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CDC Director Warns Family Gatherings are Spreading Virus; Amy Coney Barrett to Face Second Barrage of Questioning from Lawmakers on Capitol Hill; McConnell Plans Vote on Targeted Coronavirus Relief Before Election. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired October 14, 2020 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: A new warning from the CDC Director, Dr. Robert Redfield tells the nation's governors that small household gatherings are a growing source of coronavirus spread. So what does that mean? Is it time to stop seeing our extended families, even outdoors? Can our kids see the neighbors? Is Halloween canceled? How about Thanksgiving? Joining us now to discuss all of the current confusion is Dr. Megan Ranney, she's an emergency physician at Brown University and founding director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health, and Olga Khazan, she's a staff writer at "The Atlantic" who just wrote a piece on this titled "How to Tell If Socializing Indoors is Safe".

Ladies, you are here in the nick of time. I can't tell you how many people are confused about what they are supposed to be doing today. In the Spring, we knew what to be doing when businesses were shut down and restaurants were shut down. Now, we don't know what to be doing because restaurants et cetera are open. And so, Olga, is that why you wrote this article?

OLGA KHAZAN, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Yes, I just been noticing a lot of confusion in my friend groups and elsewhere, you know, people saying, well, can we have dinner inside? You know, it's a little chilly, it's raining, what can we actually be doing?

CAMEROTA: And Dr. Ranney, you yourself, I mean, you're on the front lines, you are a doctor. Even you were confused about this. You tell the story of a month ago, it was your son's ninth birthday, he wanted to go out to a restaurant to celebrate, and you had to think, they're open, but am I supposed to be going out --

MEGAN RANNEY, DIRECTOR, BROWN-LIFESPAN CENTER FOR DIGITAL HEALTH: That's --

CAMEROTA: To a restaurant and what's the answer?

RANNEY: That's exactly right. It is so confusing to figure out yourself. You know that there are all these rules out there, but you can't figure out how to weigh them, and especially for something special, like my son's birthday, where he has a favorite restaurant. It was raining and we were trying to decide, could we actually eat inside or not? That's actually why we here at Brown have created some tools to help people figure out when is it safe to get together and to socialize, and how do you minimize your risk while also not going crazy from staying home and isolated?

CAMEROTA: That is so helpful, and we'll get to that app in a second. My COVID risk -- and I think the point is, that it is different for different people depending upon geographically, where you are, depending upon how big of a gathering it is, et cetera. But I mean, Olga, I think the question is, when the CDC director gave these new guidelines that small social or familial gatherings are now a source of spread, that's different than what we thought. We thought that at least outdoors, we could be getting together with our extended family. And so from your research, from doing the article, from talking to experts, what's the answer?

KHAZAN: Yes, I mean, outdoors is definitely safer. It's -- you're about 20 times less likely to catch coronavirus outdoors as you are indoors. But what experts really told me is that if you're going to have an indoor gathering, first of all, you want to keep it small. It's going to be a risk, no matter what. But you really want to make sure that the number of new cases in your immediate area is between 5 and 10 per 100,000 people. And that the test positivity rate, that's the number of tests that are coming back positive per all the tests that are taken is less than 5 percent. So, you need to track down those two numbers. That number of new cases and that test positivity rate to make sure they're within a safe range before you get together with people you're not related to, indoors.

CAMEROTA: OK, so it's not one size fits all, we've established that. But Dr. Ranney, is it -- is that the same assessment that you're doing. Do you think that -- because I mean, the reason I ask this is that yesterday, we did a story on a man in Texas, he had a dinner party for six people, his closest family members. Nobody had any symptoms, nobody knew they were sick. They all ended up getting sick. It was outdoors, OK? Outdoors. They all ended up getting sick, they spread it to 14 of their family members, two of them died. And so, it just seems like even that outdoor protective shield that we thought we had might be changing.

RANNEY: Yes, outdoor is not perfect, right? If you're still sitting a foot away from other people without a mask, you can still spread it, especially if you're in that very infectious period. Just because someone is close family does not mean that they're safe, either. Unfortunately, if that close family member has been out having a lot of contacts, they still could be sick and bring it home. I mean, again, I myself and I'm an emergency physician, I'm not seeing my parents right now because I know that I'm in contact with COVID- positive patients.

[07:35:00]

I don't want to risk being asymptomatic and spreading it to them, even if we are outdoors. So, unless I'm more than 6 feet away from them and wearing a mask, I'm not seeing them right now.

