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Sources: Trump Frustrated with Barr After Election Comments; California Governor Warns New Cases Could Overwhelm ICUs by Christmas. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 03, 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: He is detached from both reality and democracy all at once while Americans die in record once.

Joining us now is Michael Osterholm. He's the director for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of President-elect Biden's coronavirus task force. Dr. Osterholm, just your reaction to the news this morning, a record number of deaths reported in one day in the United States.

DR. MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, DIRECTOR OF INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH AND POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Thank you very much for having me, John. My sense is that we may one day look back and say I wish it was back to 2,600 deaths a day. That's the issue that we have to bring forward to the American public right now. This is a very, very difficult and dangerous time, and if we don't change our ways this will not be the top of the curve.

BERMAN: You talk about a case cliff, that we have reached or are reaching a case cliff. What do you mean?

OSTERHOLM: Well, hospitals have a capacity to take care of an x number of patients, and today that's largely determined by the number of health care workers they have. and right now we have stretched our health care worker staff as far as we can. And it will get to the point where the quality of care will be severely hampered if, in fact, we don't have these health care workers. So you may get a bed in the hospital, but will you get the kind of trained health care workers that can care for you? And as we're seeing over and over again, more hospitals in this country are right on that edge of not being able to provide that care. That's when the number of deaths will really go up at that point.

BERMAN: And just so people know, and we can overlay these graphics, the deaths track hospitalizations. As hospitalizations go up and we have now more than 100,000 people hospitalized in the United States, deaths will follow. The top line there, the blue line there at the end is hospitalizations. You can see deaths, the black line below, they go up. They go up. And the hospitalizations keep on going up so the deaths keep on going up.

How bad -- we just got a new ensemble forecast from the CDC, they say maybe 60,000 more deaths by Christmas. How bad do you think it can get?

OSTERHOLM: Well, it's a combination of two factors, John. One is this case cliff I talked about. What remember is deaths have actually followed cases as a percentage of the total cases because we've been able to provide quality care. Remember, we've seen almost a 60 percent reduction in the number of deaths among those going into intensive care medical units from last April to about a month ago. But now the actual percentage of deaths as the number of people hospitalized is going to start going up because we can't provide the same quality of care. So you've got that factor.

At the same time, you've also got this surging number of cases overall. And that's up to us. That's on us. We have a lot of power over this virus if we just stop swapping air with our friends, colleagues, and unknowns. And if we don't do that, we'll see the case numbers go up while the quality of medical care will actually go down because of the inability to provide adequately trained health care workers. That's a perfect storm. And at that point I don't know what this number could look like. It could obviously grow substantially.

OSTERHOLM: You say swapping air. People who don't listen to your podcast as much as I do and my wife does, you talk about people swapping air inside. When you are inside in a bar, in a restaurant, in a workplace, that's what you need to avoid over the next few weeks you say.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, is trying to institute measures where people do less swapping of air, as you say. I want to listen to what he said overnight. We don't have the mayor. He said cancel everything. The mayor of Los Angeles said cancel everything, and he has instituted new stay-at-home orders. They're not as restrictive as it sounds -- retail stores are still open, there will still be workplaces open -- but he's telling people to stay home. How important of a message is that?

OSTERHOLM: Well, it's a very important message, and it has to be put in context in the sense that there are those essential workers that basically keep our society running. They are at increased risk of becoming infected, and for those people we need to provide as much of the respiratory protection as possible.

But if you don't have to be out, don't be out. Right now, you will very likely be one of those cases that ends up in a hospital. And as our intensive care medical teams have tried to tell us, they are not the front lines. We in public health, the elected officials are. They are the last line. The last face you want to have to see is some intensive care physician trying to put a tube down your throat. And so, please understand that, that if we don't change what we're doing, we don't stop swapping air with people, wherever it may be, among those who are not protected, we are in trouble.

BERMAN: You caught a lot of flak over the transition for discussing the idea of stay-at-home orders at all, not saying we have to institute a national stay-at-home order, but discussing it as something that is a possible solution.

[08:05:01]

They're doing it in European countries in certain ways, and now they're doing it in Los Angeles in a bit of a different way. Do you feel like perhaps now you've been vindicated?

