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More Than 1,000 Coronavirus Deaths in U.S. for 10th Time in Two Weeks; Mayor Warns of Dire Situation in Jackson, Mississippi; Goldman Sachs Says, Many Parents Would Stop Working if Schools Don't Reopen. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired August 05, 2020 - 07:00   ET

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


[07:00:00]

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: And so we don't know what the overall likelihood. The question is if anybody gets infected with this virus, what is the likelihood they're going to die? That's still the question we don't have a clear answer to that, although if you look at The World Health Organization data, they will say it's somewhere around 0.6, 0.7 percent, so about six or seven times higher than flu. But that's the fatality rate, if you're infected.

Now, just saying that all humans around the planet are the same, but this is -- this would be the fatality rate, the reason the numbers are so much higher here in the United States is because we have so much more virus here in the United States. It's the overall amount of virus and the number of people who have been infected that is the huge problem here. So if you look at the right side of the screen, you've got 20 to 25 percent of the infections of the world in this country, 20 to 25 percent of the deaths in the world in this country. So that's really the bottom line.

And what we have to do is bring the number of infected people down. That has to be the priority. Everything else will follow from that, but we have to bring the amount of virus down in this country.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: Kaitlan, I think it is interesting to explore why the president continually does this. Because I think that it offers an explanation for why we're in this predicament. His willful blindness about the rising death toll and how many Americans die every day, and you saw it in that Chris Wallace interview -- well, you saw it in both interviews, in the Axios interview as well as the Chris Wallace, where he's cherry-picking so-called data. He's calling to his press people, come bring me that other graph, bring me the other graph.

Do they not show him the real graphs, or is this just another example of where he says, I don't want that bad news, go find something where it looks good?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I think it is the president seeking out good information that tells a good story and not the full story of what this looks like in the U.S., because this has happened on multiple occasions, you're right, where the president is saying, well, look at this graph, this proves my point. And then people who are interviewing him or questioning him say, well, actually these are not the graphs that everyone else is looking at. These are not the numbers that everyone else is looking at.

And the one on Fox News was really stunning during that interview with Chris Wallace, because it left out Russia, which, of course, has had a substantial amount of COVID-19 cases and deaths in their country, and that just wasn't included on the chart that the president was looking at.

So things like that are notable as the president is going through information. But we're well aware of what it's like to brief this president. We've heard from people who have done it. We have heard from officials who have talked to people who have done it. And they say it's an incredibly difficult process, whether it's foreign policy, national security, or COVID-19 and how they're looking at the numbers here in the U.S., because the president is always looking for good information.

And this has never been more clear than this week when Dr. Birx just made a pretty blunt but accurate comment that wasn't that surprising, saying that COVID-19 is extraordinarily widespread in the U.S. We are well aware of that. But the president was upset by her comment, tried to argue she was only doing it because she had been criticized by Democrats, and then he said he told her in the Oval Office, I think the U.S. is doing well, you know, kind of ignoring the data that Dr. Birx and her team pores over each and every night and that they send to these governors throughout the U.S.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: Very Quickly, Kaitlan, is it actually true that yesterday was the first full coronavirus task force briefing the president has attended since April. He tweeted out a picture of it since April, I mean, that's millions of cases ago and tens and tens of thousands of deaths ago?

COLLINS: Yes. Think how much has changed in these four months since April. And now, if you look at these pictures, you notice this meeting is being held in the Oval Office. Normally, they're held in the situation room. And then when the president had attended them previously back in March and in April, he went to the situation room. But this time, they brought the meeting to the president. But that is right. This is the first time he has attended an official task force meeting since the month of April.

And it's not clear why he first now felt the need to do this. Because when he had asked the White House before, why hadn't he been attending these meetings, they had just said that he was being subsequently briefed by other officials.

CAMEROTA: I mean, that just tells us a lot about what we need to know about his level of engagement and level of interest in this topic, that it has been since April, Sanjay.

I know, Sanjay, that you have noted that there is some good news, or at least promising news, I should say, this morning. And that is the Novavax, yet a third company, Novavax, appears to be showing some promise with their vaccine trials. What are you seeing?

GUPTA: Yes. This is early data. Again, we're still seeing a lot of early data and it needs to be reviewed and validated. But there you see it, there. So this is another company, the third American company, it's a small trial, 106 participants vaccinated, 25 received a placebo.