CAMEROTA: OK, so, give us some rules right now that everyone can understand. Dr. Ranney, should we cancel Halloween? Are kids not going trick or treating this year?

RANNEY: My kids are going trick or treating, but in small stable groups with the same kids that they're seeing every day and with a mask on. And they're going to wash their hands before they eat candy.

CAMEROTA: So, they're going with a mask like a cloth mask, and then their Halloween masks?

RANNEY: Correct. Cloth mask and then for my little guy, a Halloween mask, my daughter will just be a cloth mask.

CAMEROTA: OK, next question, Dr. Ranney, should we cancel Thanksgiving?

RANNEY: Thanksgiving is a really tough one. I am going to be doing a Zoom Thanksgiving with my parents.

CAMEROTA: Olga, what's your plan?

KHAZAN: I don't know. I don't have a plan for Thanksgiving yet. It is -- it is really challenging. I would say, if you can move it outside, if you can wear masks, you know, keep it to people under 60, although the whole point of Thanksgiving is often to have people over 60 there. You know, one of the researchers that I talked to for this said that, you know, part of deciding what -- where you're going to spend your kind of risk for COVID is how important it is to you. If Thanksgiving is a really important holiday to you, you know, maybe take extra precautions, get tested, you know, quarantine ahead of time and maybe you can do something small. But it's going to depend on the person.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Ranney, I want to give people tools to be able to walk away from this segment with. So, is the answer to check your town, must you know the data points in your town of as Olga was saying, what the positivity rate is in your town before you can make any of these decisions?

RANNEY: So, that's definitely a great idea, but I also recognize that that's awfully tough for the average person to do. It's tough for me to do, to figure out what my positivity rate is in my town. And that is why we created this app, mycovidrisk.app, which allows you to put in your town, and it automatically calculates for you what your positivity rate is, what the chance of infection is, given how many people are there. What type of activity it is, and whether or not you guys are wearing masks. It also gives suggestions on how to decrease risks, although it doesn't include testing, which as Olga mentioned, can help, although as we also have seen in the Trump White House, it's not perfect. It's part of a preventions strategy, but not in and of itself. So, that mycovidrisk.app can help you make safer decisions.

CAMEROTA: I think that will be so helpful to so many people. Again, mycovidrisk, I'll put it out on my social media as well. Olga, Dr. Ranney, thank you very much for helping us understand why we're all so confused this morning. Really appreciate it.

KHAZAN: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. CAMEROTA: President Trump ratcheting up the rhetoric, now calling Joe

Biden a communist. It's no accident where he's making his pitch. We have a reality check on this when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:40:00]

CAMEROTA: It's a baseless political slur, but President Trump has now gone from calling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris socialists to outright communists. And he's using a risky place to do it. John Avlon is here with our reality check. Hi, John.

JOHN AVLON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Hey, guys. Look, it's Florida, as the late, great Tim Russert said, and this year is no exception. But Donald Trump is fighting to stay alive in the sunshine state. He's losing senior citizens, so he's looking to make gains in the Hispanic community and hurling accusations about communism to do it. Now, the Hispanic community is far from a monolith, especially in Florida where folks from Puerto Rico, Cuba and Venezuela make up big portions of the community. After reportedly suggesting that we sell Puerto Rico to Greenland and criticizing the victims of Hurricane Maria, Trump is now claiming that he's the best thing that ever happened to the island, giving them a $13 billion cash infusion just weeks before the election. But Trump's courting of the Cuban and Venezuelan vote, that's where he's playing the communist card hard.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My opponent stands with socialists and communists. They want to turn America into communist Cuba or socialist Venezuela and ruin the lives of Hispanic-Americans and all Americans.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: Of course, he also called Kamala Harris a communist. And this is all a loathsome lie because there's a body count behind it. Communists were responsible for as many as 100 million deaths under dictators like Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. But it's a particularly pungent accusations for immigrants from Cuba and Venezuela. Now, some folks on the left don't fully get it. Last year for example, Bill de Blasio had to apologize for quoting Che Guevara at a speech in Miami. But the Trump campaign has been airing Spanish language ads, associating progressives with socialists and communists. This stuff makes Joe McCarthy look restrained. And it's all part of a disinformation campaign that's been flooding Florida airwaves.

But Trump's got an Achilles heel here, because he's fond over North Korea's communist leader, praised China's communist leaders for Tiananmen Square, and of course, he's never had a bad word to say about former KBJ agent Vladimir Putin. Get this, back in 1998, a Trump company reportedly violated the U.S. embargo against Cuba when exploring new businesses there. Venezuela has been ravaged by a socialist kleptocracy. And Trump initially called for a regime change. But after a 2019 phone call with Putin, Trump suddenly changed his tune.

