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Almost 17 Million File For Unemployment Claims In Past Three Weeks; Cities Struggle To Cope With COVID-19 Victims; COVID-19's Impact On Some Easter Traditions. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired April 10, 2020 - 05:30   ET

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


[05:30:00]

ROBYN CURNOW, CNN ANCHOR: It is 5:30 a.m. Friday morning here in the United States.

So, the U.S. Federal Reserve is releasing an additional $2.3 trillion in loans in its bid to prop up the U.S. economy. It follows another staggering week of job losses.

The Labor Department reports that 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment just last week. That brings the total number of claims in the past three weeks to almost 17 million. Many workers now need government money to help pay their bills.

The U.S. Labor secretary addressed the concerns about a delay in those payments. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EUGENE SCALIA, U.S. LABOR SECRETARY: How long it takes will vary by states. Some systems -- some state's systems will take longer but we at the department will continue to support them.

We have already dispersed half a billion dollars to states to help them with their systems in making these payments. We have another half a billion dollars that we're ready to release.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CURNOW: So despite the government's pledge to help many Americans, they're already suffering. So, Vanessa Yurkevich has some of their stories -- Vanessa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): For the millions of Americans applying for unemployment this probably sounds familiar.

JACORY WRIGHT, ELEVATOR DISPATCHER: You have to hang up and call back, hang up and call back, hang up and call back.

ED CHAN, GIG WORKER: It was tough, you know. The system does crash. YURKEVICH (voice-over): Right now, millions of Americans, no matter their age, sex or race, are confronting a chilling but shared reality -- unemployment offices around the country ill-equipped to deal with the sheer volume, phone lines jammed, sites crashing, and lines of Americans in Miami waiting for paper unemployment applications.

WRIGHT: I already can't swim and I literally feel like I'm drowning.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Jacory Wright lives in Dallas, furloughed from a job he loves on Tuesday. It was the most he's ever made, 18.00 an hour, but Wright still lives paycheck-to-paycheck and now without health insurance.

WRIGHT: My insurance is gone and I'm HIV positive. So now I have to go through the process of being able to get my medicine paid for again. And it doesn't just take people out of a financial comfort zone temporarily; it literally does a domino effect to certain people.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): It was a domino effect for Stephanie Bonin, too, who has owned Duo restaurant in Colorado for 15 years.

STEPHANIE BONIN, OWNER, DUO RESTAURANT, COLORADO: In order to be able to reopen down the road, we had to make the hard decision to lay our entire staff off.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): That's 20 people, including herself, without jobs now applying for unemployment.

BONIN: We are creating an entirely new population of -- a new population of people who are not used to being in the social services program. It's a change of identity for I think many, many people in the United States right now.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Ed Chan, from Queens, New York, is a gig worker stringing together four jobs to make $40,000 a year.

CHAN: I think it might take me at least another year to rebuild my life -- my portfolio of work right now, so it kind of sucks. I mean, it's a stressful thing to think about but that's what keeps you up at night.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): If March's unemployment numbers are a sign, April will bring more sleepless nights. Last month, jobs in the restaurant industry fell over 400,000, and the unemployment rate for black workers shot up to 6.7 percent.

WRIGHT: If you don't have a job at the moment, if you don't have insurance at the moment, if you didn't save up, if you don't have wealthy parents, you are shut off at the moment. Your life is on hiatus.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Vanessa Yurkevich, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CURNOW: A powerful piece there. Let's go straight to New York. Christine Romans is standing by.

Vanessa really laid it out, didn't she? Lots of sleepless nights. Tough times for people without jobs and it's certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT, ANCHOR, EARLY START: I really will because so many of these states haven't been able to even process all the jobless claims, right?

New York State, in just a few hours, is going to reopen its jobless claims system and it has revamped it with the help of Google so that it's going to be a little easier. We think about 200,000 people haven't been able to really get through.

So the states are working on trying to process this. You heard from the Labor secretary that there's money being given to the states so that they could hire back workers -- they can hire tech -- upgrade their tech and just to process all of this so that there is a safety net for all these millions, Robyn, who have lost their jobs.

