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More Coronavirus Deaths Reported in U.S. Yesterday Than Ever Before; Pro-Trump Attorneys Encourage Georgians Not to Vote. Aired 7- 7:30a ET

Aired December 03, 2020 - 07:00   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: People are hospitalized this morning.

[07:00:02]

That's an all-time high. More than 200,000 new coronavirus cases were reported overnight, every reason to believe the number of deaths will keep going up.

The director of the CDC warns that the next three months will, quote, be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN NEW DAY: What is President Trump doing? Well, he devoted almost an hour of his Wednesday to producing and starring in a propaganda video filled with flagrant lies about the election and going after anyone who contradicts him, including Attorney General Bill Barr, who The Washington Post reports President Trump is considering firing.

As for public health, the White House is actively ignoring the CDC's coronavirus guidelines and planning a series of holiday parties with voluntary masks and social distancing.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is inviting 900 people to the State Department for a celebratory Christmas party.

We begin with the deadly pandemic. Joining us now is CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, this is madness. This is madness. I mean, long ago, President Trump gave up trying to protect the public health of Americans. Now, he's actually endangering his friends and supporters by these Christmas parties that they're having with voluntary masks and social distancing.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: And we've shown so many times the aftermath of these events. I mean, we showed the aftermath of the rallies. We showed the aftermath of the holiday parties. The first time most Americans heard the term super-spreader event was in conjunction with a White House Rose Garden ceremony. I mean, it is maddening. It's unbelievable. We're having the same conversations now that we were having back in March and April and things are much worse. I mean, things are worse because it's colder outside. People realize that, so people are huddling inside. But also back in March, we had a period of time for at least a couple of weeks where there was some sort of national stay-at-home at least recommendations. Even if they weren't applied evenly across the country, they existed. We don't have that right now. We don't have mask mandates, we don't have stay-at- home orders. Ohio and California are considering them at this point.

What we do have is an ambulant system that is on the breaking point. Can you imagine in this country calling 911 and you may be told, look, we can't help you right now. And even if we could, there are not enough hospital beds in your area. And three months ago, we would be able to ship you to another region or another part of the state. We may not be able to do that because the entire country is so dramatically affected by this.

So, yes, it is madness. And you try and keep an optimistic tone here and there are things to be optimistic about with regard to the vaccines, but things are going to get worse. I mean, they're as bad as they've ever been today versus any other point in this pandemic.

BERMAN: I'll show people why they're going to get worse, just so people can see. If you overlay the shape of the daily deaths reported graphic over daily hospitalizations, what you see is they track largely together. And so that line on top toward the end there is the hospitalization line, that blue line, and right under it is deaths reported. So the daily deaths reported is going to go up.

So we just broke an all-time record, which is horrifying and infuriating, frankly, Sanjay. That's today, but there's every reason to think that what's going to happen over the next three weeks isn't just awful, but I'm talking historically catastrophic. I'm talking 1918 levels of pain for the next month and a half or so until the vaccine comes into play.

GUPTA: I have been following that and tracking exactly what you said very closely, John, to sort of see, where are we in this country as compared to what we, you know, widely consider as the worst public health disaster in the history of the world 100 years ago, or at least the last few hundred years and we're three times the population that we were back then. But we also have better hospitalizations, ICUs, therapeutics, an ambulance system.

And despite that, if you look at the numbers, we are tracking just as badly as back then, which speaks to the fact that no matter how good we get scientifically, in terms of these therapeutics and all of the wonderful things that medicine can do, despite all of that, human behavior is still sabotaging us. That is what's leading to this.

And, John, I mean, if you look at the proportion of deaths now compared to cases, right, it is better now than it was back in March. When we were still trying to figure this thing out, like, what exactly is this. But even despite that, because the absolute numbers are so high on a daily basis, the number of people who are becoming newly infected on a daily basis is so high, it hardly matters, just as you say, because the number of deaths, the death rate is going to be still unacceptably high.

And at some point, we're going to peak.

[07:05:01]

I was looking at the IHME models last night with some modelers. The projected peak keeps moving. But some time in January, the issue really is that we may stay there and just plateau at that unacceptably high level for a long period of time. And I think that that's the real concern now. The actions we take at this point could bring that peak down more quickly. It's probably not going to avoid that peak or blunt that peak at this point, because it's just too fast moving. The exponential growth is too high.

