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Cuomo Prime Time

One-on-One With Remdesivir Clinical Trial Key Researcher Dr. Andre Kalil; President Donald Trump Again Questions Need For Widespread Testing; Los Angeles To Offer Free COVID-19 Testing To All Residents; Los Angeles Schools Won't Reopen Without More Testing And Tracing; Tampa Bay Times: Florida Stops Medical Examiners From Releasing Coronavirus Death Data. Aired 9-10p ET

Aired April 29, 2020 - 21:00   ET

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

[21:00:00]

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And everything in the whole world seems to be happening on Zoom right now. Chris Cuomo is ready to take it over. Our coverage continues now with you Chris. You're doing Zoom.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST, CUOMO PRIME TIME: Can't stop love. Can't stop love - Zoom, I do this. This is very Zoom. Good night. I'm Chris Cuomo and welcome to "Prime Time."

Federal guidelines to slow the spread are set to expire tomorrow. No state appears to have met the benchmark to reopen that is 14 straight days of declining number of cases. Not one state has met it.

The President's leadership in this moment, I'm not really sure about needing testing after all. Really for the love of logic, just two days since Pence said we should all be proud about the step-up on testing, when will the doublespeak end? No wonder so many people were looking to Governors for guidance.

We also have a big story tonight. What is the real deal on research on a new COVID treatment? Is this about hope? For all the doubt, we do know something, and it is amazing. "I" is replaced by - even illness becomes wellness. That saying was from Malcolm X. We must be together as ever as one. Let's get after it.

All right, our nation's top infectious disease expert just said today that there is a drug that may be able to block this virus.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: If you look at the time to recovery being shorter in the Remdesivir on, it was 11 days compared to 15 days. That's a "P" value, for the scientists who are listening, of 0.001. So that's something that, although a 31 percent improvement, doesn't seem like a knockout 100 percent. It is a very important proof of concept, because what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus.

(END VIDEO CLIP) CUOMO: Okay. Let's all say the name of the drug together. Ready? Remdesivir, the drug is called Remdesivir. You're going to hear it a lot. It's not easy to say. But now you know. The FDA has reportedly fast tracked it. That's what's happening right now, for emergency use.

That was Dr. Fauci, obviously, talking about the drug. He says the data shows it does have a clear-cut effect in diminishing a patient's recovery time. Not a cure. It diminishes recovery time, like Tamiflu. So what is the real deal about who it helps and how much?

We all want a cure, let's be very clear. But we can't invest in hype and false hope it only weakness our ability to have the resolve to fight the disease. Now the good news, a key researcher behind the clinical trial for the drug is our guest tonight, Dr. Andre Kalil. Doctor, thank you very much for being on "Prime Time"

DR. ANDRE KALIL, PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA MEDICAL CENTER: Thank you, Chris I appreciate it.

CUOMO: I appreciate you taking the opportunity. You're the best guest for this. So give us your take what is your level of enthusiasm about this drug's efficacy and what do you believe its efficacy to be?

DR. KALIL: So this is a very important question, Chris. I'm one of the principal investigators for the NIH trial. This trial was run mostly in the United States with about 50 different sites here, about 20 sites outside the United States, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Denmark, Germany, and Spain.

So this is a very large trial, sponsored by the NIH. Dr. John was the lead on the processed NIH with large group of very experienced investigators and here in University of Nebraska, I'm the principal investigator. We started this trial right on February 21st.

We enrolled the very first patient of this very important trial in February. It was one of the patients that came on the cruise, the "Diamond Princess" cruise. This trial, actually - the very interesting aspect of this trial is that a very strict methodology, so this as strict as it can be in terms of a scientific methodology. We're talking a--

CUOMO: So it's legit, it wasn't too small a sample, it wasn't double blind, it was peer-reviewed, it checks all the boxes. That's good to know so we should listen to it.

DR. KALIL: Absolutely, Chris. Importantly, it's not peer-reviewed yet. So but the preliminary results--

CUOMO: Not peer-reviewed.

DR. KALIL: The preliminary results are so important that we decided that this has to be out to the public, that everyone has to know, because the results are so significant from the statistical perspective that we cannot just hold and wait for the whole process to go through and see what's going to happen, because we believe that at this-- CUOMO: Let's talk about why that is, Doctor. Let's be very clear. Now let's just be very clear. You're a researcher.

