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Don Lemon Tonight

Reopening Of State's Economy Under Governor's Decision; Stimulus Checks To Bear POTUS' Name; President Trump Halts World Health Organization Funding Over Handling Of Coronavirus Outbreak; California Governor Newsom Outlines Plan To Reopen In Partnership With West Coast States; A Small Study By Researchers In New York City About Pregnant Women May Offer Some Interesting Clues About The Virus; EMT Who Assisted At World Trade Center Site After 9/11 Dies From The Coronavirus. Aired 11p-12a ET

Aired April 14, 2020 - 23:00   ET

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

[23:00:00]

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DON LEMON, CNN HOST: This is CNN TONIGHT. I'm Don Lemon.

Eleven p.m. on the East Coast. And here are the latest on coronavirus pandemic. There are now more than 608,000 confirmed case of coronavirus in the United States. More than 25,000 people have died from the disease in this country. Worldwide, nearly two million cases recorded. And more than 126,000 deaths around the globe.

Tonight, we are learning more details about the White House plan to reopen the country. And what experts are saying about that plan. The president tonight retreating from his statement that he has absolute authority to determine when states reopen. Saying tonight he'll speak with the governors about their plans and that states without major outbreaks of coronavirus could potentially reopen by May 1.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci warning again today that the country is not yet ready to reopen.

That as CNN is learning that President Trump signature will appear on checks sent to millions of Americas to combat the economic effects of the coronavirus. It's a last-minute Treasury Department order.

Joining me now is CNN's White House Correspondent John Harwood, and our resident fact checker, Daniel Dale.

Gentlemen, good evening. Good to see you.

John Harwood, you first. Today was a deadliest day of this pandemic in the U.S. Over 2,100 reported deaths. But it's clear that the president is still anxious to rewrite or reopen, rewrite history and reopen the country. Potentially earlier than his advisers suggest, John.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. But the president is as he said today, he's going to defer to states and states are going to make their plans. In fact, he even said today that he would stop states if he thought it was unsafe.

But I think it was a remarkable news conference that he had today, Don. Because in multiple ways he was kind of waiving the white flag on offering leadership in this crisis. Two examples. Firsts is he comes out and he blames the World Health Organization and says he's going to cut off funding.

Now, yes, the World Health Organization was slow. And two, deferential to China. But of course, Trump was exactly both of those things himself. But more importantly, that is a backward-looking step to take that does nothing to solve any problem that American business or worker or hospital patient has right now.

The second thing is we know that the big issue that needs to be dealt with before the country can be opened up again is a massive expansion of testing. And when the president was asked what he's going to do about that he said not my job. It's for the governors to do.

That is an abdication of leadership on the most important issue. Now we know the president is the front man for a large government apparatus. So, FEMA is having some talks with governors and maybe that bare some fruit.

But I talked to an aide to a Republican governor tonight who said we're not counting on any big help from the feds. And that is a pretty striking statement of where Donald Trump is right now and what responsibility he wants and doesn't want for resolving this situation.

LEMON: John, I want to talk to you about the vice president. Tonight, we're learning from the vice president's office they announce that he will travel to Colorado Springs to attend the Air Force Academy graduation. It's April 18th. This weekend.

Given the suspension of many events and the importance of social distancing, what do we know about how this is going to work?

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HARWOOD: I've got no idea. I've been, Don, to an Air Force Academy graduation. My little brother graduated from there many years ago. It was a very dense and joyous ceremony. How exactly they're going to do that with parents and family members and the cadets who are graduating. I just don't know how that's possibly going to work.

It will certainly be embarrassing for Mike Pence as a leader of the task force if he doesn't demonstrate the wisdom of following the guidelines that the federal government has laid out. And so, I suspect in the end they will figure out a way to make it compliant with the guidelines. But we'll see.

LEMON: Yes. There's reporting that they will follow the social distancing guidelines. But we have to see how that's going to work.

