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Coronavirus and Ventilators; When Did Coronavirus Hit United States?; Trump vs. Top Scientists?. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired April 23, 2020 - 15:00   ET

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


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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Hi there. I'm Brianna Keilar in Washington, and today is Thursday, April 23.

And, right now, the death toll in the United States is more than 47,000 people, a stunning number of neighbors, friends and family members lost to coronavirus.

As states move to reopen, Dr. Anthony Fauci just saying moments ago that he is -- quote -- "not overly confident" right now at all on the ability to test widely enough for coronavirus.

Testing, of course, is an important part of reopening. It is key. President Trump also now says he disagrees with Georgia's reopening after he initially pushed to -- quote -- "liberate states."

The House of Representatives is now voting on more economic relief for Americans to the tune of almost $500 billion. It is badly needed relief, as we learn of another 4.4 million Americans applying for unemployment benefits for the first time, totaling 26.5 million people just in the last five weeks.

So just to give you some context there, that's about the entire population of Florida and South Carolina combined.

First, let's bring in CNN Martin Savidge. He is live for us from Atlanta.

And, Martin, health experts are cautioning against states rushing to reopen, but that's certainly not stopping Georgia or Colorado or Texas.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: No, all those states either have a plan or going to announce a plan. That's the case with Texas tomorrow.

Here in Georgia, just tremendous controversy still. It was heightened, of course, yesterday by that tremendous, I guess you could say flip by the president of the United States. It was reported earlier in the week that he and Vice President Mike Pence had contacted Governor Brian Kemp here to say, hey, sounds like the plan you have is pretty good. But then last night at the platform, you heard the president come out

and he was very much opposed. Now, according to reporting from CNN and the White House crew, including Jim Acosta, the reason for that was that Dr. Anthony Fauci, before that press briefing, had got on the president and basically said, look, we know we're going to be asked about this and that the medical community cannot support the plan to reopen businesses like the state of Georgia.

And so the president turned. It does not appear that that had any impact whatsoever on Brian Kemp. He was tweeting that he appreciated the bold leadership of the president, but then went on to imply that Georgia is going to do what Georgia is going to do.

The interesting thing here is that here's kind of the confusion. So you have these businesses that open tomorrow. We're talking nail salons, hair salons, massage parlors, tattoos. You can also go bowling and you can go to the gym.

But, on top of that, there is still a quarantine in place. In other words, the shelter-in-place order for the state of Georgia still is there, which means, technically, people aren't supposed to go out. Yet the governor said these businesses are going to open.

That's just a sample of some of the confusion that is being felt here. Then you have a number of businesses that say, we're not going to open, despite the fact that we can. And you have some employees who say, hey, look, even if my business does open, I just don't feel comfortable going in. I fear that I may get sick -- Brianna.

KEILAR: And New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo, Martin, announcing today that nearly 14 percent of 3,000 randomly selected New Yorkers tested positive for antibodies. What does that tell us?

SAVIDGE: You know, it tells us that this virus is spreading much more dramatically than we thought.

I was just, you know, looking at sort of some of the extrapolation that you could do with those numbers. And, basically, then, going by those percentages, it would imply that about 1.7 million people in New York City and roughly 2.4 million people in the state of New York could potentially be infected with a coronavirus.

That is far above any of the numbers of the confirmed testing so far. And that's just one state. You clearly have seen from other studies that are being done and other models that have been released that this virus had been spreading amongst the major cities of the United States back in February.

That's when we were all looking at China. But it turns out actually coronavirus was roaring through here. And that's the warning to those states now lifting their warranty. Even though you may have stopped the curve, so to speak, it could take off at any moment again -- Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Martin, thank you so much. There are blatant disagreements between the president and his top

scientists playing out on national TV. While sharing the same podium, both Drs. Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield insisted coronavirus will come back later this year, while President Trump suggested maybe it won't.

As CNN Kaitlan Collins reports, it's a familiar pattern from the president.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Trump's unpredictable relationship with the scientists leading his administration's response to the coronavirus was front and center this week.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Come up and explain, please.

COLLINS: On Thursday, Trump brought the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director to the podium to issue a correction after the president claimed the media had misquoted him.

TRUMP: Dr. Robert Redfield was totally misquoted in the media on a statement about the fall season and the virus.

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COLLINS: But Dr. Redfield confirmed what he told "The Washington Post" was correct, that a second wave of coronavirus could be more difficult if it happened during flu season.

DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, CDC DIRECTOR: I'm accurately quoted in "The Washington Post," as difficult. But the headline was inappropriate.

COLLINS: In that same briefing, Trump was at odds with all three doctors over whether the virus would reappear.

REDFIELD: Next fall and winter, we're going to have two viruses circulating.

TRUMP: We may not even have corona coming back.

Wouldn't you say there's a good chance that COVID will not come back?

DR. DEBORAH BIRX, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE COORDINATOR: We don't know.

TRUMP: And if it comes back, it's in a very small, confined area that we put out, like fire?

BIRX: Well, the great thing is, we will be able to find it earlier this time.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NIAID DIRECTOR: We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that, because of the degree of transmissibility that it has, the global nature.

COLLINS: At the same briefing, Trump denied knowing a top doctor who was dismissed from his job as the director of the government agency leading the charge on vaccines.

TRUMP: If the guy says he was pushed out of a job, maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. You would have to hear the other side. I don't know who he is.

COLLINS: Dr. Rick Bright claims his ouster was retaliation because he resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug to the American public.

In recent weeks, the president has touted hydroxychloroquine and at times urged federal officials to approve it to treat coronavirus.

TRUMP: And there are signs that it works on this.

COLLINS: Though, lately, he's backed off.

The president is also now criticizing Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and says his plan to reopen his state is too aggressive.

TRUMP: I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines.

COLLINS: Sources told CNN that members of the task force urged Trump to oppose Kemp's plan.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, made his concern clear Thursday.

FAUCI: Going ahead and leapfrogging into phases where you should not be, I would advise him, as a health official and as a physician, not to do that.

COLLINS: Fauci's disapproval was much more emphatic than when Dr. Deborah Birx was asked a day earlier if Georgia was moving too fast.

BIRX: If there's a way that people can social distance and do those things, then they can do those things. I don't know how, but people are very creative. So I'm not going to prejudge.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS: Now, Brianna, back to those allegations made by Dr. Bright, the White House has still not responded to them specifically or in full, after he put out that scathing letter yesterday, though we should note that, late last night, an HHS spokesperson put out a statement saying that it was actually Dr. Bright who requested the emergency us to put chloroquine in this Strategic National Stockpile.

And that has been their only pushback so far to his statement, though, right now, we're expecting from health officials that they believe this is going to be a fight that plays out for weeks to come.

KEILAR: All right, Kaitlan Collins at the White House, thank you so much.

And joining me now is CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

And, Elizabeth, we're waiting for these results of a preliminary New York study on this drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for the virus.

So, what is the holdup here?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: This is such a big mystery, Brianna.

So Governor Cuomo in New York told us many, many days ago, April 20 -- we're going to announce preliminary results April 20. April 20 came. He didn't announce anything. At his press briefing, CNN producer Mark Morales asked him, hey, what's with these results? And he said, oh, they have to go to the federal government first, naming the FDA and the CDC.

We called those agencies. Essentially, they didn't know what we were talking about. They said, we haven't gotten any results.

And so now we don't know what's going on. But this is a much awaited study. Once it's announced, it will be the largest study that's been announced, 1,600 people. It will be helpful to patients, coronavirus patients, their families, their doctors, to know, does hydroxychloroquine work or doesn't it?

We were expecting those results, preliminary results, on Monday. However, the researcher says, look, I'm going to be releasing these as early as next week. So at least, hopefully, next week, we will get an answer.

KEILAR: And Martin just told us, Elizabeth, that Governor Cuomo said today, preliminary results show nearly 14 percent of New Yorkers actually have antibodies for the virus. Explain just how significant that is.

COHEN: Right. So, first of all, I think we need to take that 14 percent with a bit of a grain of salt.

And here's why. Governor Cuomo explained they were doing this testing on people who were out and about, at grocery stores, other kinds of stores. So, by definition, you're getting a group of people who have not been sitting in their homes. They're out and about, so they're probably more likely to have been infected. So the true rate might not be 14 percent.

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But even that among this group of 3,000 New Yorkers that it was 14 percent tells you something. That's quite -- that's quite a number. That's quite a few people who have had the infection.

It's so important to know what this infection rate is. It will help public officials start to change the social distancing measures or not change them. It'll help tell them what to do. Also, people who know that they're positive can look into donating their plasma. It could help people who are currently sick.

KEILAR: No, certainly.

And there's this study out of New York's largest hospital system. This is one that I think so many people have zeroed in on, Elizabeth, because it found that nearly all coronavirus patients who needed ventilators ended up dying.

