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Top Oil Producing Nations Reach Deal to Slash Production; U.S. Market Futures Slide after OPEC+ Deal Reached; One Day inside a New York Hospital; Can an Antibody Test Help Reopen Economies; Librarians Use 3D Printing to Help Health Care Workers. Aired 4:30-5a ET
Aired April 13, 2020 - 04:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[04:30:00]
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ROSEMARY CHURCH, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. You are watching CNN NEWSROOM and I am Rosemary Church.
Top oil producing countries will be slashing production by almost 10 million barrels a day in an effort to boost prices. OPEC and its allies reached the agreement Sunday during an emergency online meeting. Oil prices had fallen to 18-year lows in recent weeks due to the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and the coronavirus pandemic.
The cuts will start on May 1st and remain in place through June. The news is sending oil rising and U.S. futures sliding. A look at that number there. Dow futures down 1.41 percent. Well, CNN's Alison Kosik is in New York and John Defterios joins us from Abu Dhabi. Great to see you both. Alison, let's start with you. U.S. markets opening in just a matter of hours. What should we expect when we look at the futures there?
ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Rosemary. So we are seeing stocks, as you said, slide. We are seeing the Dow look like it will be opening at least 300 points lower. This is after stocks had one of their best weeks in a long time. The Dow jumping 12.7 percent last week. That's the seventh best weekly performance. The S&P 500 up 12.1 percent last week. That's its best weekly gain since 1974.
[04:35:03]
Those gains came as the outlook for the coronavirus health crisis seemed to be improving, but we are seeing these red arrows as investors brace themselves for what begins today. First quarter earnings season where we're going to find out kind of the report cards for corporate America between January, February and March. And this is really going to be our first look at how corporate America's finances have been hit by this crisis.
So the concern is now that the strong performance that we saw in stocks last week may have set up investors for disappointment this week because it is not expected to be good. We are expected to first hear from big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. But the thing is several companies had already pulled are forward-looking guidance because of all the uncertainty surrounding impact of the virus. And many had already slashed their profit forecasts. So everybody kind of bracing for this first look at how corporate America has been hit by this crisis -- Rosemary.
CHURCH: All right, we'll be watching very closely. Alison Kosik, many thanks joining us there from New York. Let's go now to John Defterios in Abu Dhabi. And I want to get more on the likely consequences of that oil deal and whether those cuts will be enough.
JOHN DEFTERIOS, CNN BUSINESS EMERGING MARKETS EDITOR: Well, you know, Rosemary, it took three major meetings to get everybody to agree to this. Some 23 producers in the OPEC plus agreement. But I think for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they can claim some victory here to bring everybody back together and get a cut on the table. It's just under 10 million barrels a day. It's about 10 percent of global supplies. That's a record. It's two times the level we saw during the global financial crisis ten years ago.
But it's an underwhelming market reaction, and I'll tell you why. Because about 3 billion people are not moving around the world right now. So demand is down by about a third.
Investors are really focused on the end of June and this severe recession we're seeing right now. But this is designed to rebalance the market by the end of the year. Major cuts for two months. Another six months cutting 8 million barrels a day. Then cuts of 6 million barrels a day will last until April 2022. That tells you how bad things are.
Now Donald Trump was pushing extremely hard to get this deal, Rosemary. He says it will save hundreds of thousands of jobs. The harsh reality is because of the drop in demand oil prices are hovering around 23 to $25 a barrel in the United States. We're down better than 60 percent since the start of the year.
For the shale producers to survive, they need 40, 50, $55 a barrel to make a decent profit. So it's too early to say I've won this game, but there was a lot of pressure from Capitol Hill on the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, on Vladimir Putin to say, you're messing with the shale producers. This is too much disruption. Let's get a deal. And in the span of a week they got it done -- Rosemary.
CHURCH: Yes, they did. John Defterios bringing us up to date on that deal. Many thanks to you.
We'll take a short break here. Still to come, as country's eye a return to normal life. What one epidemiologist thinks we need before we reopening our economies. That interview is next. Plus --
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everybody has coronavirus. Some people also have heart attacks at the same time.
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CHURCH: We show you a day in the life of a New York doctor on the front lines of fighting the coronavirus. That report just ahead.