And what they're finding is that they sort of measure the amount of antibodies in people who have been infected and are comparing it now in the amount of antibodies in people who are vaccinated. In this case, they found it was about four times higher in these people who received this vaccine.

[07:05:03]

We've got to see if this sort of data continues to play out.

And also it's interesting, we keep throwing this term around, neutralizing antibodies and a lot of people who are watching this sort of come to understand this term. These are the types of antibodies that can help neutralize a virus. But we still don't have a way of like really measuring this, what we call correlative measure. I can't tell you, that's ten pounds worth of immunity, or something like that. We have to see as you start to vaccinate more and more people of all ages of different medical conditions and things like that.

Another thing, I'd just say, keep an eye one, we talk a lot about the vaccine, understandably, but the idea of what are called antibody therapies, using antibodies from people who have recovered, possibly replicating them in the lab over and over again, and then giving them as a therapy to people.

We did a story on this for your show a couple of weeks ago. I think that that's gaining a lot of momentum. And over the next few weeks, the people -- my sources have referred to it as a bridge to the vaccine. Over the next few weeks, we may see some emergency use authorization for some of these antibody therapies. They may start getting used in high-risk populations, people in nursing homes, healthcare workers, things like that, keep a close eye on that. That could be encouraging results as well.

BERMAN: Yes. Some 50,000 people, I think, have already received that. The idea though is that the FDA would be able to give it direct authorization going forward.

Sanjay, very quickly, I'm going to have a mayor from Mississippi on next, and I want to put up the hospitalization rates in Mississippi. Because I think it's important that Americans know where in the country things are not getting better. Mississippi, the positivity rate is going up, the hospitalizations are going up, the cases are going up. And the governor there just instituted a mandatory two-week mask order. Soon enough or too little, too late?

GUPTA: Well, not soon enough. That's for sure. I mean, it's one of these things, I mean, and I don't know which metaphor to apply here anymore. As the disease becomes more widespread within the country, it's going to call for more aggressive measures. We've seen this over and over and over again now. I've talked to so many people in so many different states. Basically, states wait to get really sick, they wait to red line, they wait until their hospitals and then they institute the most basic public health measures.

I say it right now, there's no state in the country that is immune from this, not even states that have gone through this already and recovered. You have to think about this early. It's -- I always use the metaphor, thinking about the country as a body. But as the body slowly becomes sick, don't sit it out. Don't wait it out. Start to apply even basic therapies in the form of mask mandates, physical distancing, avoiding crowded indoor places, hand washing, all of those things that we've been talking about early. If you apply those things early, it can have remarkable, remarkable impact later on.

So, it's not little, too late, John, because I think masks can make a huge difference, still. But as it gets further along, you need to apply more aggressive therapies. So a place like Mississippi, the masks will help. Will it help enough, we don't know? It may need to go into this mode of starting to shut some things down again in order to really stop the stem of this spread.

BERMAN: Sanjay, thank you very much, Kaitlan Collins, our thanks to you, as well.

Several important primaries with the results still coming in this morning, including a huge upset in the Missouri House race. Congressman William Lacy Gray, who has held the first district seat for -- Clay -- held the first district seat for 20 years has lost to progressive activist Cori Bush. I want to bring in CNN's Arlette Saenz in Washington. Arlette?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, John. Well, a number of key races that we are tracking this morning, and we'll start right there with Missouri's first congressional district, where progressive activist Cori Bush defeated Republican -- I'm sorry, Democratic Congressman William Lacy Clay.

Now, Clay has held that seat for 20 years. And, in fact, his family has held that seat for over 50 years. His father was a congressman. So he has had longtime, deep ties to that congressional district. But Cori Bush will be the Democratic nominee in that congressional race. She had the backing of Bernie Sanders, as well as Jamaal Bowman, who was another Democratic candidate who defeated an incumbent Republican, Representative Eliot Engel, in New York earlier this summer.

So Bush's victory, should she win that congressional seat, would add to the number of progressives in the House Democratic caucus this fall, if she does, in fact, secure that congressional seat.

Now, on the Republican side, in Kansas, in the Senate primary in that state, establishment Republicans got a big win with Congressman Roger Marshall defeating Kris Kobach, a controversial figure, a hard line immigration advocate in that state.

[07:10:05] He had really caused some handwringing for Republican leadership, who were concerned that having Kris Kobach as the nominee could potentially jeopardize that long-held Republican Senate seat. But Congressman Marshall did pick up that win. Heading into this primary, he didn't have the outright endorsement of President Trump, who last week indicated that he wouldn't publicly wade into that race. But last night, Marshall did get a phone call from the president who congratulated him and offered him his full support.

