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Minnesota Under New Restrictions as Cases, Hospitalizations Surge. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired November 24, 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]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Biden is President-elect, which finally and officially frees up millions of dollars in resources and opens the door for agencies to start cooperating, including and especially cooperating on the coronavirus pandemic.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden will formally introduce his cabinet this afternoon. It includes the first woman as treasury secretary and as intelligence chief, the first Latino and an immigrant as Homeland Security secretary. They will join several longtime White House deputies in the Obama administration.

CNN has learned more about what to expect at this afternoon's event in Delaware, so we will get more on that in a moment.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans are making their Thanksgiving plans, but Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning that holiday travel and gatherings could trigger a surge upon a surge. On Monday the United States again set a record for hospitalizations. This is the 14th consecutive day we have done so.

But let's begin with Arlette Saenz in Wilmington, Delaware, who has new details about what we will see today. Arlette?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, Alisyn, Joe Biden has officially gotten that green light for his transition to get under way, but he has already announced some of his cabinet appointees, and we are learning that at that event later today where Biden and Kamala Harris will be introducing these appointees and nominees, that each of those appointees and nominees will be attending, and they will be speaking. These are some officials who will span the foreign policy and national security world as Biden has assembled a team of experienced people in each of these sectors to lead departments like the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, also his director of national intelligence.

He is also making some history with these picks, as you have the first Latino who could serve as Homeland Security secretary and the first woman who lead the defense -- or to lead the intelligence community. So later today we will be seeing them with the president-elect and the vice president-elect and they are trying to show this united front of what their administration will look like. But this morning we are also -- the Biden transition team is also

welcoming this news from the GSA that they are allowing that formal transition process to begin. Last night the executive director of the transition, Yohannes Abraham, released a statement where he said "In the days ahead transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration's efforts to hollow out government agencies."

Now, in the coming days this transition team is expected to start having their interagency review teams go into the administration and gauge what is happening at these departments and agencies as they are preparing to take office. We learned that the Department of Defense has already had contact with Biden's transition team about starting this process. And pretty soon the transition will also have access to key coronavirus data as they are hoping to gain more insight into how the Trump administration has been approaching the crisis and planning for things like a vaccine distribution plan. But this morning they officially have that green light to start working and getting more information from the Trump administration.

BERMAN: You really have to hope that there will be close coordination on the coronavirus pandemic. If nothing else, at least there, let's hope for the Trump administration is forward with their cooperation. Arlette Saenz, thank you so much for your reporting.

Joining us now, CNN political analyst Seung Min Kim, she's a White House reporter at the "Washington Post" and CNN political commentator Errol Louis. He's a political anchor for "Spectrum News." And if we can put up on the screen just so people can see the nominations that will be announced officially today, the people who will be on stage with President-elect Biden. And it's just so striking, Errol. Tony Blinken was deputy secretary of state, Alejandro Mayorkas was deputy secretary of homeland security, Avril Haines was deputy director of the CIA, and now she will lead up national intelligence. The people who he's picking have been the number twos in the job that they are now ascending to the top notch on, so people with a very, very large depth of experience here.

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That's right. And, look, lack of experience was on the ballot on November 3rd, make no mistake about it. Part of why the Trump administration has been kicked out of the White House is that they had a lot of people there who didn't really know what they were doing, who didn't have a lot of experience, who made a lot of very serious mistakes along the way. And so what we're getting with the Biden administration is people who are steeped in national security and foreign policy knowledge.

These are all public servants, in most case career public servants, who have spent decades preparing for this moment. It should make, I think, voters who wanted a new direction and a new administration feel pretty good to know that we're going to have folks here who have a real range of experience, who have traveled the world, who have met their counterparts overseas, who have 1,000 connections throughout the bureaucracies that they're going to lead.

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And they know the job from top to bottom. That is something that has been sorely missing because too often over the last four years the America first policy of the Trump administration has been America alone. Now we're going in a different direction.

CAMEROTA: And Errol, on a personal note, John Berman pointed out to me this morning, weren't you co-editor at "The Crimson" at Harvard with Tony Blinken?

LOUIS: Tony Blinken, a buddy from college. All of us who were at "The Crimson" that year are all cheering him on, could not be more proud of our buddy. I will only say that even as a very young person, as a teenager, he was very, very interested -- this is during the cold war -- in foreign affairs, national security. He's literally been training for this job for his whole adult life.

CAMEROTA: Slacker. Like you, Errol.

(LAUGHTER)

LOUIS: I was writing about urban affairs back then.

CAMEROTA: There you go.