CURNOW: So, I mean, I know we've been talking about it on the show and there's sort of a glimmer of hope coming from Anthony Fauci saying hey, maybe -- maybe you can get a summer vacation. That's for folks in the northern hemisphere. But, you know, if you look towards when the economy can reopen -- you know, how soon are people looking at it and getting people back to work?

ROMANS: You know, it's so interesting because even just the conversation about this is just fraught with --

[05:35:02]

CURNOW: Yes.

ROMANS: You know, you've got to be really careful here because confidence is so key. What if -- what if we reopen too quickly with a bang, as the president says, and you've got people in big gatherings again, you've got people going to work, and we don't have a testing regime for antibodies and all of this, and you have a flare-up again? That could really, really permanently damage confidence in the American economy.

What we hope this is, is we hope this job loss is temporary as we battle the pandemic and then we slowly get back to a new normal, which may not be planes filled and middle seats filled. Some airlines are saying they're not going to book the middle seat for the time being so that there's more space between people on airplanes.

I mean, are you really, right away, going to --

CURNOW: Some silver linings.

ROMANS: -- be rushing back to a big concert -- I'm not sure -- but you don't want to hurt the confidence of the economy. So I would say most economists say you've got to do this very carefully. You have to have testing, you have to have treatment, you have to have a vaccine in the works. And you have to have a way to track and trace people and quarantines where necessary to keep the public healthy or you'll really hurt the economy long-term.

CURNOW: Yes, but already those mistakes have been made. So, you know, you're asking about whether that can work on the second wave and now there's a big question about that as well if it happens.

Christine Romans, always good to speak to you. Have a great Easter with your family as well. Thanks a lot.

So, with the number of COVID-19 deaths increasing in the U.S., some cities are struggling to cope with the bodies of the victims.

CNN's Omar Jimenez takes us to Chicago for a look at what the city has to do in these unprecedented times.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was once a grim precaution; now, an unimaginable reality. An entire refrigerated warehouse in Chicago with a capacity in the thousands dedicated solely to dealing with the surge in deaths amid the coronavirus pandemic, transitioning from once holding simple cargo to what will soon be the remains of those tied to the deadly virus.

JIMENEZ (on camera): These racks are literally made to hold bodies. One would go up here, a second in the middle, a third down below. And they're all numbered -- four, five, and the numbers continue to go up. The county says they're numbers, they hope, won't go up, but numbers they are prepared to handle.

DR. PONNI ARUNKUMAR, CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER, COOK COUNTY: Just in two weeks, we started with 10 or 20 a week. Now we're at 40 a day.

JIMENEZ (on camera): How urgent is the work that you all are doing right now?

ARUNKUMAR: This increase is occurring at a very rapid pace so we expect to see hospitals -- hospital morgues getting filled up. And we'll need to use refrigerated trailers to start moving these patients to the surge centers soon.

JIMENEZ (voice-over): Across the Chicago area and Illinois as a whole, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths has continued to rise daily, going from a single death on March 17th to a death toll now in the hundreds for the state just weeks later.

BILL BARNES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COOK COUNTY EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT: It was anticipating its needs and the needs of the system that we're creating, and additional storage space was a clear need.

JIMENEZ (voice-over): Bill Barnes is the executive director of Cook County's Department of Emergency Management and says the plan for a place like this surge center, as it's being called, were in the works long before getting to this point.

BARNES: I would say we began looking for a surge facility such as this well over a month ago. We had some -- an eye on some percentages and if we are even looking at two percent fatality rate, that would create some very large numbers in this county of 5.5 million people, so we knew we had to jump on it fast.

JIMENEZ (voice-over): Traditional warehouse workers have now been substituted for doctors in scrubs and masks in a place where temperatures don't rise above 40 degrees Fahrenheit and go as low as five. And it's a place officials hoped would never get used.

ARUNKUMAR: We need to be prepared for any eventuality. We're the last physicians who see these patients and we want to treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve.

JIMENEZ (voice-over): And it's a push to be ready for a new phase in the pandemic for Chicago's Cook County.