[21:05:00]

CUOMO: You're a highly skilled academic and clinician, you're not a politician. I'm not asking you to sell the drug to people. But Wall Street went crazy. And releasing preliminary data is unusual. You are saying the same thing Dr. Fauci said, which is yes, but this data matters so much that we need it to get out.

Why does it matter so much? It's not like this is a pill that you'll take where you can never get this, it's not like a vaccine. Why did you think that the research was so important that it needed to come out?

DR. KALIL: Great question, Chris. Here is the deal. This is really, really important. This is what I've done for 20 years. I'm very much, as you said, I'm a clinician, and I'm in the best site taking care of patients. This is my first - first time I'm doing in my life. And to get with my clinical care I've done - such far busier.

So this is really what I do for life, that's my 24/7 activity. And, you know, when we participate in a trial that strict, that robust in terms of double blind, single control, with the sponsorship of the NIH. It really, this is - we're talking about probably at this point in the middle of this pandemic. There is no trial that has been done with such strict methodology.

That's very important, because as you know, there is a lot of pseudoscience going out there a lot of fake science going out there. This is absolutely true science. And that's why I'm participating in this trial because I believe that this trial really could bring some important findings. So that's the first thing--

CUOMO: All right, so none of the Chloroquine stinks is on this study. This was done in a different way so you have more confidence in it. But why are the preliminary findings so potent? What is the eureka moment here that people have to know right now?

DR. KALIL: So there are two things that are very important for me. And I'm seeing that not only as a researcher, as a clinician, as somebody who takes care of patients every day. The two findings that we know today that Dr. Fauci mentioned was, one, is that the time to recovery is reduced by four days.

This is not a small deal. This is a big deal, because it's four days, out of now from 15, 14 days, about a third of the time that patients are going to require oxygen, are going to require respiratory support, are going to require being in the hospital.

Why this is important, if you would ask me if I would stay two weeks in a hospital and two weeks minus four days, I would - I mean there is no body that would tell that they would prefer to stay four more days because every day you stay in the hospital, you have increased risk of complications. Increase the risks are there. CUOMO: Understood.

DR. KALIL: So that's from the patient perspective, this is definitely something very important because you're going to really have a third reduction on your time for recovery. The second thing that is as important as well is that there was a trend, even though not statistical significant because of the trial was not powered for mortality, but there was a trend for improving mortality from 11.6 to 8 percent with Remdesivir. So if you put together people die--

CUOMO: People died 3 percent reduction in death?

DR. KALIL: Exactly. If you put together, almost 4 percent reduction in death, with four days' reduction on the need for hospital and respiratory support, this is not something to take lightly, especially when it comes from a trial that is that robust. This is not a cure. As they're going to begin this is not a cure--

CUOMO: Right. So let's talk about that.

DR. KALIL: If you brought the mortality down to zero and if you had absolutely 100 percent cure - this is not a cure, this is a treatment. That's why the trial--

CUOMO: I totally get it.

DR. KALIL: --to look for other therapies as well. This is the beginning of the process.

CUOMO: So let's talk context here. Tamiflu, which people are familiar with, you get the flu, you get the pill of Tamiflu, I know this isn't a pill, it's an IV treatment that has to be done in the hospital at this point, but that's not a cure either, right? It reduces the length of the flu. That's the same dynamic we're talking about here.

In terms of whom it is great information for, not me, somebody who had a nasty case but stayed home, or somebody who gets a case and doesn't have to go in the hospital or somebody who goes in the hospital but doesn't have an extreme case.

This is a drug that at least as tested, was about extreme cases in the hospital where this was an IV treatment. So we're not talking about something that is a pill that we can pop and it will make what you deal with at home shorter in duration. So this is a very limited population we're talking about with the drug. Is that a fair point?

DR. KALIL: It's a very fair point. I'm glad that you brought this up. This is a very fair and very important point.

[21:10:00]

DR. KALIL: This drug is only to be given for people with moderate to severe COVID disease. These are patients that are actually not only having the infection but they have the infection already spread to the lungs, causing pneumonia. They're required to be hospitalized. They're required to receive oxygen or be on ventilation. These are definitely patients that are in the more severe spectrum of the disease. And that was the goal of the clinical trial. This is not a medication that should be given to anyone that doesn't meet - what we meant an inclusion criterion of the trial meaning that you have to have pneumonia from the Coronavirus.

You have to be hospitalized requiring oxygen and or more in respiratory support. This is a very important point to present. I'm glad that you brought that up. And it is an intravenous medication that requires an intravenous catheter to get administered as well.