LOUIS: Not much changes really.

CAMEROTA: No, it really doesn't. That is so interesting.

OK. So, Seung Min, can we just talk for one second, can we just postmortem everything that just happened over the past three weeks just for a second this morning, because people are waking up and going, oh, our three weeks of limbo are over, OK. And they want to know how did we get here, and how do we ever prevent this from happening again? And so is it your perception that it was actually the Republican senators, the Shelley Moore Capitos, that got President Trump to sort of end the denial?

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Certainly, there was a lot of private and public pressure to get the president to where he came to yesterday, which is that his acknowledgment of reality in his own fashion where he will never actually concede, but acknowledges that there will be a transfer of power.

So you are talking about the private pressure. You had, according to our reporting, his personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, the White House counsel Pat Cipollone tell him that maybe, yes, this is a time to kind of move on. Sources tell us another turning point for the president in his thinking was that frankly disastrous press conference by Rudy Giuliani and his other campaign lawyers and campaign advisers at the RNC last week.

But, yes, you can't discount the public pressure that was really building on the president. You had these remarkable joint statements from leaders in the business community, including some of the president's own allies in the business community, plus these statements from national security officials, and indeed statements from Republican senators. I found -- obviously you had several Republican senators speak out yesterday saying the results are the results, the president needs to kind of move on and let the transfer of government begin.

But one of the statements I found really remarkable was, like you mentioned, from Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. This is a state that the president won by 40 points. She represents Trump constituents through and through. So if she felt the political freedom to speak out and tell the president move along, I think that really signaled something about where the critical mass of the party was going.

BERMAN: It's also just acknowledging that water is wet, that day is day and night is night. It's really just acknowledging --

CAMEROTA: That says a lot for the past four years.

BERMAN: Well, it does.

CAMEROTA: Up is down, or has been.

BERMAN: But look, it's a very significant thing that the GSA just acknowledged what happened two-and-a-half weeks ago, right? But nothing effectively was different last night than it was two-and-a- half weeks ago. We had to wait this long for them to get here. And Seung Min, I think we are getting a sense of how the president is going to behave in this post-concession word. No, he didn't use the word "concession," but this is the concession we're going to get from President Trump. So over the last few hours he's been tweeting nonsense again about the election, trying to foment the idea that the election was somehow rigged. And all kinds of fundraiser pitches going out from the Trump campaign, the president's team, to raise money for his leadership PAC.

So staying in office is no longer an option, but, boy, he seems intent on raising money to do something going forward. What does that tell us?

KIM: It tells us that he is not going away anytime soon, that he is certainly making the moves to entertain a comeback bid in 2024, and that he will stay the effective head of the Republican Party for some time.

And, look, how much increasingly he comes to terms with reality we'll see in the coming weeks. Obviously, we have Nevada's certification vote later today, we have Arizona and Wisconsin, more key swing states later this week. We saw that it was Michigan's certification that tipped officials such as the GSA administrator over the edge.

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But we saw after a pretty remarkable statement by the president last night, Monday evening, saying that he will kind of allow this transition to begin, several hours later he said I am in no way -- I am in no way conceding. He made the baseless claims of fraud again. He is tweeting similar claims this morning. So even as more and more states certify their results and the Electoral College meets on December 14, how much does the president come to grips with that reality? I don't think it's going to be too much different than what we're seeing right now.

CAMEROTA: One of the things that we'll see today, Errol, after not seeing the president or hearing from him much in the past three weeks, today he will be pardoning a turkey.

BERMAN: Just the first of many.

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: The jokes write themselves really, Errol, at this point, because if we want to know what this will look like, let's get in the time machine and go back two years to when President Trump pardoned a turkey named Carrots.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The winner of this vote was decided by a fair and open election conducted on the White House website. This was a fair election. Unfortunately, Carrots refused to concede and demanded a recount, and we're still fighting with Carrots.

(LAUGHTER)

TRUMP: And I will tell you, we've come to a conclusion. Carrots, I'm sorry to tell you, the result did not change. That's too bad for Carrots.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I'd say that's the epitaph of the Trump presidency, is too bad for Carrots.

LOUIS: Lest we get too lighthearted about this, I don't want to give a pardon to the members of the Republican conference in the Senate who went along with this outrageous attack on the election results. We were only a couple of bad decisions or bad court decisions away from a full-blown constitutional crisis, and the fact that they all kept their mouths shut and pretended they didn't see what we all saw, and said absolutely nothing in public to try and get the election results back on track and to get them honored and properly moved forward is a disgrace.