Omar Jimenez, CNN, Chicago.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CURNOW: So, Easter observances started at the Vatican on Holy Thursday but many traditions are being postponed or just left out altogether because of this pandemic. Coming up next, how Christians are having to change the way they celebrate Holy Week. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:42:32]

CURNOW: If there was ever a symbol of resilience and rebirth it is this. These are pictures just coming into CNN from Paris. The Archbishop of Paris has been celebrating this exceptional Good Friday ceremony inside. Yes, this is the very bruised inside of the Notre Dame Cathedral -- beautiful.

So in a few hours, Pope Francis will be leading millions in prayer as Christians around the world observe Good Friday. For a lot of them, going to church will not be an option -- and it shouldn't be an option because of the pandemic.

Concerns about the coronavirus also why the traditional washing of the feet on Holy Thursday didn't happen at the Vatican. The practice is something they believe Jesus did before he was crucified.

Meanwhile in the U.K., Anglican services have also had to adapt this Easter. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams joins me now live from Cambridge in the U.K. He's also the master of Magdalene College in Cambridge.

And I thank you for joining us because Easter is just so different this year. So many Christians around the world are grieving or scared or under lockdown. So how are you celebrating? ROWAN WILLIAMS, FORMER ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, MASTER, MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE (via Skype): It's been quite a steep learning curve, to be honest, Robyn. We've all had to learn how to operate digital platforms in a new way and create communities online in a new way. And I have to say it hasn't all been a loss.

My sense, having taken part in some of these digital connections is that there's a real intimacy to them, there's a real sense of seriousness.

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: And many people -- more people, actually, than habitually come to church seem to be signing up for online worship and online discussion as well, as if this is giving them permission to be a bit more serious -- a bit more intimate with each other about their spiritual needs and the crisis that they face.

CURNOW: Well, I think a lot of people --

WILLIAMS: So entirely --

CURNOW: Yes, I think a lot of people are asking questions because you are alone, and isolation and solitude often create those questions within yourself.

I mean, Easter, itself, is something that not a lot -- you know, many people don't celebrate. But even if you're not Christian the narrative of sacrifice and then hopefully, rebirth is very relevant at the moment, isn't it?

WILLIAMS: It couldn't be more relevant. It's, of course, a story about how -- of the very depth of abandonment, loneliness, and so forth in the story of Jesus driven out of his city, executed publicly. How even in that, the presence of an undefeatable love is still real.

[05:45:11]

And whatever particular religious commitment you have, the sense that there's something held and something precious, that's so important here -- and particularly for those on their own.

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: But I think also, if I can just add one other dimension of that, there are, of course, Christians in the world who habitually have to meet secretly, privately -- Christians for whom actually worshipping together is a real risk in countries where there's persecution.

I think this is perhaps an opportunity for those of us who are Christians in the west or the north of the world to think a bit about them and almost to give thanks that we have just a chance of sharing something with them and praying for them a little bit more intensely.

CURNOW: And I think you also reference that there's been huge lessons and exposure, perhaps, of inequality. People complain about being locked down in their house for weeks on end but that's a luxury in many ways. Some really hard lessons are being learned about equality -- inequality, even in places like the U.S. or where you are in the U.K.

WILLIAMS: I think that's right. And, of course, it's a global question, too, because once the pandemic really gets a hold on fragile economies in Africa, say --

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: -- the impact is far greater than it would be here.

So I think in addition to what we're thinking about in terms of repurposing and restarting our own economies, we have to be thinking about how we create more safety nets for economies which could be in meltdown because of this in a month or two's time.

And in a world like ours where the fragility of an economy in Africa is going to impact on ours sooner or later, it is everybody's business, not just something that's happening to people far away.

CURNOW: No, you make a good point there because in many ways, this is such a shared crisis, isn't it? And it's about individual sacrifice for the communal good. And that's a real moral and spiritual lesson no matter where you come on that one.

WILLIAMS: It's a huge lesson to be learned. It's a reminder that --

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: -- if the world really is going to be sustainable, inhabitable, and just for the majority of human beings, then we can't simply take for granted that our own agenda, whether as individuals or even as societies, simply sets the pace for everybody.

Everyone has to step back a bit in order to give breathing space to their neighbor. We know this -- it's common sense in our ordinary relationships. And yet, it seems so difficult sometimes to see society, let alone global society, in that light.