CUOMO: Let me get one public policy point from you before I run out of time. I want to just say in advance, Dr. Kalil, I know how busy you are with processing this study right now and you're other clinical work?

I really appreciate you taking the time, because the country is hearing about this now, they need to hear it straight right now and they're not going to get a better source than you, you have no agenda other than the science.

So people will hear about this, Remdesivir, this is it, this is the cure, we can reopen now. We're going to be okay, stop with all this isolation, all the mass craziness, we have something that will keep us from dying, let's reopen. Let's be more ambitious. What is your caution?

DR. KALIL: Well, I can tell with 100 percent certainty, Remdesivir is - should not change, you know, even with the data we have, with the positive data that we can shorten the time of disease, we can potentially save lives, Remdesivir will not do anything to - in terms of public health.

Remdesivir is strictly is going to benefit people with moderate or severe disease that are right in the hospital. So just having the Remdesivir available, let's say if they approve Remdesivir, it's going to be a great benefit for patients that are sick, very sick from COVID in the hospital.

But when it comes to public health, Remdesivir is going to have absolutely no impact, because Remdesivir is not a drug to be used to prevent an infection, it's not a drug to be used in somebody with a mild infection who is at home who will improve without any medications.

Remdesivir is for a very specific small proportion of patients that get really sick, that have a high risk of death. This is the patient population that will benefit from Remdesivir. So Remdesivir should not have any significant impact in terms of public health policy, in terms of opening or closing.

This is a whole different subject that will not be influenced by the availability of Remdesivir. This is a very important thing to understand that prevention and treatment are two very different things and should not be confused at all. CUOMO: And I'll tell you the hopeful thing we finally have a tool in the box. Remdesivir is the first thing that we know with science behind it, you can give to someone who is in extremis, who is very sick and it will help them.

That's a first thing we've been able to say that about with certainty and a big reason we can say it is because if you, Dr. Kalil, and your team, thank you for killing yourself to do this research and getting it right and getting it done so soon. Thank you, sir. God bless you and your family. Stay healthy.

DR. KALIL: Thank you, it's a team effort, lots of people are working together and urge investigators all over the world. It's a huge team effort at University of Nebraska. It's really an effort of so many people. And I cannot thank everyone here, but it's just the beginning.

We're going to find more treatments and more things that hopefully that are going to improve the lives of all these patients being affected by the disease. Thanks so much for the opportunity, Chris.

CUOMO: Doctor, thank you for taking it. It made a big difference I can't get a better source for my audience than you. Be well. Appreciate it. So just quick sum-up, we finally have a tool in the box. We're losing way too many people. You know the ratio of people who go on ventilators to get off? It's not good. In fact it's shockingly bad.

Now there's something that maybe will help. It's for the worst cases, the moderate to severe in the hospital. At least we have something. Now, is it a cause to leave your house and to start being cavalier? No. And I don't know why people are hyping it that way online.

I don't know why Wall Street traded up the way it did on this, I don't know, other than that it's organized gambling. So see it for what it is? There is cause for hope. But it is not a cure. We don't have to worry less about getting the disease because of this, all right?

Now, reopening talk, okay? It's as contagious as anything, has been. I know I'm hearing it, you're hearing it, we all want to get going. A big part of the equation is masks. And I got to be honest; I don't know what the heck the deal is?

So let's bring in Sanjay Gupta because we've gone like full cycle with this. Nobody needs masks, don't touch the masks. Let other people have the masks. Now everybody needs the masks. What's the deal and why, next?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:15:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We've done incredible with the testing over the next coming weeks. We've seen some astonishing numbers. I don't know that all of that is even necessary.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: What? If I had any hair left, I would rip it out. The day before yesterday, Pence stood there proud, next to Trump, and told you all, be proud today because this is momentous. The massive step that the Federal Government took in working with the states to get testing prep to a whole new level so we can reopen, literally Monday and now the President says he doesn't even know if testing is necessary?

Listen, let's take TV and all of - over there explain to the faithful how it's okay that he said this, and he is being misconstrued. It's a bunch of bunk. It's not okay.

[21:20:00]

CUOMO: It is poisonous, pandering to ignorance. As a result, are you really surprised that states, especially red states, right, almost all of the 21 states that are going to lift restrictions early on businesses and otherwise, where are they going to get their guidance? Why should they believe anything hard and fast?