And the reality is they waited until Donald Trump decided he wasn't going to take that final step and all out try to wreck and overturn the elections, and then they came forward and decided two weeks too late that they could finally mumble a couple of words about how election results ought to be respected. I think we have problems here that should not be forgotten. It's good that we've got on with the transition, but this can never happen again, and steps should be taken to make sure it never happens again.

BERMAN: Brad Raffensperger, Aaron Van Langevelde, who is the canvasser for Michigan, they had courage that none of these elected officials in Washington had. They stood up, they stood up to millions of people, and did the job that they were supposed to do, and that took courage, and other people did not show anything close to that.

CAMEROTA: You're so right, Errol. And we even were talking to Congressman James Clyburn about what Congress can do to make sure that these types of things don't happen again. I'm not sure that they have the answers yet, but you're right that they need to start thinking about that, because, again, if it weren't for the cooler heads of some judges and the bravery of some of these local officials, we might be in a different position this morning. Thank you both very much. Great to talk to you.

LOUIS: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Hospitals across America are being pushed to the limit as the pandemic worsens. Up next we talk to a Minneapolis E.R. doctor about what she's seeing and the dire situation there.

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CAMEROTA: Minnesota is under a four-week shutdown of bars, restaurants and gyms after the governor said that the coronavirus surge was pushing the state to its breaking point. The front page of the "Minnesota Star Tribune" yesterday captures the crisis, quote, no beds anywhere. Hospitalizations have soared in Minnesota to the point where ICU beds are now in the single digits in some parts of the state.

Joining us now is Dr. Shirlee Xie. She is the associate director of hospital medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, and Andy Slavitt, former acting administration for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Obama.

Great to have both of you.

Dr. Xie, I want to start with you because you are on the front lines, you're seeing it happen. And so, just tell us what it's like when you're in the hospital this week as compared to in the past.

DR. SHIRLEE XIE, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF HOSPITAL MEDICINE AT HENNEPIN HEALTH CARE: I mean, I think in one word, it's -- it's heartbreaking. The last time I was on service, I took care of five patients who had COVID and one of those patients recovered and was able to discharge from the hospital after about a week. I sent two patients home on hospice, one went to a nursing home and he will be in a mandatory 14-day quarantine there and he -- I don't know if he's going to live past quarantine.

The other patient I discharged on hospice was 41 years old and she was terrified of dying alone, and the other two patients I had were a married couple in their 80s, and I admitted the wife the day before I admitted her husband to the hospital, and that was the first time they had been separated in 62 years. We were able to put them in a -- in a room together, just so they

could be together, which, you know, typically these patients with COVID are isolated in the hospital and it's -- they're alone, they don't have visitors and they're scared.

And I -- I'm sorry. You know, the chances that a couple in their 80s are both going to go home after being admitted are low because the chances of their survival are not good. And the wife got sicker and sicker, and she died in the hospital and her husband had to watch her die.

And so he had to see that fear and that grief, and I don't think it's -- I don't think you can describe how that feels to us as their caretakers to have to see that kind of suffering from patients. And it's -- you know, that was me in one day at the hospital. This is all of my colleagues are experiencing this at every hospital across Minnesota.

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And I think it's just really hard to comprehend that weight.

CAMEROTA: Gosh, Dr. Xie, we're so sorry and obviously, we all can see how the toll it's taking on you, and I think it's this feeling that people are dying alone that's so heartbreaking. I know when you talk to people who are coming in and you ask them where they got it, or how they got it, or if they know how they got it, what are they telling you?

XIE: You know, Hennepin County Medical Center where I work is, we're located in downtown Minneapolis. And so, we are a safety net hospital that serves this really amazing and diverse patient population, but it is a lot of patients from marginalized communities and people that have fewer resources and less access.

And so, these are in the patients that are getting COVID because they're going to bars and restaurants and parties. You know, these are people that are trying to stay safe, but they're getting -- they're getting exposed because they're interacting with somebody that has COVID.

And so, we're seeing a lot of essential workers that can't stay at home. And we see a lot of families that have housing insecurity so they have to homes to go to. We see nursing home patients who are already suffering because they are not allowed to have visitors and they've been isolated for months now, but somehow they're getting exposed.

We're seeing health care workers, you know, we're taking care of colleagues who we see in the halls every day and people we work with that we're now having to take care of patients and we see entire families who can't isolate from each other that are -- that are getting sick. I took care of a woman who, you know, after over a month in the ICU was recovering from COVID, and that should be a win.