What's the takeaway here from medical experts?

COHEN: Yes. Yes, it was something like 88 percent. And I think that just tells you how dangerous this virus is.

And also, if you get to the point where someone has to be put on a ventilator, all hope is not lost, but it is a very, very grave situation. I know I have spoken to so many physicians who are working in the ICU with these patients, and they say it is just a -- it's just devastating to watch so many people on ventilators die.

To be clear, they say people surprise us, and people who we thought were not going to make it do make it, but such a high percentage of them are passing away.

KEILAR: Yes, it's so upsetting.

And the president has downplayed this possibility of coronavirus returning, resurging in the fall, which just seems completely opposite of what health experts are saying.

In fact, they're worried that this could come back in even greater magnitude in the fall.

COHEN: Brianna, I think we should listen carefully to the words that Dr. Fauci said. And it was just in the story that my colleague Kaitlan Collins has -- had.

He didn't say come back in the fall. He said, it will be with us in the fall. The doctors that I'm talking to, these are infectious disease experts, epidemiologists. They don't think it's going away. They say it's not so much as a second wave. It's going to be that it will still be with us.

It may not be at exactly this level. It could be less. It could, God forbid, be more, but they don't think it's going away. They think it will still be with us.

I think what Dr. Redfield was getting at, or at least this is what his people say, they -- Dr. Redfield doesn't think it's going away either necessarily. It's that in the fall, you have got coronavirus at whatever level it is, along with flu. That's the issue.

KEILAR: All right, Elizabeth, thank you so much. And coming up: There is one shocking statistic that can predict who

might die from coronavirus. We will be discussing with an E.R. doctor next.

Plus, new details about the first known coronavirus death in the U.S. She was in her 50s, she was healthy, and she exercised regularly.

We will look at that story ahead.

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KEILAR: Welcome back.

Health officials, including members of the White House task force, are cautioning governors against reopening their states early, warning they could see a surge in new cases.

Joining me now is Dr. Lisa Dabby. She is an emergency medical physician at UCLA.

And we really appreciate you being here, Dr. Dabby.

I'm curious what you think, because the president said that perhaps coronavirus won't be here in the fall, maybe it won't be here in the winter. And, immediately after that, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the task force at the White House said he had no doubt it would.

So, you're a doctor. I suspect I know whose opinion you're leaning toward here.

DR. LISA DABBY, UCLA HEALTH: Yes.

I mean, I think the reality is that coronavirus is not going away anytime soon. And I think the sooner we embrace that and learn how to safely coexist with the virus, the better off we're all going to be.

This virus is here, and we need to learn how to live with it, is the best advice I could give right now.

KEILAR: This afternoon, Dr. Fauci expressed some concern about the ability to ramp up testing in this country.

Let's listen.

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FAUCI: I am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that. We're getting better and better at it as the weeks go by. But we are not in a situation where we say we're exactly where we want to be with regard to testing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Where does that leave us, Dr. Dabby? DABBY: Yes, so testing is a really important factor right now in

terms of the idea of opening up the economy.

I can say we're really fortunate, at UCLA, that we're running over 500 tests a day and we're able to get immediate results. But that's not the reality across L.A. or across the nation.

I think, without being able to immediately test and in real time know that a patient has coronavirus, how do you go about isolating that patient from the community? How do you go about contact-tracing, if you're not getting the information until a week later? At that point, that patient has gone into the public and exposed hundreds, if not thousands of people.

And so I think it's really important. I know everybody's working really hard. And we're going to get there at some point. But it's really important to have readily testing available to everybody, not just certain populations, and to get real-time results, before we can make smart decisions to keep people safe.

KEILAR: And Dr. Dabby, doctors are reporting to CNN an unprecedented level of blood clotting when they're looking at coronavirus patients.

And that's something that can obviously be life-threatening. It has been in many, many cases. How do you explain this sort of phenomenon that seems to go along with the virus?

DABBY: So, Brianna, that's a great question.

We don't really know why, but we're definitely seeing it. People who have this virus are having what we call a hypercoagulable effect, where their blood is more likely to clot than a person who doesn't have the virus.

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And, unfortunately, that can lead to really dangerous things, like clots to the lungs, clots to the brains.

So we're trying to be very proactive about putting patients on medications to thin their blood to prevent clots from forming. But, at this point, we don't really have answers to why this is -- the virus is causing this effect on patients.

KEILAR: And you're in emergency medicine. I know that there has been a problem where folks are so afraid of the coronavirus that they're actually deciding not to get care for life-threatening illnesses and conditions.