It doesn't appear any of those states met the Federal guidelines of 14 days of cases on the decline. But can you be surprised? When the President changes his message every other day? Liberate your states. Don't stay home. Testing is everything. I'm not so sure about testing.

Of course you're going to have this. And it is just appalling from leadership. That's not playing politics. It's truth. Now, let's get truth on something else here. Let's bring in Dr. Sanjay Gupta and talk about masks, okay?

Now, I happen to have a very fetching mask that a friend of mine made for me. I will model it for you. Look, it is made to cover even a pie hole as big as mine. This was made by my beautiful young friend Selay, Sanjay's daughter. It is a beautiful fabric mask.

Now Doctor, you and I have been talking masks it seems forever here and we seems to have gone in a 360 about it.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, yes, you're right. Initially the guidance was you don't need masks because first of all, the masks that health care workers are using, you save those for health care workers. There was a shortage of them.

So the other types of masks likes the one you're showing there weren't necessarily designed to protect the user. I think what changed at some point several weeks ago was the acknowledgement that a mask like that could protect other people from the user.

So if you wore that mask out in public, Chris, and you had the virus, you could actually decrease the amount of virus that you would shed into the environment. So it's a way to mitigate the spread. It's not perfect by any means.

You know the N-95 fitted mask, that's the one that's actually going to be the best in terms of protecting the user. But a mask like this would offer some benefit towards decreasing the amount of virus being put out into the environment. That's a good thing, I mean, especially as we're trying to slow down the spread. That was the thinking, Chris.

CUOMO: It seems to have become a little bit of a touchstone for people. That if you have to wear a mask, that's a severe restriction, that's the real deal. I talked to Governor DeWine last night, in Ohio, and he had a really interesting, and by the way honest and candid answer, for why he was not making it mandatory to wear a mask in a retail store?

His answer was simple. I think people should wear them. I'm not making it mandatory because the push back was so strong that it was a no, don't do that to us. We don't want to wear them when we go into retail stores. What is it about the mask, Sanjay, that you think is such a litmus test for people about whether or not a restriction is tolerable?

DR. GUPTA: I think its three things. One is the point that you just made. It hasn't been explained very well to people. So I think they lost a little bit of faith in the explanation. Wait, you told me I don't need them, now you tell me I need them, so I don't trust you guys anymore.

Second is the liberty, don't tell me what I can and can't do. The third is this idea I think the misconception that you know people aren't doing it to protect themselves. You know if I frame the reasoning and saying, hey, look, you're not doing it to protect yourself, you're doing it to protect the people around you.

You're doing it so that you don't spread the virus which you may have in your nose and mouth and not even realize it because you could be completely without symptoms and still have the virus and still be spreading it.

I think if people were to understand that better, maybe they would be more likely to do it. If you can keep a safe distance from someone, you probably don't need it. But it's hard, as people start to go out more in public, and you don't know did I keep a safe six-foot distance around me for the entire time I was out?

If you're not confident you can do that, you should wear a mask so that you don't inadvertently infect someone else.

CUOMO: Yes, and the states are doing it, state by state whatever the rule is, or different in different places, New York has a rule that you just outlined. You know something really interesting that I saw from the reopening, every state that is reopening has created a new assumption in the impact models that the White House is using.

And every addition to it has increased the death projection. Each week the death projection is going up. Now, is that just a natural assumptive consequence of time or is there co efficiency or there is an added basis for boost because of early reopening?

DR. GUPTA: I think the early reopening is definitely fueling these changes in the models. I've talked to the people who were authoring these models and asked them about you know what are their inputs?

[21:25:00]

DR. GUPTA: How are they actually coming up with these numbers? And that definitely fits into it. What else fits into it Chris? And you've talked about this, your brother has talked about it is this is not looking as much like a curve in many right in places like New York in many places, it looks like a plateau.

So we've gotten up to a certain amount and then it's sort of flattened out there. Flattening the curve is what we're supposed to do, not create a plateau. That's why you're seeing a significant change in numbers.

Chris, I'll remind you, that just over a month ago, the same modelers, IMHE modelers, said the death toll would be closer to 90,000, and then they reduced it to 60,000 why? Because the physical distancing stay- at-home measures were working and in some ways they were working better than even the modelers anticipated.

People were really abiding by it, they were checking people's cell phone data, actually checking their mobility, anonymously, obviously, but they were trying to figure out are people actually staying at home? And the answer was yes, more than they expected that brought the numbers down.