[07:45:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I had a very good talk with President Putin. He is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela, other than he'd like to see something positive happen for Venezuela, and I feel the same way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: Suddenly, Trump soured on opposition leader Juan Guaido, telling his then national security adviser that Regime leader Nicolas Maduro looked tough by comparison. Support for Guaido had been a rare bipartisan area of foreign policy agreement. And anyone who thinks Joe Biden will be soft on Venezuela hasn't talked to Maduro because he complained back in 2015 that Vice President Biden was trying to overthrow him, even conservative columnist Eli Lake has concluded that Biden should give Maduro reason to worry.

But there comes a time when rhetoric and reality collide. And for Trump, the most painful contradiction comes in the thousands of Cuban and Venezuelan refugees who have tried to seek asylum in the United States and found themselves denied or deported. The fight for Florida will be fierce, but fear-mongering about communism and socialism is an off-the-rails slur that doesn't remotely match the facts. And that's your reality check.

CAMEROTA: That's really helpful, John, because I mean, sometimes, you know, we can just lump all slurs into the insult bucket, but I really appreciate you drawing the distinction to this one.

AVLON: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: OK, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee spend 11 hours in the hot seat yesterday. Did she offer clues on how she might rule on health care, the Affordable Care Act and Roe versus Wade, abortion rights? We'll speak with the Democratic senator set to question her again today, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:50:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CO-ANCHOR, NEW DAY: About an hour from now, questioning will resume for President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett. One topic raised several times during 11 hours of questioning so far, the future of abortion rights in the U.S. Judge Barrett declined to say whether Roe versus Wade set a precedent that should not be dismantled. Here is Senator Kamala Harris.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, (D) VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: I would suggest that we not pretend that we don't know how this nominee views a woman's right to choose to make her own health care decisions. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Joining me now is the Democratic Whip, Senator Dick Durbin, who also questioned Judge Barrett. Senator Durbin, thanks so much for being with us. There are a lot of people who I think look at these hearings as Kabuki theater, but in fact, there was a lot learned if you listen over the course of the 11 hours yesterday. And one thing learned, I think, was Judge Barrett's position on abortion, at least from a jurisprudence perspective. She made clear that she does not think that Roe versus Wade or she cited scholarship specifically, that does not think Roe versus Wade is a super precedent, in other words, like Brown versus county Board of Education, something that can't be touched. What should voters -- what should Americans take away from that?

SEN. DICK DURBIN (D-IL): Well, I think it's very obvious. When she was asked about the three central points behind her nomination, the question of the future of the Affordable Care Act, Roe versus Wade, and whether she would be doing the president's bidding if there is an election contest, she basically made it clear that she wasn't going to make any commitments at all. That tells me sitting on the other side of the table that those are frankly up for grabs. But let's face it here, she is a personable, likeable, intelligent person who has done great things in her life. No question about that.

But there is an orange cloud over her nomination in the trumps of Donald tweet. He has told America, I'm not going to put anybody on the Supreme Court unless they're going to eliminate the Affordable Care Act which protects 23 million people, unless they're going to overturn Roe versus Wade, and if they're going to be there, I want them there for my election contest if it's necessary after November 3rd. Those are still the real --

BERMAN: Right --

DURBIN: Realities of this nomination.

BERMAN: For all the talk about precedent, though, which she leaned on repeatedly and which we often hear in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, she made clear that Roe, that the decisive case, dealing with abortion rights in this country is not the same type of precedent. So why is that important?

DURBIN: Well, it is important because super precedence like Brown versus Board of Education that said you've got to integrate the public schools of America, she said over and over again, there is no -- there is a consensus on this. Well, when it comes to the issue of abortion in her mind and in the mind of any observers, this is still a jury out controversy on the political level in America on the rights of healthcare for women. And that's what it comes down to. She believes that this is still in debate, and she's made no commitment to suggest Roe versus Wade is a super precedent she would follow. You have to, I guess, anticipate that she would be a vote as the president promises that would overturn these protections for women's health care.

BERMAN: You talked about some questions that she did not answer, really at all. Some of them had to do about the peaceful transfer of power, about voter intimidation, about whether the president even has the ability to move the election date. She wouldn't answer that, and I wonder what you think of that because I'm not so sure that's an issue of the so-called Ginsburg rule where a judge doesn't want to weigh in to a potential case, whether or not the president can move the election day is a simple matter of legal fact, isn't it?

