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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Trump Causes Confusion with Inaccuracies, Omissions in Prime- Time Speech to Nation; Italy Closes Restaurants, Bars, and Shops Amid Virus. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired March 12, 2020 - 16:30   ET

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

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The president made that announcement in an Oval Office address in primetime last night.

[16:30:03]

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.

COLLINS: While the message was intended to show he was serious about coronavirus, the president left out major details. Less than an hour after he gave his address, the Department of Homeland Security clarified it didn't apply to American citizens or legal permanent residents.

TRUMP: It was made very clear last night who is and who isn't.

COLLINS: The White House was also forced to clarify that the restrictions wouldn't impact goods coming into the U.S. after Trump said they would.

TRUMP: These prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.

COLLINS: After highlighting the risk of large crowds, the president has cancelled multiple trips on his own schedule, including public appearances, fundraisers and campaign events.

TRUMP: And the question is, how many people will die? And I don't want people dying.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS: Now, Jake, we should also note that the Vice President Mike Pence was also at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend when the Brazilian president and his aide were there. He also has not been tested for coronavirus and there are other officials who came in contact say they are self quarantining, people like Senator Rick Scott of Florida. They say they are doing that out of an abundance of caution.

But right now, that is not the plan here at the White House for the president or the vice president. JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Let's hope they're all OK.

Kaitlan Collins, thanks, so much.

Let's chat about all this. So in terms of last night's address, the president said, one, all travel from Europe to the U.S. was suspended. That's not true. The U.K. is exempt. Some others are as well.

He also did not mention that U.S. citizens were excluded from the travel restriction as well as permanent residents, family members. He also did not mention the suspension includes those around the world who recently had been in Europe. They're also included in the ban. And he also said that the restrictions including trade and cargo, and that's not true.

And this was a speech on teleprompter that was supposed to reassure the world.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's extraordinary, because it's so simple to just list what are you going to do in a factual manner and tell the American public what they can expect and that speech did not accomplish that. In fact, it did quite the opposite.

It caused all of this confusion at airports all around the world, people trying to buy last-minute flights so they don't get locked out of the United States, because if you listen to the president's speech, you would be under the impression that after Friday, you would not be allowed back in.

TAPPER: You'd be stranded, yes.

PHILLIP: You would be stranded somewhere.

So it's a real problem, just from a rhetorical perspective that the president can't seem to get his message clear. But I think underlying it is just a lack of preparedness on this administration's part to do some things they should have done frankly months ago to get hospitals and communities prepared, to get ready to do the massive amounts of testing that they would need to do.

We are now in a position where they are trying to do it at the last second when the virus has already spread across the country and it's no longer an issue of whether it is coming from outside of the United States' borders. It's spreading right here.

TAPPER: It is here.

And, Jackie, President Trump today insisting that testing is going smoothly. Everything is fine. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We have a very heavily tested, if Americans are coming back, or anybody is coming back with testing. We have a tremendous testing set up, where people coming if have to be tested. You are not putting them on planes if they're -- if it shows positive. But if they are, if they do come here, they have to, they are quarantined.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Now, it's true that some people are being screened at airports, meaning, they are being checked to see if they have a fever, their temperature might be taken, but that's not testing to see if they have the coronavirus. I don't know if he misunderstands what he's being told, or if he's being misled by his own people.

JACKIE ALEMANY, ANCHOR, THE WASHINGTON POST'S "POWER UP": Well, if his past comments are any indication of what's going on right now, the president has consistently misled the American public about the nature and the severity of the coronavirus pandemic. You had Dr. Anthony Fauci who has been a real truth teller during this time on the Hill, telling lawmakers that they have, in fact, failed to implement testing.

It's -- the numbers are something like, you know, 100 people are being tested to see whether or not they actually test positive for the virus a week. Those numbers are abysmal especially in comparison to places like South Korea and Italy. Presumably governments that we would be acting similarly to that are really outperforming us. You saw lawmakers on the Hill express outrage.

TAPPER: Including President Trump's allies.

ALEMANY: Right, that's exactly right.

Lots of Republicans just baffled by what the CDC is doing, what the holdup, saying there has been a failure to communicate what the issues are, when all of this has highlighted is that the president used this from a political lens. That means he thinks he can just band aid and paper over a lot of the necessary remedies. And, in fact, there's been an absolute collapse of communication here.

TAPPER: Doctors and patients all over the country are telling CNN and other media organizations about all the difficulty they're having getting tested.

[16:35:06]

And yet this is what President Trump said today when he was asked about an ER doctor in Texas who complained about the bureaucracy, because a lot of times the Department of Health is saying, well, you don't need these requirements so you can't get tested. Here is President Trump's response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: You are talking about one case. I mean, I can certainly look into it again. It's one case. I heard also it goes very well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Again, it's not one case. It's dozens if not hundreds of cases we are hearing about. PHILLIP: No, it's not one case at all. We clearly are not doing the

scale of testing to even keep up with the number of cases that are coming up in states all across the country. And even -- if you take a look at just within Washington, the number of elected officials who have had some kind of approximate contact with someone who had coronavirus or may have had coronavirus under the guidelines that exists right now, many of them shouldn't be tested.