Now, one race where we are still awaiting the final projection is in Michigan's 13th congressional district. That is a seat held by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. She is part of the so-called squad, that group of four women of color, who won back in 2018. She is looking to hold on to that seat in a race against Brenda Jones, and we are still waiting for those results to come in.

BERMAN: All right. Arlette Saenz in D.C., thanks very much, for us. We're going to have a chance to speak to Cori Bush about her primary victory in Missouri over William Lacy Clay. We will speak to her in our next hour.

CAMEROTA: Now to a storm update, the deadly tropical storm, Isaias, killing at least five people along the east coast. Several of those deaths blamed on falling trees. And there are preliminary reports of more than 30 tornadoes hitting up and down the coastline. The storm also knocking out power to more than 3 million customers.

New York saw its strongest winds since Super Storm Sandy more than eight years ago.

While Mississippi's Republican governor issuing a statewide mask order to try to contain the spread of coronavirus, our next guest says the situation in his city is dire, and so John is going to speak to the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, next.

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[07:15:00]

BERMAN: This morning, Mississippi is on track to become the number one state for new coronavirus infections per capita, as the number of new cases there continues to surge.

I want to bring in the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, Chocke Antar Lumumba. Mayor, thank you very much for being with us this morning.

The governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, just instituted a two-week mandatory mask order. How much of a difference do you think that will make now?

MAYOR CHOKWE ANTAR LUMUMBA (D-JACKSON, MS): I think that it's necessary. I think that we failed to operate with a sense of urgency. We issued a mandatory mask -- or mandatory facial covering mandate in the City of Jackson nearly a month ago. And so we felt that it was necessary. We saw that the numbers were increasing. We warned that we were opening up too soon and that communities were having their hand forced to do so. And so I think we're seeing the ill effects of that decision.

BERMAN: What happened in Mississippi? What happened in Jackson? We see the hospitalizations in the state rising at this new high level. The positive rate is really high. So what went wrong in Mississippi?

LUMUMBA: I think that the same thing that we've seen across the nation, that we rushed to reopen, when those decisions were not based on the data. And it's particularly daunting here in Jackson, Mississippi, where 85 percent of our population is black. We know that the virus has disproportionately affected black and brown communities.

Far too often, people don't have the luxury of social distancing when they don't live in conditions which allow them to do so. So many people in our community have pre-existing conditions, which this virus disproportionately affects. And I think that those are all things that we should have considered and we should have pumped the brakes on opening our cities up too soon and opening the state up too soon.

BERMAN: What's the situation in your ICUs and hospitals this morning?

LUMUMBA: Overwhelmed. Jackson is the largest city by a factor of three in the state of Mississippi. We're not only the state capital, but we're the capital of healthcare. And so the decisions that are made by the state or the decisions that are made on a city level don't only affect our community, it affects those in surrounding communities, as well. And so that's why we need the state support.

Our communities are too interconnected. They depend on our hospitals. They depend on our morgues. They depend on our resources that we provide. And so we need a uniform response from the state.

BERMAN: You've questioned the data being provided by the state itself, in terms of cases, hospitalizations, even deaths. Why do you doubt it?

LUMUMBA: Well, I've question the fact that we have not been -- the data has not been provided to us. We've been trying to have a data- sharing agreement with the state for some time. We just passed an order in our city council meeting last week. We had, you know, four or five versions of an agreement that we were trying to get in place. And we were trying to benefit from a census track level understanding of where the virus is most disproportionately affecting our community, so that we could respond accordingly.

We've stood up our own testing mechanisms. We've had mobile testing taking place. Many people who don't have personal care physicians, don't have a history of going to doctors, it works best when you meet them where they are. And so we were trying to meet people where they are, get them the resources that they need, understand where this virus is having its most detrimental impact in our community.

BERMAN: It is taking a toll on Mississippi. It is taking a toll in Jackson. People are dying. The president of the United States, when asked about the death toll in the United States, and 1,400 new deaths reported just yesterday, he said, it is what it is. When you hear that, going through what you're going through, what does that feel like?

[07:20:00]

LUMUMBA: Well, I think that it's a sad state of affairs anytime someone who has been elected into leadership, where one of the most valued and sacred responsibilities is the protection of the people that you serve, I take very seriously that responsibility, each and every day that I serve the people of Jackson. I eat, sleep and drink the ideas of how we improve conditions. And it's simply not okay just to say that people will die knowing that we haven't put our best effort forward.