[04:40:00]
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CHURCH: Well, as we've seen, over the past few weeks, hospitals in New York City are overwhelmed and doctors are desperately trying to save the lives of thousands of patients infected with the coronavirus. CNN's Clarissa Ward introduces us to Dr. Melanie Malloy, a physician on the front lines. They were college roommates and remain close friends.
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DR. MELANIE MALLOY, ATTENDING PHYSICIAN, MOUNT SINAI BROOKLYN HOSPITAL: Hello, my name is Dr. Melanie Malloy. I am an attending physician Mount Sinai Brooklyn and Mount Sinai Queens. I'm on my way to work.
CLARISSA WARD, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We've asked my old friend to see what life is like on one day in one New York hospital.
MALLOY: So I'm picking up my PPE. I'm going to get some scrubs. I'm going to get mask, face shield, everything that I need to be safe on my shift.
WARD: For Dr. Melanie Malloy, this is the new normal.
MALLOY: I am going to start my shift.
WARD: The emergency room at Mount Sinai Brooklyn Hospital has been overflowing.
MALLOY: I walked in, and they said, everybody is intubated, and it looks like it's true, actually. Most of our beds are taken up intubated patients, meaning patients who can't breathe on their own and who are on the ventilators. Almost everybody is on oxygen. And almost everybody is a COVID patient.
WARD: Since the pandemic began, more than 1,200 corona cases have flooded in, pushing the hospital to 150 percent to its capacity.
MALLOY: So today, there are 43 people in the department. That's pretty much full. But I have to say, it's doing a lot better than a couple weeks ago when we had 86 to 96 in the department, 40 people boarding. It was really tough. It was really bad, bad week.
WARD: In the intensive care unit, it's a similar scene.
MALLOY: I just wanted to give you guys a little look at the ICU. So we have a full ICU. We have every patient in here on a ventilator. As you can see it's not a huge space, but it's quite full. Every bed is full.
Now I'm going to try to go to the tents, because this is our fast- track extension. Just you know, from -- from the get-go, you can see we have, you know, we have to tell people we can't test them for mild symptoms.
They can get registered here. Good morning.
Here is our fantastic staff, and then we have separate areas for people getting treatment.
WARD: For the doctors working around the clock to save lives, there are occasional perks.
MALLOY: One of my favorite things to do is the free food.
I'm super excited, because we have Shake Shack. What?
WARD: Moments later, it's back to work.
MALLOY: So I'm waiting for my next patient to be placed in a room. This one is different, because as opposed the mostly older we've been seeing today, he's in his early twenties. I think one thing we're learning is that we don't really know what somebody is going to come in with and have COVID.
[04:45:00]
Everybody has coronavirus, but some people also have heart attacks at the same time. This happens, and it makes things even harder.
Well, my day's over. Well, my hospital day is over. It was -- it wasn't the worst day I've had, but it's always pretty draining. It's just -- it's hard. It's hard to think that some of your patients that you diagnosed today might not be here tomorrow when you come back for your shift. Or you know, all of it. I don't know. I'm just tired.
WARD: For Dr. Malloy, the challenges don't end with her shift. A widow, she's raising three children on her own.
MALLOY: So it's almost 10 p.m. at night, and on my way home, I got a FaceTime from my youngest child, who's four. And I think that's the hardest part. I think that's, like, just being alone when I come home, knowing that, you know, my childcare is going to go home. My helpers are going home. And it's just me and whatever state my children are in. And I don't really have a lot left in me.
WARD: The next day, Dr. Malloy takes a moment to talk to us.
(on camera): It's crazy what you're seeing and dealing with. Have you ever experienced anything like this?
MALLOY: Never. And you know, like, even the older folks, like, the older doctors are, like, I've never seen this before in my life. WARD: So one thing that I know you weren't allowed to show us is the morgue.
MALLOY: There are now two large tractor-trailer trucks that are refrigerated. They are full of bodies wrapped in white plastic bags. I was told that they can hold 50 people, and the one that I saw was full.
WARD: Do you not worry about getting sick?
MALLOY: Of course we do. Of course I do. The way that -- that we're working in the E.D., it's so -- it's a hit of coronavirus. It's literally dozens of positive patients. The viral load in that place must be astronomical.
WARD: What do you wish all Americans understood about what you're going through?