But now they are seeing that the numbers are sort of flattened, that's making the numbers come up; they also started coming down already. They've also added probable infections into the equation Chris, you remember? That's also driven up the numbers.

And then this last point, how do we account for the reopening in these models? I've got to tell you, and I don't mean to poke fun at the modelers because this is hard work, but all these models are wrong. Some are useful, as we say.

The range is huge, like if you look at the IMHE model, the range is somewhere between 40,000 and 140,000, right? We focus on sort of the middle number, but it's a huge range that they're providing which kind of basically is, you know, understandable. We really don't know for certain where this is headed. But right now, the projected numbers of deaths do seem to be going up.

CUOMO: Well, look I mean to be fair to them, you know, you get asked to model a projection with an assumption built in that a state has to have 14 days of cases trending down.

DR. GUPTA: Right.

CUOMO: Not just a slowed increased rate. And so you must start doing your modeling and your projections. And now, none of the 21 states that are reopening or about to reopen have met the standard. Your model is shot. You don't have a chance of having any real accuracy on that.

DR. GUPTA: That's right. CUOMO: And the hard part of it is nobody is correcting them. The President came out today and said I don't even know that testing is needed. So what the hell the uses as a standard, why even have it?

DR. GUPTA: That was surprising I think given that everybody I know around the President I talk to many people on the Coronavirus Task Force, has been telling him, have told him, will continue to tell him that not only is testing is important. It's the pivotal thing everything else sort of revolves around the testing.

You can't make any other decisions unless you have eyes on this and it's going to continue to be important. We will argue, I think people will argue about what is the right number of tests that are needed? And, you know, the Harvard roadmap, they say ultimately by July you need 20 million tests a day.

And just to clarify, that doesn't mean, you know, the population of the country is only 350 million, roughly, so several people will get tested several times in order to give people confidence in order to return to the workplace.

Maybe the answer is somewhere in between, maybe it's not 20 million a day, who knows what it's going to be, but it's a lot more, Chris, by all accounts, than we're doing now.

CUOMO: Look, what we're really going to battle ultimately is going to be the "X" factor of fatigue. And, you know my best sense from my reporting and my knowledge of the players is that the President is betting on fatigue that people are going to get tired of this.

They're going to want to reopen, and every little suggestion, liberate your states, I don't even know that testing is necessary, all these little things, hyping up the drug that they came up with today, making it sound like it's almost a cure.

This is all to push people towards fatigue and that will be the biggest battle. We'll see how it plays out. I think we're going to see it sooner than expected. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, you are a gift. Thank you for being on the show tonight.

DR. GUPTA: You got it, Chris, any time.

CUOMO: And thank Selay for the mask, it's awesome. I can't believe I've kept it away from the girls so long, because this is the best looking thing in the house, and it covers my mouth, which is a double bonus.

California has been taking a much more cautious approach than any of the 21 states reopening now, why? What do they see that other states are discounting or ignoring altogether? We have the Mayor of Los Angeles here. Another lucky guest why? His city is about to be the first city in the nation to do something that is very significant. What is it, next?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:30:00]

CUOMO: Some important breaking news to tell you about tonight. L.A. is going to become the first major city to offer free COVID tests to everyone. Now it is a generous move but it is also a nod to desperation, why?

You know nothing if you don't test and you can't trace. You don't know what kind of scale of what problem you're having especially when you talk about big population centers. We're so coolers about the reality we don't even know how many dead there are because of that.

Numbers in the state are stabilizing in California, okay but there are still going up. So let's bring in the Mayor of Los Angeles obviously Mayor Eric Garcetti has become a house hold name. Welcome back to "Prime Time"

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, LOS ANGELES: Great to be with you. You look good I like the high end tight the new hair cut.

CUOMO: Thank you, the misses did it. My joke is that when I asked her to cut my hair she said okay and wants to start with a straight blade right here, Mayor I thought that was a bad sign, but we--

GARCETTI: My wife keeps it so it looks good in front.

[21:35:00]

GARCETTI: It looks uneven in the back, but you can't see it and I can't see it so we're happy.

CUOMO: No, you're looking good. We'll take it, we're blessed. All right, so let me play proxy for the President for a second. What are you doing, Garcetti? I don't even think you need all that tests, I'm not even sure they're necessary.