OSTERHOLM: I don't feel vindicated. I think the issue we have to put forward is that what is it going to take for us to slow down the growth of cases. Remember, we're not trying to do what the European countries have done necessarily, or for that matter, for sure what the Asian countries have done. We're trying to keep our hospitals running in a way that if you have your heart attack or stroke you can still get care. If you are severely ill with COVID-19, you can get care. And if we don't take the measures right now to limit the contact with each other, we're going to see that we can't provide that care.

So to me it was a matter of we need to do something now. I'd rather do it now and try to avoid the cases in the future than wait to try to put this in place when the house is so on fire that, in fact, we have crossed that case cliff and hospitals basically are literally overrun. That's what we're up against.

BERMAN: Michael Osterholm, we appreciate the work you're doing. Thanks so much for being with us this morning.

OSTERHOLM: Thank you, John.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Great conversation. Joining us now, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, let's just start there with John's last question to Dr. Osterholm. Nobody wants to have to stay at home, but it sounds like that's what the mayor of L.A. has decided to try to impress upon the people of Los Angeles. Is it time to do that elsewhere and even nationally?

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think that there are certainly places around the country where you're starting to see the numbers, as Dr. Osterholm was talking about, really getting to an unmanageable level. It's become, again, like everything else, so politically charged to talk about stay-at-home orders or locking down certain parts of society, and I think that that's what he is -- Michael Osterholm has been alluding to. But it may be necessary.

California, you're talking about the city of Los Angeles, but the governor of the state has also said that by Christmas Eve ICUs could be essentially overwhelmed, and in that case you have to do something to dramatically break the viral transmission and try and reduce the number of people who are becoming newly infected.

So there are other options, and they include really focusing on the areas of our society where we know most of the viral transmission occurs. But we haven't done any of that. We still don't have mask mandates. We don't even do the most basic things to try and prevent the spread of this virus, and as a result you may need to do more aggressive therapy. It's like that analogy we keep talking about. Patient comes in with localized disease, easy to treat, you recommend the treatment, they don't do it, they come back with more widespread disease and are now wondering why can't I just do the easier treatment now to treat the more widespread problem? It's because it's a bigger problem now. So that's sort of where the country is.

BERMAN: It really is staggering to hear Dr. Osterholm say that we may look back on 2,600 deaths a day as a point that wasn't so bad. He is clearly worried it's going to get that much worse over the coming weeks, Sanjay.

GUPTA: Yes, we have seen these trend lines, I think, now for the last several months. People, I think, generally know how this works. You get an increasing number of cases, and then a few weeks after that you get the increased number of hospitalizations, and a few weeks after that, sadly, the increased number of deaths. So the cases are going up. We can show what's happening in the United States. Compared to other countries it's pretty remarkable, because, you look at the five worst countries, just to give you a little bit of context, United States having over 200,000 newly infected people on any given day. But just look at these other countries. Brazil is a smaller population, but that was a country we were tracking with for a while. They are up closer to 50,000. India is obviously a much larger country population- wise, 35,000.

You see the list. You see what's happened here in the United States compared to other countries that drew comparisons for all sorts of different reasons because of their initial approach, because of their population density, whatever it may be. And we are the worst in the world, clearly.

So it is one of those things where, as Michael Osterholm was talking about, we have gotten a lot better at taking care of patients. The death rate, if the question is how likely are you to die if you contract this disease? Well, the percentage was higher in the spring because we were still figuring things out. Now we have therapeutics, we know that ventilators may not always be the best answer. It may be as simple as proning somebody, laying them on their stomach instead of on their back, things like that that do make a huge difference.

[08:10:00]

But the problem is, and, again, it's something I think we've really been repeating on this show, done reports on this show -- it's the hospitals, it's the care that people either will or will not receive, because as good as those new strategies are medically, if you can't provide them for people, they obviously have no benefit.

CAMEROTA: Right. And that's what makes the Christmas parties that the White House is planning so unconscionable. Remember when President Trump had people who go to his rallies sign release forms that he wouldn't be held legally liable. They wouldn't sue him if they got coronavirus at one of his rallies. Maybe it's time to have the people who go to the Christmas parties sign release forms if they won't use hospital services, they won't use ambulance services, because it's the strain on the hospital system that is -- you can talk about personal responsibility. If I want to go and expose myself, OK, I'm going to go. But it's what you're doing to the doctors and nurses and to everybody else who needs the hospital system.

