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U.S. adds more than Three Million COVID-19 Cases in November; Toronto Goes Into Lockdown as Infections Spike; Coronavirus Cases Rising in States Across U.S.; Some Republicans Now Calling on President Trump to Concede Election to President-Elect Joe Biden; President-Elect Joe Biden Naming Potential Cabinet Picks. Aired 8- 8:30a ET

Aired November 23, 2020 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: G20 Summit over the weekend, but he is finding plenty of time for golf.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And plenty of time not to concede the election. The legal spectacle of the president trying to overturn the election is really reaching this new stage with a growing number of Republicans now making it clear, I suppose finally, that it's time for the president to concede and for the transition to officially begin.

While this is going on, the pandemic has reached just a new frightening stage, a record day for hospitalizations. You can see the number of people in the hospital just continuing to rise on that steep path. Deaths now rising in 41 states, you can see by this map right there.

There is some vaccine news overnight. AstraZeneca reports that its vaccine candidate is showing a lot of promise in trials, an overall 70 percent efficacy rate. Joining us now, CNN political correspondent Arlette Saenz. Also with us, Tim Alberta. He is the chief political correspondent for "Politico" and author of "American Carnage."

Arlette, I want to start with you with the news out of Biden world. We learned overnight the president-elect will nominate Tony Blinken, who was deputy secretary of state. He's all but held the job before to be the next secretary of state. What does that nomination tell us? What does the rest of the national security team that we know about so far tell us?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, first off, John, with these nominations that President-elect Joe Biden is expected to announce tomorrow, he is trying to make it clear that he is moving forward with all of his transition and planning work even as the Trump administration has tried to put up roadblocks. But by naming someone like Tony Blinken to be his secretary of state, Biden is making it clear he is relying on people with a lot of foreign policy and diplomatic experience to help guide his administration in these early days. Blinken is a longtime adviser to Biden and has crafted a lot of his

foreign policy stances during the course of the campaign. And something that when you talk to sources who are close to Biden, he has really wanted to make sure that that person who is secretary of state is out there and able to relay his own worldview and beliefs, and there's perhaps no one better than Tony Blinken who has been at Biden's side to do that.

Now, we are also learning that there are other posts that Biden is expected to announce tomorrow, and that is his national security adviser and also his ambassador to the United Nations. For that national security adviser role, the leading contender is Jake Sullivan, another longtime aide to the former vice president. And then also for the ambassador to the U.N. position, there is Linda Thomas- Greenfield. She has decades of experience in the foreign service sector, and she also is a woman of color, which would lend some diversity to these top officials that Biden is trying to put together.

But really what he is trying to relay here is that he's going to lean on these people who have a deep well of experience to help him in this national security and diplomatic role as he is crafting out his administration.

CAMEROTA: And so, Tim, Biden is slowly, steadily pressing forward, despite the fact that there's been no trigger of the transition, and a blizzard of what seems like futile lawsuits from the Trump team. And just this weekend, just this weekend, you're starting to hear Republicans now say out loud that it's time to wrap all this up. So here is what some of them said on Sunday shows yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CHRISTIE, FORMER NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR: This legal team has been a national embarrassment.

REP. FRED UPTON, (R-MI): The voters have spoken. Here in Michigan, there was 154,000-vote margin by President-elect Biden. No one has come one any evidence of fraud or abuse. It's over.

GOV. LARRY HOGAN, (R-MD): We are beginning to look like a banana republic. It's time for them to stop the nonsense. It just gets more bizarre every single day. And frankly, I'm embarrassed that more people in the party aren't speaking up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: It took two weeks from the time that the networks called it to some Republicans now speaking out. Do you think they've mentally worked their way around? Why are we -- how have we arrived at this point?

TIM ALBERTA, CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "POLITICO": Well, I think to put this plainly and in a way that most folks can appreciate and understand, the president has been throwing a temper tantrum for the last two weeks, and many Republicans are sort of humoring him, afraid that if they grab him and shake him and try and speak the truth to him that the temper tantrum will get worse, and that perhaps they will be collateral damage, that by crossing the president at this most sensitive time for him that they will not only alienate him but alienate a lot of his supporters back in their districts, back in their own states.

[08:05:03]

That's a constant running theme over the last four years. It's something that most of these folks aren't willing to do. But there are national security implications here for delaying the transition, and that alone, I think, guys, has been enough to spook a lot of these Republicans into finally finding their voice here and speaking out.

But we should be clear, an awful lot of Republicans have not chosen to speak out. They are still content to humor the president and enable him and go along with this, even as Chris Christie said his legal team has become a complete parody, and they are not winning court cases. They're not even waging competent court cases. They're getting laughed out of courtrooms for the most part. And so there's no legal strategy here to overturn this election. It is a political strategy to continue to sow doubt in the integrity of the electoral process, and that campaign is working, but the legal campaign is going nowhere.