And that's actually killing them, because they're not going into the E.R. What are you seeing? What needs to happen? What do people need to know?

DABBY: Yes, Brianna, thanks for bringing this up.

This is a really important thing that we're seeing now. People are scared to come to the E.R. And the real message that I'd love to get across is, please don't be scared. I feel safer in the emergency department than I do going to the grocery store.

We're using really impressive infection control measures to make sure that everybody is protected and not exposed to COVID. What I'm seeing is, I'm seeing somebody coming in with an appendix, and it's already burst, because they waited a week to come in, instead of coming in right away.

I'm seeing somebody who's had a G.I. bleed, and he stayed at home bleeding for five days. And by the time he comes into the E.R., his blood count is so low that he almost died at home.

And so what people need to know is that we're here for you. Let us take care of you. We don't want to see people getting sicker and dying at home from things that are completely preventable. Strokes and heart attacks, if you come in right away, we can do amazing things. We can take clots out of vessels to preserve brain function.

Same with hearts. If somebody's having a heart attack, and they come in within those first few hours, we can remove those clots and preserve heart function. So, it's really, really important to know that you can come in right away, so that we can help you.

We would hate to see, after this all passes, that all these patients have suffered these terrible medical consequences from things that could have been easily treatable. So, please come see us if you have a problem.

KEILAR: And there's a study -- pardon me -- Dr. Dabby, of New York's largest hospital system, and it found that nearly all of the patients on ventilators ended up dying.

I mean, this is something that that's really upsetting people. I wonder if you're seeing similar outcomes.

DABBY: Yes, so I think -- I think we have to be cautious about taking a study from one hospital and -- or hospital system in one part of the country and applying it, generalizing it across the country.

There's a lot of factors that go into mortality, a patient's age, their other medical problems, their socioeconomic status, their ethnicity.

And the truth is, we can't take information from one hospital and apply it across the board.

I can speak to what I have seen personally. The majority of the patients that I have seen in the E.R., I have been able to send home safely. I have admitted people for oxygen support.

Of those patients, some of them have ended up on ventilators. And I can proudly say that those patients have come off ventilators without dying. So, I would encourage people to stay hopeful. This is a serious virus. People are dying of it, but we're able to save a lot of people, and people are having good outcomes as well. KEILAR: All right, Dr. Lisa Dabby, thank you.

DABBY: Thanks, Brianna.

KEILAR: On March 1, the official number of cases was just 23. Now new reporting reveals the real number was likely in the tens of thousands.

What we know about the early hidden outbreaks -- next.

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KEILAR: The explosion of coronavirus cases in New York City may have started well before the first confirmed case in early March.

In fact, there may have been silent outbreaks in big cities across the country, including Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle, all of this according to new modeling from Northeastern University reported in "The New York Times."

Let's go to CNN Brynn Gingras right now.

So, Brynn, is there an effort to find out whether the findings in this modeling are actually true?

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Brianna.

Well, we posed that question to the New York State Department of Health, as well as New Jersey, two of the states, of course, we know that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus.

And, essentially, they're saying, at this point, there isn't this retrospective outlook to see if there were earlier cases, because there's so much work to look ahead at this point. But, really, what we're hearing -- or what I'm hearing talking to people on the ground, though, is, it's not really ruled out at this point.

They really do want answers to this, but it's just not going to happen at this moment, but that modeling is incredible, knowing, according to it, that, in New York, when we knew about the first recorded case on March 1, this modeling suggests just in New York alone that there might have been more than 10,000 cases.

So it's pretty incredible, and it's actually what we have been somewhat hearing on the ground. I'm sure you have heard some anecdotal testimony, Brianna, from friends even who said, I kind of had these symptoms, but they weren't the flu. So what was it?

Even an E.R. doctor who we caught up with in the midst of this crisis in a New York City hospital, where we were inside with her, talked about that earlier today on CNN. Take a listen.

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DR. ARABIA MOLLETTE, BROOKDALE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL MEDICAL CENTER: We noticed that the volume at the emergency department back in February started to increase, and we noticed that many people were coming in really, really sick.

And, at first, we were thinking like, OK, is this the flu? Now we -- in having this conversation, we figured that perhaps it was due to the coronavirus.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GINGRAS: And even since this modeling has come out, I have even talked to several people today who are now starting to ask those questions themselves of: What did I have? What sort of symptoms were those?

So, of course, this is something we will probably likely learn

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