But we were trying to call her family every day to give them an update and we couldn't get ahold of anyone, and then one day we found out it's because her husband had died of COVID and her daughter had died of COVID, all while she was in the hospital.

And so, how do you tell somebody that? How do you tell somebody that their family has died?

BERMAN: Just one more question for you, Dr. Xie, and I know how hard this is.

And, Andy, we'll come to you in just a second.

We see the headlines in the papers in Minneapolis, we see -- and it's not just running out of beds, it's not that the beds are necessarily all full, it's that there aren't enough of you. There aren't enough medical workers at this point to care for all the people who are coming in sick.

So talk to me about the strain on the system.

XIE: I think for us as health care workers when we see the numbers of the thousands of people in Minnesota that are getting tested positive every day, it's really -- it's terrifying because we can find physical space, you know, we can make rooms, we have made rooms, we can get ventilators, we can get equipment, but we can't create doctors, we can't create nurses to take care of patients, we can't create respiratory therapists to manage the ventilators.

And when thousands of people are getting sick, that just means there's more risk for a health care worker to get sick, for a health care worker to be exposed and then be quarantined. I think we're all just really, really scared of what's to come because the hospitals are already full, you know, and not just with COVID, it's with people having heart attacks and people have other pneumonias and people have cancer and people have car accidents, and they all need hospital beds and they all need staff to be able to take care of them.

CAMEROTA: Andy, it's just so heartbreaking, I mean, when somebody like Dr. Xie can bring us inside what's really going on and how people are really feeling, it obviously brings it home for all of us.

ANDY SLAVITT, FORMER ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, CENTER FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES: Well, I hope CNN plays Dr. Xie's comments over and over and over again for the next few weeks because the story is incredible, I could barely listen to it. She's in my hometown, she's a hometown hero, and she is -- I know what she goes through every day and people like her.

And people don't get it. We can't turn an eye to it. CNN plays an incredibly valuable role in giving Dr. Xie a voice, because otherwise, no one listens, no one hears, no one sees what she goes through. And they think it can happen.

But I think this gets -- this is a kind of thing that does get through to people. So, I'm grateful that you spoke up, doctor, of course, grateful for all you're doing for this community.

BERMAN: Andy, I think that the vaccine news is wonderful and it has created so much hope.

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It's a marvel of science, but it's not going to help us tomorrow or next week or three weeks from now really. And I think people need to listen to Dr. Xie.

What do you want people to hear from this now and what do you want people to do about it now?

SLAVITT: Well, here is how it does help us -- it helps us understand that this isn't going to go on forever. It helps us understand that we are actually going to see the results of amazing science, incredible time, January 11th to December 13th, the sequencing sent to the U.S. for the first time it will be in people's arms is an incredible feat of science.

And we should -- that should make us feel optimistic, that should make us feel comfortable that come Memorial Day and come Fourth of July, it won't be like Thanksgiving, we will have opportunities to be with our friends and with our family. So what that should help us understand is that these next few weeks are only weeks. We have had people have to suffer through these things for years.

And these next few weeks, while they're going to be tough, we have to keep Dr. Xie and people like Dr. Xie whole as much as possible so she can do her job and her colleagues can do their job, and then after that, we will be coming out of this because the vaccine will not only help protect us, it will dramatically reduce the spread, and that's around the corner.

We're not there yet. And people need to wait for that to happen.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Xie, what can the rest of us do for you? What can we do this week? What can we do as we approach Thanksgiving?

XIE: I think that what we are -- the health care workers are asking the public is for everybody else to step up to become the front lines, you know? I can't -- I can't prevent anyone from getting COVID, all I can do is try to keep COVID from killing you.

And so, we are not the front lines. You know, we are the last line of defense and so what we need is for people to step up and to wear masks and to distance from people and just try to keep themselves safe and everybody else safe.

BERMAN: Dr. Xie, thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you.

I mean, that's all we can say is thank you. And thank you for coming on and sharing your story, it's so important for people to hear. I really hope that they're listening.

Andy Slavitt, thank you to you as well.

XIE: Thank you. CAMEROTA: It's sobering. It really is really sad and sobering. It

always gets me the stuff about being alone. 41 years old, being alone and thinking that you're going to die alone and you can't expose your family to it. They have to deal with that every day.

BERMAN: Look, I have to tell you, this is Minneapolis, but first it was New York, then it was Miami, then it was Texas, then it was Arizona, it's been in the Midwest, now it's up in Minnesota.

It's moving around. We're seeing it happen everywhere. People need to start paying attention to this.

CAMEROTA: "NEW DAY" will be right back.

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