Yet, if others are to live, we need to step back -- and stepping back into the kind of isolation so many of us are experiencing at the moment -- as a sign of -- well, giving room, giving space to others. Literally, helping to give breathing space to others. That's, to my mind, a powerful symbol of how we ought to be thinking about a working society -- a just society.

CURNOW: You're also the master of Magdalene College Cambridge. I'm an alumni of that fantastic college and I know that many of the students and students across the world have struggled with this as well.

What are young people saying to you about -- and are you learning anything from them? Or what message are you giving them?

WILLIAMS: It's certainly a very difficult time for students, especially students who are meant to be graduating this year.

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: The prospect of a final term before their final examinations when they can say a proper goodbye to their friends, when they can celebrate their achievement, that's all vanished.

And I think one of the -- one of the messages I'd want to give is look, the work you've done is worthwhile. The relationships you've built are worthwhile. There will be a chance to celebrate after this.

For now, take each day as it comes and above all, find the things that are feeding your spirit. Keep in touch with one another. Share your work, your leisure as you've been used to doing. There are ways of doing it. There are plenty of electronic means of communication.

And try and -- try and remember that worthwhileness -- the worthwhileness of who you are, what you've done, who your friends are, and that will carry you through.

But it's a challenge for them -- it really is. And the complications of keeping in touch with college, keeping a regular flur (ph) of communication --

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: -- they're quite considerable.

CURNOW: Yes.

And as you think to Sunday and beyond, what is your message to the world? You're a former Archbishop of Canterbury. You've had to provide solace and support to many people over the years.

Is slowing down, contemplation, isolation a good thing for the moment? How do you find the positive in that?

WILLIAMS: Well, I think as we've already said --

CURNOW: Yes.

WILLIAMS: -- it's important not to be too sentimental about this because there are plenty of people for whom contemplation isn't exactly an option.

[05:50:04]

CURNOW: No.

WILLIAMS: They're worried about their jobs and their future and that's an urgent thing.

But for those of us who do have the space given by this for whom isolation is not going to be the end of the world, it really is a chance to step back and say well, what makes me human? What really needs to be -- nourish my humanity? Do I depend on my freedom to travel, my freedom to acquire, my freedom

to succeed or is there something deeper than that? Because realizing that gives us a freedom which we need in order to create a more equal and a more -- well, a more joyful society at the end of the day.

CURNOW: Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and the master of Magdalene College Cambridge, thank you very much for joining us. Happy Easter, sir.

WILLIAMS: Thank you, Robyn.

CURNOW: You're watching CNN. We'll have more after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CURNOW: That is not a pack of wolves or a horror movie, it's people in Denver, Colorado -- listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Howling sounds.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CURNOW: Howling at the moon because it's become a ritual every evening. One couple in the city started a Facebook group entitled "Go Outside and Howl at 8:00 p.m."

[05:55:01]

They say they were inspired by the balcony music performances from people quarantined around the world. This is something else completely.

The group is now almost half a million members from several countries. Many are also posting their howling videos on Twitter using the hashtag #howlat8. And God knows some of us need it at 8:00 p.m. by then, don't we? Enjoy your howling this Easter.

But also, there's some fantastic people there on the front lines and I want to share some of their stories as well. Doctors and nurses are certainly going the extra mile -- we know they are -- to make the coronavirus patients feel at ease and save lives. But look what people are doing.

Robertino Rodriguez works at an E.R. in San Diego in California. He says he felt bad for his patients who couldn't see his face under all of his protective gear. So he taped a large, smiling photograph of himself to his suit so that they could see his face.

And then also, Derek DeVault took this photo of his colleagues at an L.A. hospital. He says the patients are isolated from visitors so seeing what their nurse actually looks like helps comfort them during these extremely stressful times. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to do.

So whatever you do this Easter -- howling at the moon, praying online -- I hope it's joyful and peaceful.

Thanks for your company. I'll see you again next week. I'm Robyn Curnow. "NEW DAY" is next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In areas where the epidemic has impacted most we continue to see evidence of stabilization.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It appears to us the stay-at-home order and the social distancing are starting to pay off.

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D), NEW YORK: The flattening of the curve happened because of what we did yesterday. If we stop acting the way we're acting you will see those numbers go up.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hopefully, we're going to be opening up very, very soon, I hope.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As we move to reopen, it's not going to be one size fits all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

END