MALLOY: I really want Americans to take this seriously, to know that, even if you're in an area that's not a big city, you still are in danger. And we don't know who's going to get really sick. It does not spare anyone, particularly.
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CHURCH: And she is our hero, along with all of the other medical professionals across the globe. And the world is now dealing with close to 2 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The big question, when will it be safe for life to return to some level of normalcy?
Well, earlier I spoke to Keith Neal. He is a professor emeritus of epidemiology of infectious diseases at Nottingham University and I asked him what we need to see happen before reopening our economies?
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KEITH NEAL, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, EPIDEMIOLOGY OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES: The antibody tests currently do not work. And they're very good at showing you have COVID-19 if you're severely ill. But we know those have been infected. What we need is a good antibody test to see who had mild or asymptomatic infection.
CHURCH: How large do you think that population of people with the antibodies who maybe had some very mild version of this and didn't even know it?
NEAL: We're not totally sure. There was a report recently last week from Germany suggesting 15 percent of the population of a town that had been particularly badly hit had some antibodies. The actual antibody test they have used has not been described and not been repeated elsewhere. The estimate for the United Kingdom is between 3 and 5 percent depending which part of the country.
CHURCH: Right, which is very low really but certainly that's more people than have been tested in the United States. I mean, only about 1 percent of the U.S. population have been tested. Why are these developed nations having problems getting out some of these tests and decentralizing them so they can actually get them to various populations, get the results and get those back to people?
NEAL: I think I don't know the situation in the United States, but the United Kingdom we always have gone down through a line of centralization. And I think now we're moving to a situation where this will become more at the NHS labs and also university labs.
[04:50:00]
One of the difficulties of trying to achieve 100,000 tests a day is finding 100,000 people to test because after you've cleared the backlogs, the number of people to be tested is likely to drop off quite quickly.
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CHURCH: And you are watching CNN NEWSROOM.
Still to come, librarians in the U.S. are finding an innovative way to lend a hand in the coronavirus fight. We'll have the details on the other side of the break.
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ANDREA BOCELLI, SINGER: Ave Maria --
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CHURCH: Magnificent. Italy may still be on lockdown, but world-famous tenor Andrea Bocelli shared the gift of music in a free concert Sunday from an empty Cathedral in Milan. The free music of hope concert was broadcast on YouTube to celebrate Easter Sunday. And according to the mayor of Milan, warmed the hearts of the world.
[04:55:00]
Well, the fight against the coronavirus is truly a collaborative effort. Whether you're an essential worker or essentially staying home to stop the spread. But some librarians across the United States have found an innovative way to lend a hand. CNN's Paul Vercammen has that story.
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PAUL VERCAMMEN, CNN REPORTER (voice-over): Vi Ha, manager of the L.A. Central Library's Octavia Lab, for do-it-yourself projects, was ready to shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic and then --
VI HA, MANAGER, LA CENTRAL LIBRARY OCTAVIA LAB: We got an email right as we were closing from a doctor and saying, can you make PPE?
VERCAMMEN: PPE or personal protective equipment. Vi Ha and her team said yes, partnered with a nonprofit called Lacey which develops clean technologies to make functional face shields. They started with a shipment of 70.
HA: I've been sewing for comfort, a lasted for it to stay on, and what's nice about this version, it pulls all the way to the top and also covers from droplets entering through the eyes from the top.
VERCAMMEN: PPE are popping out of library 3d printers across the country.
At the University of Utah library staff tap campus brainpower to make an estimated 1,200 face shields for hospitals.
T.J. FERRILL, MARRIOTT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH: The fact is there's a bit of an emergency going on in a lot of situations and it's really awesome to be able to participate in a solution.
VERCAMMEN: As many libraries are sharing online how to make PPE to defend doctors and nurses, the librarians are showcasing skills far beyond the reference desk in this pandemic.
HA: One, we are adaptable. Two, we believe truly, truly in the public good. This is why we get into this work. And number three, it's like, we're here to help.
VERCAMMEN: The local library joining the quest to put COVID-19 on the shelf.
Paul Vercammen, CNN, Los Angeles.
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CHURCH: Everyone doing their part.
Thanks so much for your company. Stay home, stay safe, stay strong. I'm Rosemary Church. CNN NEWSROOM continues now with Robyn Curnow.
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