Daniel, I want to bring you in now. The president also announce that he is halting U.S. funding to the World Health Organization criticizing them for praising China's transparency. But as Kaitlan Collins reminded him he also praised China. Watch this and then we'll talk.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: You were criticizing the WHO for praising China for being transparent. But you also praised China for being transparent.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't talk about China's transparent.

COLLINS: On January --

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Well, you know, if I'm so good to China how come I was the only person, the only leader of a country that closed our borders tightly against China?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Not really an answer to the question so give us facts though.

DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: It's not. Don, I counted 28 words in this Trump claim. And the three false things about it. S number one, yes, he did talk about China in transparency in a tweet on January 24th. He expressively praised, he said their efforts and transparency.

Number two, he did not close U.S. borders to China as we've talked about before. His restrictions had various exemptions for U.S. citizens, permanent residents and their family members. And number three, he was far from the only leader of a country to impose travel restrictions on China.

The Washington Post did an analysis and found that 38 countries had imposed significant travel restrictions on China, they said before or at the same time the U.S. restrictions were put in place. Plus 12 other countries that had less significant restrictions. So basically, everything he said to our Kaitlan Collins was incorrect here.

LEMON: Yes. John, Dr. Fauci wasn't at the White House tonight but he told the Associated Press that these coronavirus briefings can be, quote, "really draining," and then he added this. "If I had been able to just make a few comments and then go to work, that would have been really been much better. It isn't the idea of being there and answering questions which is really I think is important for the American public. It's the amount of time."

I mean, you can see Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx during the president's tirade yesterday. I mean, this really can't be easy for them to sit through.

HARWOOD: No doubt. And there's no doubt that to the extent these are taken over by the president ranting at reporters or blame casting.

LEMON: For hours. HARWOOD: Doing other for extended periods of time. It's a complete

waste of their time. It's a waste of our time too to be honest. The value in the briefings for the American public theoretically is to bring experts who can tell here's what's the latest information about the course of this pandemic. What progress we're making, what we're not making, and what happens next.

Birx and Fauci are capable of doing that. Mike Pence is capable of doing that and has done that. But the more they're taken over by Trump and used as a vehicle for him to preen and vent and rant and that sort of thing, they're of no value to the public in dealing with coronavirus.

LEMON: It's a rattle of company names for 10, however long it was today. Just -- I didn't get it. I didn't understand why. I was like, why do I need to hear all these company names? What does that have to do with anything?

Thank you both. I appreciate it.

President Trump undercutting his own promise from last month when he rolled out a plan for drive-through testing sites at retailers across the country.

CNN's Drew Griffin is here with the truth about testing. Drew, good evening. Here's what the president said back in mid-March. And what he said tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We have been in discussions with pharmacies and retailers to make drive- through tests available in the critical locations identified by public health professionals. The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car.

They'll go and rely on their mayors and their local town officials. They bring it right down and Washington shouldn't be doing that. We can't be thinking about a Walmart parking lot that's 2,000 miles. We're staying by --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: So that's a huge promise that he's abandoning now. What happened with this drive-through, this drive-through testing sites?

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DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: Well, like all this testing business, it just didn't come through. And I think now the president is trying to distance himself from what is yet another failure in testing.

Look, there are drive through testing sites. Walgreens has 15 sites I think in seven states. CVS has a couple. Michigan has 13 sites that they are standing up. You can get drive-throughs in Los Angeles now at Houston. But nowhere near what we were promised when he had all those CEOs and businesses line up and tell them how great it was going to be.

Don, this whole response it involves testing. The beginning, the middle and the end involves testing. And they knew how much testing we were going to need when they promised us, the White House promised 27 million tests would be conducted by the end of March.

Here we are midway through April and we've got little more over two million tests. So, we are 25 million tests short of what they promised. They know it. I think the president is just trying to distance himself from the history lesson here which is this is a failure of testing.

LEMON: A new distancing in this whole thing. Thank you very much, Drew. I appreciate that.

I want to bring in now Dr. Celine Gounder. She is an infectious disease specialist and an epidemiologist. Thank you, Dr. Gounder for joining us. So over 2,500 coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. just today. That's unfortunately a new high for the country. President maybe talking about reopening but we are clearly still right in the middle of a very tenuous situation.