BERMAN: It strikes me, I know what Mitch McConnell is doing. Mitch McConnell is obviously worried about the Senate races in Georgia, but then you have guys like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton who all want to be president and don't want to wait. So it seems to me that while they're coddling the president, they're helping him raise money, more or less, for his leadership pact which he's going to use for himself. I'm not sure that this isn't working at cross purposes if you're Marco Rubio who wants to be president yesterday. You're empowering a guy who is going to lord over you for the next four years, and determine your fate. How much does this figure into their calculations?

ALBERTA: John, what else is new, though? Everything you just said is true, but think back to the 2016 Republican primary where for the first at least five or six months of that primary, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz didn't lay a finger on Donald Trump largely because they thought it wasn't in their interest to do so. They didn't, again, same reasoning, they didn't want to alienate his supporters. They figured that after a while, he would sort of fade away, that he wasn't serious about this, so they didn't go after him in that primary. And eventually, they did, but it was too late. And when they did, it looked sort of phony and opportunistic and voters weren't buying it.

There is sort of a similar principle at work here. Rubio and Cruz know that if they do want to be president one day, and at the very least if they want to hold onto their seat at the table and they want to remain prominent in the Republican Party, they cannot afford to alienate the president's base. They just can't. This is -- we can't overthink this, right? It's pretty simple. These guys understand that if forced to choose between the president and themselves, these constituents are going to choose the president. They like him more than they like Rubio or Cruz or the rest of these Republicans. And so they're not willing to put a gun to voters' heads in many cases by coming out and speaking the truth to these voters and saying, look, there's no fraud. We've investigated this. This is the most scrutinized election in our lifetimes. We would have known if there was some incredible pattern of fraud and corruption and rigging this election. It didn't happen. We need to move on. The guy lost. They're not willing to come out and say that because they know they're going to alienate the very people who they need if, in fact, one day they do want to run for president again.

CAMEROTA: Arlette, on behalf of Joe Biden -- excuse me -- House Democrats are trying to get Emily Murphy, the GSA administrator, to do her job and sign the paperwork that triggers the transition. They had sent her a letter requesting her for a private meeting. As far as I know, as of yesterday, she hadn't responded to that. I don't know if anything has changed. And so how is Joe Biden working around all of this?

SAENZ: Well, really what you are seeing the president-elect and his team do is mounting this public pressure campaign as they are repeatedly out there calling for this ascertainment to take place. Yesterday Biden's team fanned out across all of the Sunday shows, and that was a consistent message that they were relying, that this ascertainment really needs to take place.

In the meantime, they are essentially trying to find these workarounds to the fact that they can't access administration resources or transition resources during this period. They're privately raising their own money so that they can fund this transition. They're assembling their own teams of experts and talking to people who may have just left government as they're trying to get an idea of how these agencies are working and the needs that are currently needed there at this moment.

But the Biden team also has not completely ruled out the option, legal options to try to get this ascertainment to happen. But Biden himself last week spoke to the fact that he's concerned that it won't necessarily speed up the process. Legal fights can take some time and resources.

[08:10:00]

And so for the time being, what you're seeing Biden do is really just trying to relay this public posture that he is the president-elect. He can still get this work done, holding these types of events. Later today he's meeting with mayors as part of his outreach to state and local officials to talk about COVID-19 and the economy. And so what you have Biden doing is trying to just step into that role, even if the Trump administration is putting up roadblocks to it.

CAMEROTA: OK, Arlette Saenz, Tim Alberta, thank you both very much for the reporting and the insight.

So the CDC is urging people to stay home and to avoid large gatherings this Thanksgiving. But millions of Americans are traveling. We discuss what this means for the next month, next. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: The United States added more than 3 million new coronavirus cases in November alone, that's the worst month yet. Hospitalizations are also breaking records overnight. They've doubled in the last month. The nation's top health officials are urging Americans to stay home for the Thanksgiving holiday. The TSA reports that more than a million people traveled through the airports yesterday. That's the most since, of course, the start of the pandemic.

Joining us now is Dr. Ashish Jha. He is the dean of Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Jha, always great to see you. And of course, what we're seeing today, so the spike in cases, the spike in hospitalizations, as you have taught us, is two to three weeks old. And so can you hazard a guess as to what two to three weeks from now will look like?

[08:15:00]

DR. ASHISH JHA, DIRECTOR, HARVARD GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE: Good morning and thank you for having me on. Yes, so the way to look at today's numbers is that the infections we are identifying today, the cases, those infections happened last week.

The hospitalizations happened two to three weeks ago -- sorry, the hospitalizations were infections that happened two to three weeks ago and the deaths today are infections that happened four plus weeks ago.