DURBIN: I don't understand it. She is a constitutional law professor. We have explicit language in the constitution about the peaceful transfer of power with dates and procedures spelled out in detail. And yet, when she was asked repeatedly as to whether she believed that the president's position is defensible or at least is willing to stand up for the constitutional provisions, she said I'll wait. I want to hear the arguments. I want to see what the testimony is. I want to know what the facts are before I will tell you whether there should be a peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America. I don't get it. I think the right answer was, we have an established standard throughout our history that makes us a democracy, that we don't go into the streets after an election, and that has to be honored.

[07:55:00]

And anyone who comes before me and wants to say that they can remain in the presidency regardless of the electorate has got a burden that they'll be unable to meet as far as I'm concerned.

BERMAN: One of the notable moments, I think memorable moments of the hearing was your questioning with Judge Barrett, when you asked her about the death of George Floyd. I want to play some of that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMY CONEY BARRETT, SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: Senator, as you might imagine, given that I have two black children, that was very personal for my family. My 17-year-old daughter Vivian who was adopted from Haiti, all of this was erupting, it was very difficult for her, we wept together. For Vivian, you know, to understand that there would be a risk to her brother or the son she might have one day of that kind of brutality has been an ongoing conversation, and it's a difficult one for us, like it is for Americans all over the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Why did you ask the question and what do you think of the answer?

DURBIN: Well, I think the answer was very real and very convincing and personal. And I think it reflects what many families across America went through. And the denial by some of the administration that we are dealing with systemic racism as a result of police going way beyond their rights and doing things that aren't acceptable, totally unacceptable as in the George Floyd instance, was the reason that she gave that answer. And I thought it was a very credible answer.

But the point I was getting to where she has a written decision, which says a convicted felon can be denied a right to vote, but cannot be denied a right to buy an AK-47. I think that's upside down, and we know that the right to vote has been particularly a problem when it comes to minorities in America, suppressing the vote, we even see it now. One collection box in a county of 4.5 million people in Texas, guess what's going on there, they're trying to suppress the vote.

What I was trying to do was link up all of our concerns about racism in America with the reality of her written opinion which gives a standard for voting rights which I think is just not fair.

BERMAN: Very quickly, Majority leader Mitch McConnell has said that he will put on to the floor a bill for about $500 billion in targeted relief money for the American people. Now, McConnell would not bring up a multi-trillion dollar relief package passed in the house in the Spring or early Summer, and the version the White House has proposed over the last week, Mitch McConnell and other Republican senators or doesn't have the support it seems of Republican senators, but this is the version he wants to put on the floor. Do you see yourself being supportive of getting those $500 billion?

DURBIN: I can tell you this, he's getting the hell kicked out of him in this hearing over the Affordable Care Act and what America is going through with the coronavirus and the impact on the economy. And so out of nowhere, here comes Senator McConnell saying, oh, listen, before we leave, we're going to do this symbolic little gesture just to show you we really care. Where has he been for five months? Nancy Pelosi passed the Heroes Act five months ago. A really substantial commitment. Now, the president says he wants a big bill. The chairman of the Federal Reserve warns us, keep your foot on the accelerator for this economy. So, McConnell wants some symbolic effort before we leave town before November 3rd. He thinks that will pull it off. I don't think it will.

BERMAN: Senator Dick Durbin, we appreciate your time. Thank you for being with us, we'll be watching the hearing when it starts up again in about an hour --

DURBIN: Thank you.

BERMAN: NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: More than seven months into this pandemic, the U.S. is sliding backwards.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of a resurgence of cases, historically leads to an increase in hospitalizations, then ultimately, an increase in deaths.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is going to be a horrible Winter.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: With exactly three weeks to go until election day, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in the hot seat.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you able to commit to recuse yourself when disputes arise out of the 2020 presidential election?

BARRETT: I can't offer a legal conclusion right now about the outcome of the decision I would reach.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone, welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. The warnings about a long deadly Winter are increasing, just three weeks into the Fall. This map on your screen tells the story. This morning, 36 states are facing increases in coronavirus cases, 14 are holding steady. That leaves zero states declining. In other words, there is not a single speck of green on this map. We have not seen a map that looks like this since early April.

Seven states are now reporting a record number of hospitalizations. Wisconsin is one of them. They just set a single-day record for coronavirus deaths and President Trump is heading there in three days to hold a rally. All while the CDC is out with a new warning to avoid indoor family gatherings, even small gatherings, as the holiday season approaches.

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