zucker and said, we have to tell people, what are the rules. How does this work?

[11:59:58]

That's when I came up with Matilda's Law. I said I named it for my mother. And it was clear about people who are older and what they are exposed to.

My brother still had my mother still at his house out of love and comfort.