And also, you know, ambulance systems breaking, 90 percent of hospitals now at capacity around the country. Where do you go? When it was primarily in the northeast, again, back in the spring, you did at least say, well, look, the rest of the country is not as affected. You could send patients out of the region. It's bad, but we do have all of these sort of escape hatches. If the entire country is on fire, what is the escape hatch? It's becoming increasingly hard to find one.

CAMEROTA: And, Sanjay, I mean, so many of us still do look to our leaders, of course, for guidance and so the significance of L.A. Mayor Garcetti spelling it out for people. So here is what he just told the people of Los Angeles.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D-LOS ANGELES, CA): My message couldn't be simpler. It's time to hunker down. It's time to cancel everything. And if it isn't essential, don't do it. Don't meet up with others outside your household, don't host a gathering. Don't attend a gathering. And following our targeted safer at home order, if you're able to stay home, stay home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Guidelines are so helpful, because I think that people are so confused. Is the positivity rate in my state really bad? What about my county? How about my town? And so do you think it's time for other leaders to say something like that as well?

GUPTA: This has become such a -- like everything else, such a politically-charged issue, the idea of trying to advocate for some sort of stay-at-home or lockdown type of order. The answer is yes. My answer is yes. And I know that a lot of people, you know, they hedge on this. But there's two realities here. One is that it really is no longer going to be our decision at some point.

We keep acting as if we have control over this. The virus has control over this in terms of what the hospitalizations would allow. If you simply have no more hospital beds or an ambulance can't come pick you up in your home to take someone away who is having a hard time breathing, then the answer is clear, you have got to do these circuit breaker sort of stops so the transmission of the virus really starts to slow down and hopefully it comes to a more manageable level.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people may say, look, this isn't affecting me. I'm not -- we're good. If hospitals and things like that are overwhelmed, it's not just coronavirus patients that are going to be affected. It's all the elective operations, it's people who come in with heart problems, with stroke problems, with cancer, you know, all of these other things start to get affected. We start to crumble from a health care kind sort of standpoint.

The hospitalizations, I think, as we've said now for a few months on your program, are the truest and most consistent measure of what's going on here and it's the most relatable for people. We are so used to being able to being able to pick up the phone and call 911, be relatively assured there's a hospital bed, an ICU bed, therapeutics that we might need. This is the United States and yet we are going to take this country, I think, from a health care standpoint to a breaking point at this point.

And, again, guys, we've been talking about this for months. You know me. I try not to get too hyperbolic. This is really worrisome. It has been for some time, but now there's some really objective problems that everybody in the country may start to feel.

CAMEROTA: And Michael Osterholm is going to be with us, Sanjay, later in the show, says we are at a case cliff. We're at the cliff right now, maybe even have gone over it in the next few days.

You bring up Eric Garcetti and what's happening in Los Angeles. I just want to make clear, it's a huge sacrifice he's asking for, but it's not everything. Retail stores are still open. There's a lot of offices still open. Movie, television production, which drives the economy out there, it's still happening. He is just asking people to make sensible decisions.

And when you look around the world, you see it works. You see what's happened in these European countries, where they've instituted measures like this for short periods of time and it breaks the rise. It just does. Israel has done it like three times. They keep having to do it, but the country is willing to do it, by and large. And when they do it, it just stops that incredibly fast rise in cases and hospitalizations.

GUPTA: Yes. They call them these circuit breaker sort of lockdowns. Let's just get a hold of it for, as you say, a short period of time. And it's really these five primary locations that is where 80 percent of viral transmission is happening in our societies, restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels and houses of worship.

[07:10:00]

Now, as you say, most of society -- much of society, I should say, can still say open and still function as long as people wear masks and things like that. It doesn't need to go into a complete lockdown like we saw in Wuhan, for example, at the beginning of this pandemic. But we're not even doing that. And as a result, these numbers are continuing to grow. I can't even get these numbers out of my mouth. Because when Dr. Robert Redfield was saying, we're entering the worst three months, 1,500 to 2,000 people may be dying every day, that was just a few days ago, he said that. And we've surpassed 3,000 now. So as bad as it was, and as dire as he sounded within a few short days, it's gotten even worse.

BERMAN: Sanjay, I want to read you something here, because the CDC ensemble just put out a new forecast of their projected deaths by December 26th, which is, what, three weeks from now. They say the projected deaths will be between 303,000 and 329,000, up to 329,000 deaths by the day after Christmas. That's, you know, another 55,000, 60,000 deaths in three weeks, is what the CDC is now forecasting.