That's what the President said today. And here you are, letting everybody get tested for free. Obviously you're going to favor people with symptoms, but why are you wasting the money? The testing's not even that important, says the President.

GARCETTI: I have a different philosophy. We all know this is a silent killer. It moves quietly through the population and why it is so important to people who don't show symptoms to get tests is because oftentimes they're the super spreaders.

They don't know that they have that infection and so it's always been our goal. We set up our first testing centers on our own with our own firefighters in our own geography paying for it with our own dollars and looking for our own labs. That was 40 days ago. And just 40 days later, we're very proud to have the first widespread testing for non- symptomatic people in a major American city.

I think it's something that we can hopefully all get towards. Because even when we do that, it's still not enough tests, as you've heard. But it's a great and bold step forward. I'm very proud of our firefighters and everybody who has helped stand this up. CUOMO: When you offer the tests, do you have the money, the manpower, and the materials to apply all those tests, to get them processed, and do it in a timely fashion, and find people who have it and may have contacted others?

GARCETTI: We believe so. And we've been, you know, opening that apertures set you know we've been widening who can get tested every single day. Yesterday it was construction workers. The day before, it was taxi drivers and ride share drivers. The week before, it was people without symptoms who work in critical industries like our medical profession and first responders, grocery clerks.

So each step we've taken, at the end of the day we still have additional tests left. To us, that were a good sign that even as we thought the first day, we were telling people with no symptoms in these industries that they could get tests, that we would be overwhelmed, we weren't.

And together with the County of Los Angeles which has been a superb too. We believe together that we can now offer to everybody living in the County of Los Angeles starting tomorrow, with or without symptoms, we can offer you tests, get you those results back in a day, two, maximum these days is three.

And also go into places like our senior homes, our homeless population and have a whole other surge in those areas, because those folks can't necessarily come to testing centers, and that's a critical part of the strategy.

CUOMO: Perspective. Florida over the weekend, the beaches, people go, they're all over the place. It does not slow down Governor DeSantis' decision to move forward with reopening. California had a similar thing happen in areas where people were all over the beaches. The word is that it was a set of breaks for both the city and the state level, that we are not ready to do anything aggressive.

Why was the same stimulus, people going to the beach, cause for completely opposite conclusions for two different states? Why didn't you see it the way Florida did, which was people want to get back out there, Garcetti, let them do it.

GARCETTI: Well, I think as long as we do these steps in a smart way, we assess how great is the need, first? Second, how big is the risk? And then third, what safety measures can you apply to deal with that risk? That there's nothing we won't be able to do necessarily until the future, but we have to be really careful.

And as a region, we have to move together. Los Angeles County kept our beaches closed but to the north and south of us, some were open. Down in San Diego, they thought about it carefully, they spaced people out. You look in places like Australia where they have opened beaches from 6:00 to 9:00 in the morning for exercise, that's it.

You really get people who aren't going to be loitering and tanning and being close to each other. So I don't think you should to take anything off the table. You just have to be really smart and don't be overly anxious. This isn't about scoring political points. This is about saving lives while we're restoring a slightly better quality of life and economic prosperity to more people and that's the lens that I take.

CUOMO: You know and right now you're getting a little bit of a break. You guys have a little different. Summer schedule for schools there, but schools are the bogeyman. You don't want to mess with schools and kids, because if it goes wrong, the political payback is going to be harsh and fast. But you can't get people back to work if you can't get their kids back to school.

Now, again, the summer gives you a little bit of a hedge, because a lot of kids aren't in school in the summer. But do you accept that reality, that until you can make it safe enough to send kids back to school, you can't really get people back to work?

GARCETTI: No question. You know, a mother or father can't go back to work with peace of mind if their kids are by themselves at home. We have to think about the kids first. They need to catch up on their education. They need to move forward with their development. But secondarily, you're exactly right, Chris. This is an economic issue, it's a childcare issue.

[21:40:00]

GARCETTI: It's a childcare issue. Let's not forget those kids that even as we open up schools with new rules that have preexisting conditions. They're not going to go back to school anytime soon. And we have to make sure we take care of them, provide for them to get an education at home, even as teachers are in the classroom.

So this is going to be tough on teachers. It's going to be challenging for school districts. But I do think we do have enough time to think that through for the fall. And probably as we're seeing in places like Denmark or whatever, maybe its fewer hours, may be its fewer kids at a time.

But we have to get some kids back into the classroom and I'm confident we can find safe ways to do that, especially with temperature checks and tests at the schools as well.