GUPTA: Yes, that's absolutely right. We did a report a few months ago in terms of how just people assess risk. When you think of risk, you think, well, I'm willing to take the risk. Well, this isn't that with the contagious disease for the reasons you mentioned. First of all, you're putting others at risk. I think people kind of generally get that. But now we're at the point because of hospitals becoming overwhelmed that you're putting patients who have nothing to do with coronavirus at risk as well because they may not be able to get the care for the heart attack that they're having, the stroke that they're having, the cancer follow-up treatment that they need.

Elective operations for a period of time were essentially canceled in many places around the country, and that was back in the spring, and we're starting to run into those situations again now, people who need treatment for other things that aren't able to get it. So it is a huge problem.

And by the way, when you have the passage of time, we went back and looked at the rallies, for example, in Tulsa, in Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, and said, OK, it's very hard to tell in the moment how much of an impact this had. But let's take a look a few weeks later and see what happened. And you saw exactly the same trends -- case counts went up, followed a few weeks later by hospitalizations, and then deaths, a doubling of some of those things after those rallies.

CAMEROTA: That's such a good reminder, Sanjay. Thank you very much for all of the information as always.

We have a quick programming note for everyone. You can join Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta tomorrow night for a new CNN coronavirus town hall. You can get your coronavirus and vaccine questions answered. That's 9:00 p.m. eastern.

So President Trump is completely detached from reality. He is ignoring the deadly pandemic as it hits new historic highs.

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[08:16:47]

BERMAN: Developing this morning, sources tell CNN that President Trump is frustrated with Attorney General William Barr for accurately stating there was no widespread fraud in the presidential election. "The Washington Post" reports a senior administration official says the president may potentially fire him.

Joining us now CNN political correspondent Abby Phillip. Also with us, CNN senior political commentator and host of "THE AXE FILES", David Axelrod.

You guys just did a whole podcast together. It's like reuniting the team here.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's called promo, John.

BERMAN: I knew I blew something.

So, listen, David, I want to start with you. The William Barr thing is one thing but it's part and parcel of something much larger here which is just how detached from reality and frankly democracy the president is. He spent 46 minutes yesterday in this Facebook rant which was a string of lies, I mean, a word salad of lies about the election he lost.

You couple that with what his former national security adviser Michael Flynn is doing, the guy he just pardoned, Michael Flynn is publicizing this call to declare martial law and hold a revote. This is not small stuff. I just don't think we can get numb to what's going on here and I get maybe the president is doing it for money, but even then what is actually being said out loud is the type of thing that I really do think should make Americans shake right now.

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Right, we should note the recently pardoned and very grateful Michael Flynn. Look, the reality of this is, yes, I think the president in some ways is detached from reality, I think it's very hard for him to accept the word "loser". It's not part of his lexicon for himself, it's an epithet he puts on others.

But in another respect, this is completely consistent with Trump's narrative, his political narrative from the beginning, his political narrative to his base was the liberal elites and the deep state are stealing from you. You are losing because of them. And now, he's saying they took this election not just from me, but from you and that is how he rallies his base.

And, John, you look at the polling and Republicans overwhelmingly now question the results of the election. So he is building on his base, he is inflaming his base, he's making money off of it as you pointed out but he's also building his base into the future.

So, you know, the problem with it is that it's deeply corrosive to democracy, it's also very dangerous and he's putting people at risk who did their jobs, including Republican officials who counted the votes, recounted the votes and recounted the votes again and are now subject to death threats.

The one irony of it and I will finish here is that in the state of Georgia which will decide control of the U.S. Senate on January 5th, he's been so persuasive that his followers now say, well, we don't want to participate in this election with these -- with these crooked counting machines, voting machines, and so on. We may just sit it out and now Republicans are worried having abetted him with their silence are worried that he may cost them the U.S. Senate.