That means, we can see where we are today and project pretty clearly where we're going and unfortunately, it's all bad news. I think, over the next 10 days, we are going to probably increase hospitalizations by about 50 percent and over the next few weeks -- three to four weeks, we are going to end up hitting 2,500, maybe 3,000 deaths a day.

That's baked in and we have got to do better moving forward to prevent that those numbers don't keep going up.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And I think people need to realize that the vaccine news, which is incredibly promising, isn't going to stop that. That's baked in, as you say, and potentially could get even worse through mid-January or through when we start getting the vaccine.

The two things don't affect each other at least not directly and that's what he people I think need to know, Dr. Jha. Let's talk about the vaccine -- sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

JHA: No, I was going to say, that's absolutely right, and so in fact, the one way they are related is it makes it that much more urgent that we don't lose people right now, because we are so close to a vaccine, and these people that we're losing today are not coming back.

And the bottom line is, if we do a good job now, we can get people vaccinated. We can get people safe and life can return back towards a new normal, but the vaccine makes it that much more urgent to act effectively now. BERMAN: On the vaccine news, AstraZeneca, now the third vaccine to

release the results of some of its third phase of trials says it's an average of 70 percent effective up to 90 percent, depending on the dosage.

What does now having this third possibility available mean and what's unique to this vaccine?

JHA: Yes, so I see this as more good news on the vaccine front. I think we have to sort out why one arm when dosing regimen was 62 percent, the other one was 90 percent, but the bottom line is if we can figure out that regimen that gets us to 90 percent, this is the vaccine much of the world will end up using.

So, I think that's one of the things to understand is that countries around the world are focusing on this vaccine. We needed this vaccine to be safe and effective.

The second is it gives us a third vaccine that gets vaccinations happening much, much faster in the U.S. and around the world. So, again, we need all the vaccines in the world. I'd love to have a dozen. I'd love to have as many as possible.

It just means more people will get vaccinated quickly. We just have to make sure they are all safe and effective.

CAMEROTA: Well, also, this one, the AstraZeneca one according to their press release doesn't have to be stored at such low temperatures. I mean, so that sounds like a game changer, because you know, we've done stories on people having to build and ship these, you know, uber cold freezers.

JHA: Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons why much of the world is counting on this vaccine is for exactly that reason. It is so much easier to store and so much easier to ship, and so if we want to be able to get this vaccine out to the six billion to seven billion people around the world, we need vaccines that are relatively easy to transport and ship and store, and this vaccine really meets that.

So one more reason I think all of us were pulling for this vaccine to be safe and effective.

BERMAN: You want to make your Thanksgiving pitch here, Dr. Jha? What do you think people should do this week? I can see by your look that this is something that gets you here, what do people need to know?

JHA: What I'm telling people is I totally get the desire to spend time with your family. I totally get it. I feel it. It's very frustrating that we can't.

This is where we find ourselves. I love my family. I want to see them over thanksgiving, but I love them and want to see them in 2021, and I just don't feel like I can risk it and I really think you all ought to think about whether you really want to take that risk as well.

CAMEROTA: You know, I was thinking, John, of a sports metaphor as I often do as you know, as you know, and it's like, I've never run a marathon, but you have and Dr. Jha is in the Boston area and you've run the Boston marathon, right? And isn't it right before the finish line, right before you see the finish line, isn't there something called heartbreak hill?

BERMAN: It's in mile 122. Yes.

CAMEROTA: Don't quibble. And that's it, right. We are approaching heartbreak hill, right, and we have to get to the finish line, but first, you have to go over that heartbreak hill, which is Thanksgiving.

BERMAN: That's exactly what it is.

CAMEROTA: Thank you.

BERMAN: I think that's the perfect metaphor.

CAMEROTA: Thank you.

BERMAN: Our thanks to Dr. Jha, who didn't stick around for the sports metaphor but he agrees. He agrees a hundred percent.

CAMEROTA: I am sure he does.

BERMAN: Altogether. The presidential election now with a new recount in Georgia. So what does that mean there? What does it also mean for the Senate runoffs there that Democrats want to win control, if they can of the Senate?

One of the Democratic candidates, John Ossoff, joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:24:01]

BERMAN: So one of the continent's great cities taking extraordinary measures to battle coronavirus. Toronto, is entering a nearly month- long lockdown, as officials try to slow a surge in infections there.

CNN's Paula Newton has the details.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA NEWTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Its nickname is Toronto the good, Canada's largest city comes by it honestly.

Toronto was so compliant, nearly everyone wearing masks, following doctor's orders, it crushed the COVID-19 curve in spring, a curve that public health officials say is spiking out of control now.