CUOMO: I'm hearing a few hours in a lot of different places. That would be so sad because we are already don't have our kids in school enough. But you have to deal with the situation as you find it. Mayor Eric Garcetti, I appreciate it. One last quick thing, as far as you know on the state level, is California still resolved to follow the CDC guideline of 14 days of cases on the way down before reopening?

GARCETTI: That's the measure that our Governor put out there. Whether it be a formal measure or not, because sometimes you get more and more tests, you see it go up artificially just because more people are getting tested. But looking at deaths for sure, and hospital admissions, those are the two biggest ones.

And lastly, let me just say, I appreciate what you said about masks. I don't know if it's a guy thing but real men wear masks and we shouldn't be afraid of being seen with masks. So I'll go out on this one.

CUOMO: Let's see, let me test you. What is the movie where Andre the giant said "Men in masks cannot be trusted"?

GARCETTI: "Princess Bride".

CUOMO: Eric, take care, Mr. Mayor.

GARCETTI: Take care.

CUOMO: Let's go to break. That was a good line. Have fun storming the castle. Who said it? Billy Crystal. All right who was his wife? Carol Kane have you seen her in "Hunters" it is amazing.

All right, Florida's Governor bragged at the White House how well his state is faring in comparison to others in this fight? What we may not know is the full picture, specifically this. There has been growing curiosity about the death toll in this country from COVID.

Two reasons, one, it ain't easy to count. Why? Because there are a lot of people who died without being tested, so you don't know what the cause of death was. That's a fair reason. Then there's another reason that may be specific to Florida in particular.

Medical examiners saying officials are blocking them from releasing their own list of Coronavirus deaths. Is there any good reason for that? Let's talk to a journalist who is deep inside and helped break the story, next.

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[21:45:00]

CUOMO: All right. Look, I know the numbers that are flying all over the place. I know it's hard to trust them. I'm going to give you reason to be distrustful of the numbers and new reasons to let us do our job and vet these numbers.

Florida, it's a story out there medical examiners they are the ones who keep counting deaths right in all sorts of emergencies It's a typical public protocol and it's something that you almost always have access to, you pay for it, why shouldn't you have access to it, especially now?

But in this instance circumstance with Coronavirus "The Tampa Bay Times" reports that the state made them the medical examiners stop releasing that information to you. Kathleen McGrory was digging into this for "The Times" when the state pulled the data. Kathleen, thank you for joining us on "Prime Time" can you hear me and see me, okay?

KATHLEEN MCGRORY, DEPUTY INVESTIGATIONS EDITOR, TAMPA BAY TIMES: I can hear you. Thanks for having me.

CUOMO: Don't adjust your camera. It's just a very extreme haircut. Now let me ask you something reading through the piece, I don't see you - you went out of your way, okay, to layer the reporting about the different rationales for holding the data.

But I think they all stink. I mean, they didn't give you one good reason other than privacy of people with COVID. But since when is that a public policy exception for putting out data on a mass scale?

MCGRORY: Yes, they haven't quite provided us a reason for why they're withholding this information yet? And we're still pushing for it. But it's still not information we've gotten. We've been asking for it for about ten days.

CUOMO: You got an answer from the Governor's office which was basically, we're awesome. But look, there is curiosity going all over the country about the numbers. But usually it's because there hasn't been enough testing to understand why people may have met their demise and whether or not it was COVID.

That's not what you're dealing with in Tampa Bay. What were you hearing from medical examiners about their darker suspicions about why they were being told to stop doing something that they always do routinely?

MCGRORY: Right. I mean, so you're absolutely right. The medical examiners have been counting the dead in times of statewide crisis since 1992. It's kind of pro forma for them to be compiling this list. You know, and I have been doing some reporting a few weeks ago, just some very basic reporting to try to learn what the medical examiners were seeing on the ground.

And somebody said why don't you get this list? I said, okay, that makes sense. So I requested the list from the Medical Examiners Commission. I got it. And a colleague and our colleague Rebecca - I wrote a story about it. At the time, the Medical Examiners Commission list was about 10 percent the count was 10 percent higher than the official state count.

And so we wrote about that. We wrote about all of the reasons why there would be some differences between the two counts.

[21:50:00]

MCGRORY: And then a couple of days later I attempted to get an updated copy of that list, something journalists do all the time, and was told I couldn't get a copy of that list anymore. There were some conflicting reasons why.