GUPTA: Right. I mean, you know, if we're at 3,000 now and it's going to hover around this sort of number, I mean, you know, the math is sort of -- it's awful to do, but, you know, you talk about three weeks, another 50,000, 60,000 people dying, I don't know where this peaks at this point. I mean, this is starting to defy the models, even the aggressive ones in terms of how bad things could get.

I will say, when you look at even the CDC models and the IHME models, they do count on these certain mandates and these states saying in place, 40 states having some sort of mandates. You know, I know Ali Khan was talking about this earlier, I think there's 13 states or so that have mask mandates of some sort. Seven states that have, you know, reliable business sort of mitigation or closure in place. If we don't even maintain even those mandates, the numbers that we hear, as awful as they are, could be even higher.

There's always worst-case projections with these models, and I don't know if viewers have noticed, but we hardly ever present those worst- case models. What we are presenting to you is sort of the middle of the road, the middle of the road sort of model. It could be better if we actually started to employ mask mandates and talk about those five locations, restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels, houses of worship, for example, or it could be a lot worse, as well.

And right now, I'm not sure where we're headed. It's very disheartening to hear that they're still having these parties at the White House, not just because it's the White House, but because then I get a hundred emails from people saying, hey, how bad is it, really? We're thinking about having a bunch of bunch of relatives over for the holidays, it's going to be okay, right? That's what I get all the time. And I have to be the guy who says, no, it's not. And I hate to be the guy who says that.

I enjoy a great holiday party as much as the next guy, but this is not the year to do that. We saw what happened in Canada. Canada is an example. October 12th was their Thanksgiving. We saw within a couple of weeks after that that the numbers really started to go up. And, in fact, the case numbers doubled a few weeks after their Thanksgiving. We've got to look around the world and get some clues as to what might happen here after our holidays.

BERMAN: Listen, Sanjay, we appreciate you. Someone has got to level with the American people. We appreciate it.

CAMEROTA: And you'll be back next hour to answer viewer questions, which we also really appreciate.

BERMAN: Quick programming note, join Anderson and Dr. Sanjay Gupta tomorrow night for a new CNN coronavirus town hall. Get your questions answered about the coronavirus and the vaccine. That's at 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time.

So, all the lies coming from the president, all just the outer space lies coming from his supporters, are they now backfiring on Republicans in Georgia? Pro-Trump lawyers literally telling Georgians not to vote now in the January runoffs.

We will speak to the election official who has begged the president to stop doing this, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

CAMEROTA: President Trump heads to Georgia on Saturday to campaign for Republican senators facing runoff elections. But yesterday, two pro-Trump lawyers told Georgians not to vote.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNEY POWELL, FORMER ATTORNEY FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP: I think I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure.

LIN WOOD, ATTORNEY: They have not earned your vote. Don't you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election, for God's sakes?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us now, Georgia's election implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling. He's a Republican who issued an impassioned plea to President Trump this week to stop pushing false election claims and to condemn violent threats. Mr. Sterling, thank you very much for being here.

What are they doing? What is Lin Wood -- what are Lin Wood and Sidney Powell doing?

GABRIEL STERLING, GEORGIA ELECTION IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER: Who the heck knows? I mean, it's Looney Tunes. It's -- the president's literally coming to Georgia to campaign for the same two senators that his former lawyers were filing lawsuits to contest the election with the same claims the president made in his very long 46-minute video yesterday, that have already been debunked, I'm speechless. That's the best I've got right now.

CAMEROTA: Yes. Did you know Lin Wood before this? STERLING: Not really. Of course, if you're in Atlanta, you know of Lin Wood. He actually did live about 0.6 miles that way a little while ago, not that far from where my house is now. But I never had to deal with him directly. I saw the movie about the Olympic bombing, that's about as close as I ever got to see Lin Wood.

CAMEROTA: Because he brought you up personally. So here is what they said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

POWELL: They have fought so hard to get rid of President Trump and tried every dirty, nasty, evil, illegal trick in the book to do it.

[07:20:03]

Yes, it is pure evil.

WOOD: You listen up, Gabriel. You're not going to sell our votes to China.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: You listen up, Gabriel. What does that mean?

STERLING: I heard about -- again, who knows? I mean, it's -- as I said in one of the conferences today, this all comes out of fever dreams. I mean, there's just no basis in any reality, whatsoever, but there are people who are emotionally tied to the president and the president is taking advantage of that. And one of the other things is, people like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are taking advantage of people who are not understanding the ins and outs of a relatively complex system of how elections work.