CELINE GOUNDER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, I think that's right, Don. I think we were very slow to implement simple distancing measures in part because there was a lot of concern about what kind of damage it would do to the economy. And now we're rushing to lift those very same measures because of those same concerns about the economy.

It's sort of surprising to me that we still haven't learned a lesson, which is that if we want to limit the damage to the economy, we have to be very aggressive about social distancing and do a country wide, nationwide aggressively to really suppress transmission. And the more aggressively we do that the shorter the duration of that social distancing, and the quicker we can get back to business as usual.

But somehow that hasn't been fully learned. And the other lesson that has not been learned is that we really do need to prepare for the next phase. We need to be gearing up in the next phase now is going to involve a lot of contact tracing.

So, to do contact tracing like in Wuhan, we would need 300,000 people on the ground across the United States to do that. And we would need testing. Which as you were just discussing, we are nowhere near testing capacity to do what we need to be doing.

LEMON: So, the president continued to tout hydroxychloroquine today to treat coronavirus. But there's a new French study it shows that the drug doesn't help patients with the virus and was associated with heart implications. Right? It is implications with the heart. So how concerning is that for you?

GOUNDER: Well, it's highly concerning and there's also data out of Brazil of some 81 patients. Eleven of those 81 patients in that study died from cardiac complications. So that's more than 10 percent who died. That's a huge percentage. Not -- you know, definitely on par with the case fatality rate that we see from the virus itself if not higher.

So that's very concerning. And you have to also remember the people most at risk of dying from COVID from having severe complications of COVID are people who have underlying heart conditions. And so those very same people are the ones you're trying to treat with a drug that can cause a fatal cardiac arrythmia.

LEMON: The World Health Organization, doctor, says that they are investigating cases of reactivation of the virus after Reuters reports that some people in South Korea tested positive after being cleared. So, what do things stand on understanding immunity here? Because supposedly I thought once you had it then you had these antibodies and you couldn't get it. Like what happened?

GOUNDER: Yes. This is an area that really needs to be studied and a lot more depth, Don.

LEMON: Because we can't open the country then, right? If you -- does that have implications for that?

GOUNDER: Well, that's -- that is precisely the problem. So, one of the things we're really hopeful maybe helpful in terms of reopening the country is antibody testing. But right now, we don't really know what those antibodies mean if they mean that if you have immunity.

For example, if you have HIV you are antibody positive. But those antibodies don't protect you. That means you have HIV. And so, we really need to better understand what these antibodies mean in the context of coronavirus. Does that just tell us that you've been exposed, does that actually mean you're immune? Does that mean you've completely recovered? We do not have all of those answers yet. And so that's something that needs to be studied in much more detail.

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LEMON: So, we saw, you know, some of the people, same people -- the same thing with people wearing masks and how this virus spreads. So how does this complicate the fight against coronavirus? Because they said, you shouldn't wear masks and now you should wear mask. And they say, well maybe you have, you know, maybe you have immunity if you have the, what do you call them again, the antibodies.

GOUNDER: Antibodies.

LEMON: So how -- yes.

GOUNDER: Yes.

LEMON: So, does this complicate? This whole thing.

GOUNDER: Well, I think we need to step back -- yes, I think we need to step back and say look, this is a new virus. There's a lot of things we don't know. And there's two different ways of thinking in terms of the way I think about it. You can think like a scientist. Which is to say, look, I don't know

we're going to test out some different hypothesis, we're going to do some research and we're going to let that lead us. The other approach is what I would call a more lawyerly approach. Which is, this is what I want to do, how am I going to back up what it is that I've already decided to do.

And I think in this situation, that's really not the answer here. You don't make the decision ahead of time and then back it up with your justification. You really need to let the science lead you in the right direction.

LEMON: So, there's so much I want to ask you. Quickly here, I want to ask you about Gavin Newsom in California announcing that some guidelines for reopening they include telling people that their temperatures will be checked. Not a lot of people have this COVID or coronavirus. Some people have it and they don't show a temperature at all. Correct?