At first I was told that it was confidential then I was told that the state might need to redact it, you know, and that's kind of the situation that we're in right now. You know, in talking to some of the medical examiners, what they're telling us is that this decision was precipitated by a call from the State Department of Health.

And we know that the State Department of Health has tried to apply some pressure to some other agencies to keep this data under wraps. And that's kind of informed where we are right now in our thinking.

CUOMO: And what are the official and then the unofficial feeling about why they would want to keep it under wraps?

MCGRORY: Yes. Well, the - I don't know that there's an official reason necessarily again, because they haven't given us a reason yet. You know, they're telling us that they have some privacy concerns around this data. It's questionable if once you are deceased if the same type of privacy, you know, protections apply to you.

But I think the unofficial thinking behind is that, you know, the state just doesn't want this number out there. It's another number. It's confusing. And some public health experts have been critical of the way that the state is keeping its count of the dead here in Florida.

CUOMO: How so?

MCGRORY: Well, so there are two different ways of doing this, right? The medical examiners are counting the dead based on the county in which the person died and the state in which the person died. Now, the State Department of Health is looking specifically at Florida residents.

So in order to be included in the state's count of COVID death, you have to have been a full-time resident of the State of Florida. Why does that matter? Well, we have a lot of snowbirds in Florida. We have a lot of seasonal residents, part-time residents and visitors' right?

So public health experts are telling us for the count to exclude those people who were infected in Florida, who died in Florida, you know, and to exclude them because their driver's license says New York or Ohio, that that's not really painting an accurate picture of the epidemic here in Florida.

CUOMO: And most snowbirds, by the way, are obviously later in life, people who are more susceptible to this virus.

MCGRORY: Exactly.

CUOMO: And it's more deadly for them as well. One other quick thing, have you guys found any other example of where on any type of scale the state used privacy to redact or remove cause of death and disclosure of the same in the state?

MCGRORY: Well, the "Miami Herald" has done some terrific reporting. We know that the State Department of Health reached out to the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner and actually asked them or advised them not to release their information about deaths to the "Miami Herald" citing a law that applies very specifically it's a statutory exemption to our public records laws that applies very specifically to records created for the State Department of Health.

CUOMO: Right.

MCGRORY: And the County Attorneys in Miami-Dade read that or, you know, had that communication. They read the statute and then they decided they didn't buy it, you know, they thought that their death records were still public record, and they did, in fact, give them to the "Miami Herald."

You know, we've seen other instances where the DeSantis Administration has not been as forthcoming with information as reporters would have liked. For a while, the DeSantis Administration was releasing the aggregate number of people who had the infection--

CUOMO: Right.

MCGRORY: --in nursing homes, but not specifically which nursing homes had infections. It wasn't until a coalition of newspapers led by "The Herald" that "The Tampa Bay Times" doing threatened to sue that we got that granular information that public needs.

CUOMO: Yes, and also I mean, I was just asking the question because in looking into the story today, I couldn't find another example, at least over the last ten years, of the state keeping death information on the basis of privacy.

There is that one discreet law, well, this was only done for our own internal purposes, but in terms of these disclosures, they've never used privacy because of the cause of death before. Anyway, Kathleen, thank you very much for the reporting you guys are doing. This is going to go much deeper, Kathleen McGrory, you're welcome here to tell the story as it continues. Thank you.

MCGRORY: Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks.

CUOMO: Now, McGrory was already feared to them but the Florida State response, you know, surplus of fairness is reporting deaths by residency is the appropriate method utilized to calculate disease rates which allow for a more accurate analysis of disease impacts on populations through the incorporation of demographic data a critical aspect of public health planning.

[21:55:00]

CUOMO: Now, listen, I don't buy it. Why? Because whether you're a resident or not, if you're in a place and they have to figure out public health planning, they have to plan for the people that are there. And if they were so concerned about this itinerant nature you know that if you're not a full-time resident that we're not really going to worry about you.

Then the whole spring break things starts to make a little more sense about why they let people come down there who weren't residents, party their asses off, spread the disease and then go back to all these different states, all right?

So that's the statement from the state. It doesn't make a lot of sense. You're going to hear a lot more about this. We'll be right back.

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CUOMO: Let's bring in D. Lemon. I want to thank you for watching of course "CNN Tonight" starts right now with my man starts right now. I want to read you a quote that rosily gave to me tonight, Don. Listen to this. Hold on. I got to get it here. Give me a second.