[08:20:00]

CAMEROTA: Abby, this is upside down world. It is upside down world. I mean, the idea that this is a winning strategy for the base, yeah, if you like losing. I mean, you know, he didn't win the presidency with it and I don't know what's going to happen in Georgia, but I do think it bears repeating. What these lawyers, these pro-Trump lawyers, Sidney Powell and Lin Wood are telling people because if you think the president sounds unhinged and delusional, wait until you hear what they said yesterday at their rally. (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: OK. What's the winning strategy there?

PHILLIP: Well, it's a good question. Why would their supporters go back and vote in an election that is supposed to be rigged?

It just highlights how much this does not make any sense, just from the get-go. I mean, there are all kinds of other races in which Republicans won and those election results are readily accepted by, you know, the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and by others on Capitol Hill and now they also need Republican voters to come out in Georgia and actually vote in an election that does matter and where their votes will matter.

But these mixed messages are just going to be completely confusing to Republican voters and I'm not sure that the president showing up this weekend and, you know, by the way, we should be clear, who knows what President Trump is going to actually say this weekend?

I mean, he is so focused on his own political future, his own grievances about this election, it's a real open question whether he's going to deliver the kind of message that is actually effective in this Georgia special election, starting with the fact that he needs people to get out and vote.

So it's a problem of the president's own making but it's too late now I think for Republicans to suddenly try to turn around and say, well, the presidential election was rigged, but, by the way all these other elections aren't rigged and you guys should get out and vote.

BERMAN: You know, I had been skeptical of the idea that Republicans won't show up to vote based on the things that the president was saying. I was skeptical until the lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, talked to Alisyn yesterday and said he was too busy to campaign with the president on Saturday and he's clearly concerned. Then you have the president's lawyers explicitly telling people not to vote, David, it really does feel now like Republicans, senior Republicans in Georgia and around the country, are really nervous about this.

AXELROD: Yeah. And as I said before, you know, there's a rough justice to this. They're reaping the whirlwind. So many of them have been silent as the president -- since election day and even before election day -- questioned the integrity of the election system and fed this poison into our democratic system because they thought they could manage it as they have for four years, and now they're left to -- for many sleepless nights between now and the weekend wondering if he's going to take the whole thing down.

The control of the U.S. Senate at stake and they don't know what the president of the United States will say. So they're paying -- they're paying now for their complicity and their unwillingness to speak out before. We will see what happens.

He may go down there and say the only way that we can overcome this is to just vote in such overwhelming numbers that even a rigged system can't stop us. Maybe that's what he'll do. But I think it's going -- as Abby points out -- it's going to be a hell of an interesting weekend and an anxious one for many Republicans.

CAMEROTA: David, I feel like your suggestion of what he would say is just a little too logical, but, you know, we'll see on Saturday.

AXELROD: Yeah, we'll see.

CAMEROTA: Yeah, Abby, David, thank you both very much for all of that analysis.

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris join Jake Tapper for their first joint interview since their election victory. Tune in for the special event tonight at 9:00 p.m. only on CNN.

All right. The mayor of Los Angeles says it's time to hunker down and cancel he everything. The outbreak in California continues to spread. We discuss with the California lawmaker next.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI (D-CA), LOS ANGELES: 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 are able to stay home, stay home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Hunker down. Cancel everything. Stay home.

That's Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti urging his residents to comply with stay-at-home restrictions as cases in that city reach record levels.

Meanwhile, California Governor Gavin Newsom is warning that hospital ICUs could reach capacity by Christmas.

Joining us now is California Democratic Congressman Raul Ruiz. He was an emergency room doctor before being elected to Congress in 2012, still sees patients, still is out there working.

Congressman, thanks so much for being with us.

This new stay-at-home ask from L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, how important is this now?

REP. RAUL RUIZ, MD (D-CA): It's very important and it's very pertinent for the people who live in Los Angeles because this virus is going to ravage the community if they don't take drastic measures like this.

BERMAN: You are very concerned about the hospitals in Riverside County, throughout California, but your hometown, too. Michael Osterholm, who we just spoke to is on President-elect Joe Biden's transition coronavirus task force, said he is concerned about a case cliff.

What is your concern with the hospitals in your region?

RUIZ: The biggest concern that I have with health care capacity is not at this point the number of ICU beds or the number of ventilators, the biggest concerns I have.

[08:30:00]