GOUNDER: Yes, that's right. That's right. And that's part of why symptom screening can be very challenging because some have no symptoms. Some people have very mild symptoms. Not everybody has a fever.

So, we're going to have to be -- I think California is approaching this in a more scientific way. They're saying look, these are the sort of step by step ways we're going to approach this. We're going to try this first thing.

You know, in terms of loosening restrictions and see how well that works before we really just open the economy with a bang, you know. I think you want to take this step wise and evaluate every step of the way.

LEMON: OK. Another question. An influential model cited by the White House predicts that coronavirus deaths will essentially stop this summer with zero death projected in the U.S. after June 21st. Do you really think that's possible?

GOUNDER: Well, so the model that you're citing is the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. So, they have a couple of assumptions built into that. One is that we are really social distancing through the end of May. We're doing that nationwide.

And clearly, there are states that are not doing that right now. And we're already hearing that there are states that may want to lift social -- social distancing even before the end of May. So, you know, there's a lot of -- there's a lot of ifs built into that model.

Now that model also presumes the way the virus will peter out is really a reflection of social distancing. It's not a reflection of herd immunity. And in fact, their model assumes that probably 5 percent or so of Americans will have been exposed by that time.

LEMON: Yes. I want to have you back to talk to you about hydroxychloroquine. Because I've been watching like some TV doctors and I'm wondering I'm like, what happened to you? What are you doing? It's really unbelievable.

Thank you. I have to move on another subject because we're learning some new information. Thank you, Dr. Gounder. I appreciate it.

CNN has learned that President Trump's name while not his signature will be on stimulus checks. Millions of Americans are going to receive them. That is coming as the last-minute decision from the Treasury Department.

The story was first reported by the Washington Post reporter Lisa Rein, and she joins me now. Liza, thank you so much for joining us. So, as you point out, this is unprecedented. Why is the president's name going to be printed on these checks?

LISA REIN, NATIONAL REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, it's unprecedented first of all because the IRS is a non-political agency and they don't, you know, they don't do things like this. Why the president wants his name on the check, I didn't speak with him.

However, I do know that he asked Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin he floated the idea a couple weeks ago of him signing the checks. But was told that wasn't possible because --

LEMON: Yes.

REIN: -- you know, he's not authorized and really a civil servant in the Treasury Department who no one has ever heard of, you know, is signing these checks.

But a second option -- you know, the president and his aides came up with the treasury secretary which then transmitted this decision to the IRS which then just this morning told their I.T. staff that they had to recode all the information for the checks.

And the decision was that the president's name is not going to be a signature but it's going to be his name on the left-hand side of the paper checks that are going to start going out in the coming days. And it's the memo line. You know where you write down, I paid this much for a haircut, or I saw the chiropractor, I wrote a check for $100. Whatever. That's where the name is going to be.

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LEMON: In the memo section of the check. OK. So, it had to be recoded. But the administration is denying that it's going to delay when people get their money. What did your reporting tell you?

REIN: That's right. So, there is a dispute on this. What happened was the administration originally planned on issuing the first batch of these paper checks that are going to about 70 million Americans who qualify. So that's a huge number.

They originally were going to issue the first batch of these checks next week. And in increments of, you know, every week after that until September. Starting with the lowest income Americans. They were a little bit ahead of schedule on this. So, the date was Thursday to start the process for issuing a check.

I heard from three separate IRS officials who said that the decision at the last minute to inform the IRS that they were going to be asked to recode the information that's going on the checks that that could really delay the delivery by a few days.

Treasury Department tonight told me that they disagree with that. So, there's a dispute. The IRS has not issued a public statement to me on that.

LEMON: OK. Lisa Rein, thank you. I appreciate your reporting. Thanks for joining us.

REIN: Thanks for having me.

LEMON: Details emerging tonight on the Trump administration's plan to reopen the country for business, what do the health experts say about that? I'm going to ask one, next.