Daily cases have nearly doubled in a matter of weeks. ICUs are near capacity and with 1,500 coronavirus deaths and counting in this city, officials say a second lockdown as strict as the first, save for keeping schools open, must be enforced to avoid a worst case scenario. DR. IRFAN DHALLA, VICE PRESIDENT, PHYSICIAN QUALITY AT UNITY HEALTH

TORONTO: We're in a lot of trouble, and so our public health officials and our elected leaders decided there really was no other choice, but to take a big step back.

[08:25:14]

NEWTON (voice over): That step back means a return to lining up for groceries, shutting down all in-person dining, even outdoors, all non- essential in-store shopping, salons, gyms, now shut down for at least four weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's challenging obviously for all us, but it's our -- you know, societal obligation to do it.

NEWTON (voice over): That obligation extends to staying home and seeing no one other than those you live with.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hopefully by Christmas we maybe get in a controlled part where families can get together for Christmas, but you know, it is -- like I said, it sucks for most of these people that are running these small businesses.

NEWTON (voice over): And it's not just business. The Raptors, Toronto's beloved NBA team had to find a temporary home in Tampa, Florida, because of the health crisis.

It's a measure of how seriously this city is taking this. We caught up with Mayor John Tory not at City Hall, but at home hunkering down for a second wave he says many cities underestimated.

MAYOR JOHN TORY, TORONTO, CANADA: I think we, you know, didn't focus as hard as we now are very focused on the marginalized neighborhoods where the virus spread and the positivity and the test rates has been much higher than in other parts of the population and we're really focused on all of that now.

The lockdown will help to us get a greater grip on all of this.

NEWTON (voice over): Protests against the lockdown and masks have been small, but persistent, a reminder that the city's goodwill has its limits.

NEWTON (on camera): There's no question a second lockdown will be tough here in Toronto, but what's been even tougher to think about are the consequences if it doesn't work.

NEWTON (voice over): The worry fewer restrictions in other areas bordering the city; in some cases just a few blocks away means people will move freely to shop, dine and get together. Only Toronto and one of its sprawling suburbs, Peel is in lockdown.

HotHouse Restaurant managers Adam Joe and Arif Ahmed used to employ a hundred people. They were able to keep half on payroll, thanks to their large patio. Under lockdown, they'll have to scale back even further. ADAM JOE, RESTAURANT MANAGER: I guess I would say, you know, a little

crestfallen. You know, we have a lot of energy recently. I wouldn't say I was shocked.

NEWTON: Are you guys afraid of what will happen if it doesn't work?

ARIF AHMED, RESTAURANT MANAGER: Absolutely. But you don't know how it is going to pan out on the other end, so it is, you know, scary.

NEWTON (voice over): And so Toronto, one of the largest cities in North America masks up, locks down, and hopes this painful sacrifice will be enough to reopen in time for Christmas.

NEWTON (on camera): And you know, as high as cases are in Toronto, here is something to think about. I was talking about the Raptors, right, the NBA team. They're going into Tampa Bay to play.

Tampa Bay right now has a surge quite like Toronto, and yet the striking contrast between how these two cities are now handling the virus, really it couldn't be more striking, and says a lot really about how things are being handled in Canada right now through that second wave. Back to you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: So here's to your health. You asked so we're answering your top coronavirus questions, actually you're lucky, we're not answering them, Sanjay is, someone who actually knows the answers is here.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta with us. So Sanjay, people wrote in, viewer questions. It's been a long time since we've done this with coronavirus and I think there are new types of questions being asked. So let's just start with the vaccine.

Sheryl asks, "They say if you're not feeling well not to get your annual flu vaccine until you feel better. Once the COVID vaccine comes out, what do you do? How does that affect how you're feeling? Will it be safe to get the vaccine?"

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, this is a really good point. So the reason you typically are told not to get the flu vaccine if you're not feeling well is because the way that these vaccines work is that they sort of rev up your immune system.

If your immune system is already busy fighting something else, then it may not respond as well or you may not -- you may not just not feel as well.

When you don't feel good after a vaccine, it's not because you've gotten the infection, it is because your immune system is revved up. It is doing what it is supposed to.

So, in this case, it's going to be critical, as I think you're asking if you're asymptomatic, you should go ahead and feel comfortable getting the vaccine when it's your turn. You want to make sure that your immune system gets primed by this vaccine. If you don't have any symptoms, you should be okay to do that.

The idea that if you start to feel symptomatic, and it means that your immune system is really reacting to something, you probably want to talk to your healthcare provider about that. You're probably going to go through a questionnaire as well to make sure that you're in the right position to get the vaccine.

CAMEROTA: Here is a good question from Bill in Prescott, Arizona. "What assurances will a patient have that the vaccine administered has been stored at or below the proper temperature at all stages between manufacture, all logistical shipping and storage steps? What will be the impact if a vaccine has been exposed to an above-limit temp?"

[08:30:20]