But the reality was Sidney Powell's main claims is that these dominion voting machines flip votes. We literally did a hand tally and it was 0.105 percent off of the (INAUDIBLE) to a balance and 0.009 percent off the margin, showing that the machines scanned exactly what the ballots that every voter cast said. I mean, but she's continuing to stick with it.

At that same rally, somebody asked her about the hand recount, and she said, no, no, they didn't on machines. They're lying to me. They're just lying to people. And I really have a problem with somebody like Lin Wood, who hasn't voted in a Republican primary since 2004, telling Republicans, don't vote for the Republican Senate candidates. It's maddening. I can't even begin to put words to it.

CAMEROTA: If this were a science fiction movie, you would almost think that they were Democratic operatives looking to depress the Republican vote. But they're not. They're supporters, ardent supporters of President Trump and Republicans. Do you think that the upshot of all of this is that it will depress the vote in Georgia?

STERLING: At this point, there's no way that it can't. I mean, the unfortunate part was the president put everybody in this position when he went to Senators Loeffler and Perdue and basically said, you need to call for Secretary Raffensperger to resign, my boss, for no apparent reason, and they said, because of failures in the vote and a lack of transparency.

Alisyn, you know, we were having two press conferences a day and putting out hourly press releases on what was going on with the count. So I don't know how much more transparent we could be. We did a hand recount to verify the outcome. I don't know how much more secure we could be. I mean, we're talking about the most secure election in the history of the state of Georgia in the history of the United States.

CAMEROTA: So there are statements that will depress the vote, we think. Then there are statements that threaten the lives of election officials. I don't know if you heard the president's lawyer, Joe diGenova, go after Chris Krebs. Did you hear what he said on a radio show?

STERLING: If you're -- in my quote/unquote impassioned plea from the other day, the first thing I talked about was a former U.S. attorney, Joe diGenova, talking about having Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran a cyber and infrastructure security agencies to be shot. That was what I opened with. But what brought me to that day, yes, that was bad, but, again, Chris, he took a big high-profile job. I took a high-profile job in the secretary and for office.

There was a 20-something tech who was working for Dominion Voting Systems, who was innocently doing his job and some of these conspiracy guys were videotaping him and adding commentary about stuff that they didn't understand or didn't care to understand, saying he was manipulating votes. He was moving one report from one machine to another machine, normal processing stuff. And they put that out there and then within a few minutes, there were people putting gifs of nooses saying, may God have mercy on your soul and you committed treason. I mean, that's a death threat. And this kid had a unique name and they put his name out there and his family started getting harassed.

That was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back for me, because this kid just took a job. He just took a regular job, like the hundreds of thousands of other election workers around this country who were just doing their job diligently and well, and they don't deserve it.

CAMEROTA: Yes, neither do you, neither does Chris Krebs. Just because you took a high-profile job doesn't mean you have to get death threats and your family has to get death threats.

And so what do you say to Joe diGenova?

STERLING: Dude, you know what the heck you're doing. Knock it off. I don't have any easier way to say that. He said he was joking. Is this in any kind of an environment where a joke like that can go over? No, it's not.

CAMEROTA: And then there's Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who President Trump just pardoned, who is calling for martial law to be invoked so that they can hold a new election. Your thoughts.

STERLING: We have a Constitution. Every person who works in the government and has been elected to government swears an oath to that Constitution. This was the most secure election in the history of the United States in 2020, because of all the efforts of hundreds of thousands of men and women across this country.

[07:25:02]

To then say, no, no, we're going to throw the whole thing out and start over again under martial law -- I mean, I will say this, if they had another election, I have a pretty good feeling what the outcome would be. But they don't do that in this country. The electors are going to vote on December 14th and Joe Biden will be the president- elect at that point officially.

CAMEROTA: Gabriel Sterling, you seem to be maintaining your sanity somehow despite all of this. And we really --

STERLING: Thanks, Alisyn. I cover it well, I guess, at this point.

CAMEROTA: I guess so. We appreciate you speaking out and all of your words and your time this morning.

STERLING: Thanks, have a great day.

CAMEROTA: You too.

A programming note, you can watch the Georgia Senate debate between Senator Kelly Loeffler and Reverend Raphael Warnock Sunday night at 7:00 P.M. right here on CNN.

It was one of the deadliest -- well, it was the deadliest day of the pandemic yesterday, and the White House though is moving ahead with their holiday parties despite warnings from their own CDC, their own doctors. Wait until you hear how they're defending their plan for voluntary mask holiday parties.

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[07:30:00]