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LEMON: The Washington Post reporting tonight that a team of government officials has created a public health strategy to reopen parts of the country.

Here to discuss, Tom Bollyky, the director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Tom, good to see you. Thank you for joining us.

THOMAS BOLLYKY, DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL HEALTH PROGRAM, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: Nice to be back. Nice to see you, Don.

LEMON: So, here's some of the Post -- of the Post reporting on the plan to reopen led by FEMA and the CDC. The plan lays out three phases. Preparing the nation to reopen with a national communication campaign and community readiness assessment until May 1.

Then the effort through May 15 would involve ramping up manufacturing of testing kits and personal protective equipment and increasing emergency funding. Then, staged re-openings would begin depending on local conditions.

The plan does not give dates for re-openings. But specified not before May 1. So, does that sound realistic to you, Tom?

BOLLYKY: I don't think it's realistic in most parts of the country. So, I've only seen the reporting on the plan. So, I haven't seen the plan itself. But based on reports it's predicated on infection rates being extremely low and a monitoring and testing program being in place before you can even consider reopening.

Consider this on a nationwide basis we still have only done just under three million tests. We do not have a work force hired for this kind of monitoring nationally. It's really hard to see how we're going to get to this in many states. It's not clear that the president needs to authorize governors to do this.

This is really a power that is reserved to them. The federal government can support them and I'm glad they're putting out criteria to do that. But it's not clear that the president needs to give them the authorization to do this.

LEMON: Yes. I mean, you're being diplomatic. He does not need to do that. The governors can do that themselves.

But listen, I mean, as you were alluding to here, we're behind in so many metrics that are necessary to reopen including testing. It's getting testing up to speed by May 15. Do you think that is doable?

BOLLYKY: Not nationally. It may be that as we pass the peak in some states and some localities if we target our efforts there we might be able to see a ramp up. But the idea that this is a 50-state solution that we're going to have this level of testing in place by May 15 is unlikely. But even harder is going to be the monitoring. And the two are meant to go in tandem.

We won't know if we have low incident rate until we have the testing. But once you have the testing what we're seeing from other countries abroad is that you really have to have the within several hours monitoring work force in place. And that involves hiring hundreds of thousands of people nationally. And we're -- we haven't even started on that.

LEMON: Yes. So, Tom, the president announcing that he is halting funding to the World -- WHO, the World Health Organization. He's been heavily criticized, that organization has, for how it handled this pandemic. But you say it is at the mercy of the constraints put on it by countries like the U.S. and defunding it would be an enormous mistake. Why do you say that?

BOLLYKY: I'll be less diplomatic here. The president's decision makes Americans less safe. Let's be clear about that. The World Health Organization plays an indispensable role in pandemic response. Particularly in poor countries they provide test kits, they provide personal protective equipment. They put doctors and scientists on the ground to build up the capacity to respond to this pandemic.

If this virus circulates unabated anywhere, ultimately it puts everywhere at risk including Americans. By the only way that we are going to make progress in this pandemic is with the international cooperation, the scientific expertise and the data that I fully supported World Health Organization provides. This is a big mistake to go this route.

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LEMON: You are also very blunt in your writing because you write in The Washington Post that the WHO isn't responsible for the bungled U.S. response. Was tonight another example of the president trying to shift the blame, you think?

BOLLYKY: Absolutely. A number of different dimensions. So the argument was the World Health Organization was slow. But keep in mind, every other nation in the world and their government have the same information that the president had, and many of the them, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, others, all responded quickly. They have all had many fewer cases and many fewer deaths than the United States working on the same information.

President argues that the World Health Organization somehow kept him from implementing travel bans. But on analysis that we have done and in The Washington Post article today, 45 countries implemented travel bans before the United States, one of them nine days before the United States.

World Health Organization is not responsible for the delays for the U.S. in implementing it, and ultimately they have been proven right in that travel bans haven't been effective in this country and many others in slowing the spread of this disease.

LEMON: Yeah, it wasn't a full ban, it was more of restrictions. Thank you, Tom. I appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

BOLLYKY: My great pleasure. Thanks for having me.