BERMAN: You said your ICUs are overwhelmed. What exactly does that mean? Do you have capacity at this point if more patients present themselves?

LUMUMBA: The director of the state health department announced more than a week ago that there were only two ICU beds available at that time. And now, the circumstances is even worse at this hour in terms of our available ICU beds.

And so, we need temporary hospitals to be established. I asked that question. We had a meeting with Dr. Birx, who came to Jackson, Mississippi, a little over a week or so ago. And I posed that question to the governor. And I fear that as we're seeing schools reopening and no plan that we have yet to see the worst. There is a 180-day curriculum rule so that school districts meet their accreditation standards.

And so we have to reduce that timeframe so that school districts are not forced to go back to school and we can make certain that we measure out an approach that is best to serve not only our children, but to protect them, the teachers, and the families that those students go home to.

BERMAN: Mayor Chockwe Lumumba, we thank you very much for being with us morning. We appreciate your time. We wish the best of luck in these difficult days.

LUMUMBA: Thank you.

BERMAN: Mayor Lumumba just brought up schools, which is a question facing so many parents across the country right now. Is it safe to send your kids back? If your kids can't go back to school, if you're a working person, if you're at the office, who's going to take care of your kids? So many dilemmas, that's next.

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[07:25:00]

CAMEROTA: What happens if your kids do not go back to school in the next few weeks? Well, some economists at Goldman Sachs are telling clients that nearly 15 percent of parents may have to stop working entirely. That would mean 24 million people forced to quit their jobs. Is there any alternative? Joining us now is Juliette Kayyem, CNN National Security Analyst and former Obama Homeland Security Official, and Dr. Edith Bracho-Sanchez, Primary Care Pediatrician and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University.

Juliette, just this week, I am starting to hear parents freak out. They are freaking out, because they have elementary school kids, the schools are not giving them information yet about whether the kids will be going into the classroom, and they don't know if they will be able to work in the fall. How is this doable?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: I mean, in some ways, it's not. It was totally predictable. About four weeks, I was on, I had written a piece for The Atlantic. We need to treat schools like critical infrastructure, like water supply generators, food supply, get it back up in a responsible way. Otherwise, we're going to see what we're seeing now. We have, unfortunately, run out of time and there was no money.

So what that means is if -- based on my life, if you have not heard from your school district yet, the likelihood that your kids are going in either hybrid or at-home at this stage is incredibly high at this stage. So parents now need to adapt.

We are at the stage where our decision to open up the economy once again gives us the worst of both world. We now can't get people back to work. We assume that women, in particular, working mothers, are doing it out of choice. In many instances, they are the only or primary bread winner, and that burden is falling on working families.

The solution is going to be piecemeal, because there's no national solution and it is going to be, you know, pooling resources amongst communities and neighborhoods, having alternatives for kids. And then to employers who are watching, give everyone a break, continue work- from-home. It is going to be the only way that we can lower community spread and get our kids eventually back into school.

Look, schools don't have to start in September. Give us a couple more weeks and then maybe they can open up in October and November. But people are freaking out rightfully. The silence by school districts More likely than not means your kids are not going back full-time.

CAMEROTA: Doctor, is there any reason that schools in the states that are currently stable, that are not having spikes, the Connecticuts of the world, the New York, Maine, Vermont, those states, that kids couldn't go back into the classroom there?

DR. EDITH BRACHO-SANCHEZ, PRIMARY CARE PEDIATRICIAN: Alisyn, there are so many layers needed to keep kids safe and school administrators safe and teachers safe. So, yes, it starts with lowering the community spread, which some communities have done. New York being one of them, Maine being another, as you mentioned. But then there are so many additional layers that we need.

So unless schools have the resources, unless they have come up with a plan, unless they have the space to be able to do this safely, just lowering the spread is not going to be enough.

CAMEROTA: Juliette, Israel is a cautionary tale. Israel thought that it had beaten back the virus. They opened schools in person for all the kids. They fully reopened on May 17th. And just look at your screen and you can see the Mt. Everest-like rise in cases. I mean, what happened was a couple of kids at a high school then tested positive and it just, you know, spread like wildfire through different schools, through households.

[07:30:03]

And so, I mean, I know that that is, I'm sure, what school administrators are looking at, but it's not what parents are looking at.

END