LEMON: Absolutely. California's governor is laying out what reopening his state could look like, and from what he is saying, it seems there will be nothing normal about the new normal.

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[23:35:00]

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LEMON: California Governor Gavin Newsom is outlining a framework for reopening the economy in his state. He didn't say when that would be happening, but he did describe some of the things the businesses will have to be thinking about.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): The incredible importance of redrawing our floor plans and that is quite literally a responsibility if we are moving into a next phase of our businesses so that we can practice safe physical distancing within the premise of a business, within and around a school site, and facilities large and small, public and private, all throughout the state of California.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEMON: Let's discuss now. Seth Harris is here. He is the former acting labor secretary under President Barack Obama. CNN political commentator Catherine Rampell is here, as well. Thank you both. I appreciate it. Seth, I'm going to start with you. You set us a long list of some things that businesses will need to do, including California Governor Gavin Newsom's point about re-engineering workspaces. We've got your ideas up on the screen now. Can you talk us through these ideas?

SETH HARRIS, FORMER ACTING LABOR SECRETARY UNDER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Sure. Well, this is straightforward occupational safety and health planning. You got to start with a plan because what gets planned gets done. So every employer in the country needs to know how they're going to plan to keep their workers safe from coronavirus in the workplace.

The starting place for that is to try and keep sick and infected workers and others out of the workplace. Give them paid sick leave, give them paid family leave. Limit the number of people who can come in, the deliveries that can come in.

The second is the point that Governor Newsom was making and that is engineering control. The physical distancing we are doing outside the workplace, we need to sustain that in the workplace. And we are going to need other protections, hand washing stations, breaks for hand washing. In some cases, physical barriers are going to be needed where distance is not possible, effective physical barriers.

And then finally, in a lot of cases, including the cases that we are seeing in workplaces that are open right now, workers are going to need personal protective equipment, N95 respirators, masks, gloves, in some cases gowns. It just depends on the workplace.

The plan is going to differ from workplace to workplace depending upon how it is configured and what kind of work they do and how much interaction they have with customers. But, boy, employers have a lot to do before we open up the country.

LEMON: OK. Yes. And even now, I have been thinking about that because, you know, we all need to go to the supermarket now, right, because it has been going on longer than most people thought. So people are social distancing in supermarkets. You are there, you are six feet away from the next customer, but then the stock person comes by and bumps you on the shoulder.

(LAUGHTER)

LEMON: It is not really social distancing. You know, there is a lot to think about. Your points are very valid. Catherine, the testing capacity in the United States is still so far behind where it needs to be. Even with guidelines in place, I mean, can workers feel safe going back to work without proper testing?

CATHERINE RAMPELL, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think that is really the problem here. Even if we implement all of the kinds of adaptations that Seth just laid out, which I think would be obviously critical, if we don't have adequate testing, we can't actually tell who is sick, who is exposed, we can't trace the transmission of these infections.

So it really needs to be both tools handy. You need to know how to actually surveil the virus to make sure that your employees are safe, your customers are safe.

[23:39:55]

RAMPELL: And then you need to actually, of course, have these kinds of measures in place, have the personal protective equipment, whatever the equivalent is for non-health care professionals, so that once you have isolated those folks who are sick, you can still limit their transmission from going to their co-workers and to customers and others. But right now, we are not just on pace to get that first step in place.

LEMON: Yeah. And then there are these tests that I just talked about with Dr. Gounder. The study is saying that some people were re- infected. We have to figure out if that's so and see if, you know, that continues to happen. You only know that if you are tested and if the tests are correct.

Catherine, the president is also working on building out a new opening, the country counsel though who will participate and I'm wondering and what they'll actually even do is still up in the air. So, who should be on this council -- on a council like this?

RAMPELL: It should be a economists and it should be public health experts, period.

LEMON: Period.

RAMPELL: Those are the people -- those are the people we need to be listening to to figure out again how we limit transmission of this illness and how we can safely reintroduce people to the workplace. You know, I think has been acting as if there is some deep trade-off between doing what's best for the economy and saving lives. That's just flatly false. Economists do not agree with that.

In fact, there is virtual unanimity amongst economists that saving lives will actually improve economic performance in the long run. I'm very concerned by some of the names you have been floated as members of this task force who are not economists.

You know, they are sort of hacks for hire, people who are just there to promote tax cuts, for example, who has been whispering in his ear or publishing op-eds in some cases saying, you know, we need to get the country open as quickly as possible, that's what's going to help economic growth.

And in fact, again, if you listen to real economists, they say no. There is no disagreement between themselves and between epidemiologists getting the virus under control which includes having social distancing measures in place until we have other tools available, including, you know, ramping up testing, for example, or a vaccine which is a long way off.

Doing those kind of measures will, in fact, improve economic growth in the long run. We saw it in 1918 flu and there's plenty of research to back it up. LEMON: Well, today's briefing sounded more like an economic briefing

rather than a briefing about coronavirus. Thank you both. I appreciate your time. A New York hospital is testing 215 pregnant women for coronavirus and the results could tell us a lot about the rate of infection for all people. What did they find? That's next.

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[23:45:00]

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LEMON: Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health say Americans may have to live with social distancing until 2022, unless a vaccine becomes available. And small study by researchers here in New York City about pregnant women may offer some interesting clues about the virus.

I want to bring in now Dr. Dena Goffman. She is the chief of obstetrics at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Thank you, doctor. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it.

DENA GOFFMAN, CHIEF OF OBSTETRICS, NEW YORK PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: Thanks for having me.

LEMON: So, your study looked at 215 pregnant women. They all got tests when they came to the hospital. You found that a lot of them have COVID-19 and they didn't know it. So, please explain your findings for us.

GOFFMAN: Sure. So, just a bit of background, early on in our coronavirus experience, really only about three and a half weeks ago, we encountered two women who were admitted for labor and delivery feeling well, and those women became symptomatic while under our care. At this point, we had not seen something like that before.

As a result of this, multiple team members on our staff were exposed to the virus and led us to a prompt decision to begin universal screening for women who were admitted for delivery. Once we recognized that we needed to do the screening, we began.

And so the study that you're mentioning show that for us, really the most interesting part was that about 13 and a half percent of women delivering were asymptomatic but tested positive for coronavirus.

LEMON: Mm-hmm.

GOFFMAN: The second thing that we saw was that when you look at our total group of coronavirus positive women, about 88 percent of them had no symptoms.

LEMON: And so in that study, it recommends universal testing for everyone, because you think in the general population, it would be -- it would mirror what is happening with the pregnant women who are coming under your care. GOFFMAN: I think a couple of thoughts. Having this sort of information has been really valuable for us with significant implications for us. It actually allowed us to do things like safely take care of the mom, like take precautions that we need to throughout the hospital stay, safely take care of the babies, as well as to use PPE or personal protective equipment that we need to protect our teams.

We recognize that having this knowledge of the patient's coronavirus status is actually valuable for many reasons.

LEMON: Mm-hmm.

[23:49:53]

GOFFMAN: And I think to answer your question about whether or not this group of women in New York City looks like the rest of the population, I don't know that we know for sure how this applies to the general population, but it certainly appears that there may be more people than we initially recognized who are infected with the virus but fortunately are feeling well.

LEMON: Wow, it's fascinating. And we appreciate you joining us. Dr. Goffman, your information is really pertinent right now, and we thank you so much. Please be safe.

GOFFMAN: Thank you. Thanks very much.

LEMON: We'll be right back.

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[23:55:00]

LEMON: Before we leave you tonight, sad news. New York City has lost a hero. Gregory Hodge, an EMT and 24-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department, has died from the coronavirus. EMT Hodge assisted at the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attacks.

Commissioner Daniel Nigro is saying in a post that Hodge was a skilled responder who provided outstanding care throughout his distinguished career, adding that the entire department mourns his loss. He was 59 years old.

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