Even the White House is saying the president who stood next to someone who is tested positive wouldn't be tested because he's not showing symptoms and because they don't believe the contact was sustained enough. Well, I think across the country, people are feeling like that is just not sufficient and the testing needs to be more far widespread than that.

TAPPER: All right. Thanks to both of you. We appreciate it.

And we just found out that Disneyland in California will be closing starting on Saturday due to concerns about coronavirus.

Thank you both. Appreciate it.

Coming up next, all of Italy on lockdown because of the coronavirus and what's happening there could be a warning for the United States, why? We'll explain.

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TAPPER: In our world lead now, another drastic step in Italy to address the coronavirus pandemic. The prime minister there has ordered restaurants, bars and shops to close down nationally after a record jump in confirmed cases of coronavirus today.

But despite immediately quarantining patients and blocking flights from virus spots, Italy is now facing a crucial hospital shortage and one official warns the healthcare system is, quote, one step from collapse.

As CNN's Mellissa Bell reports from Rome, the rush is on to avoid the same dire situation in the United States, where the virus seems to be mirroring the spread of the disease in Italy, though the U.S. was roughly ten days behind.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MELISSA BELL, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Italy in crisis as the novel coronavirus aggressively infects the country. The famous tourist-filled streets, now mostly empty. Popular landmarks like the Colosseum in Rome without any visitors. Restaurants and bars shut down, as the government slashes flights in and out of the country.

More than 15,000 COVID-19 cases, the most outside China, after a massive jump in just the last days, leaving more than a thousand people dead from the virus.

And the country's normally efficient healthcare system stretched to the limit.

DR. ENRICO STORTI, HEAD OF INTENSIVE CARE, MAGGIORE HOSPITAL IN LODI, ITALY: When we see 100 people at the same time sick and all the people needs your job otherwise they die, this is exactly what we have seen, because they arrive in the hospital with such a consistent distress that you have to treat these people in seconds.

BELL: With not enough beds, equipment and physicians.

DR. PIETRO BISAGNI, DIRECTOR OF GENERAL SURGERY, MAGGIORE HOSPITAL IN LODI, ITALY: We start here four-to-five days continuously.

BELL: Now, there are reports that some doctors in Italy are being forced to make painful decisions.

YASCHA MOUNK, CONTRIBUTING WRITER AT THE ATLANTIC: Doctors are being pushed to a point where they might have to make a choice about which patient gets one of those ventilators and which patient is denied that care.

BELL: Government officials are denying that.

The pandemic hit Italy a few days before the U.S. So far, cases in the United States are mirroring the growth in Italy, with no signs that American hospitals are any more prepared than their Italian counterparts.

The United States has 2.8 hospital beds per thousand, fewer than Italy's 3.2 per 1,000 people according to the OECD.

The former Italian minister issuing a stark and haunting warning to America, don't wait for it to get worse.

MATTEO RENZI, FORMER ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Please don't make the same mistakes of under valuation of the risk.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BELL: One of those other mistakes that Matteo Renzi has been talking about these last few days that he is warning Americans to avoid is one of the early mistakes, Jake, that was made by Italy. It was a mistake regarding travel bans. You will remember long before any other country did it, Italy decided in January they would ban all flights from China and flights going back to China.

Well, the epidemic has reached Italy, of course, on the proportion the rest of Europe hasn't known, nonetheless. It simply didn't work. It did not keep the coronavirus out.

This is a country that is even now struggling to deal with the latest cases. This latest piece of news from the country, Jake, very quickly, all Catholic churches will be closed now until the 3rd of April with worshippers absolved from Sunday masses -- Jake. TAPPER: That's incredible for Italy to end church services until

April.

Melissa Bell, thank you so much.

Joining me now is Dr. Craig Spencer. He's an emergency room doctor, director of global health and emergency medicine at Columbia University's medical center.

Doctor, do you look at how bad things are in Italy and think that is where the U.S. is possibly going to be within the next couple weeks?

DR. CRAIG SPENCER, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL HEALTH IN EMERGENCY MEDICINE, COLUMBIA MEDICAL CENTER: Yes, anyone that is hearing the stories out of Italy knows they are harrowing. Look, we know that here in the United States, we have some of the finest healthcare structures in the world. I am happy enough to work at one. But we also know here in the U.S., we have a stark inequality between our best centers and our last resource and maybe overburdened centers, largely in rural areas throughout the country.

[16:45:08]

So, I think we absolutely need to heed the advice that we're hearing from the Italians. As you mentioned, maybe we're 10, 11 days behind. We need to be heeding that advice. And we need to be thinking, preparing in advance, because, despite how great our hospitals are, many of them are already overburdened, and many of them would already cripple under a big influx of these patients.

TAPPER: What should the states be doing?

Should they be protect -- setting up right now excess hospital rooms? Should they be constructing and ordering more ventilators and the other kinds of equipment needed for a possible surge of patients?

SPENCER: That's a really great question.

And hospital systems have already been thinking about that, right? We have been thinking about the number of ventilators. We have been thinking about the number of ICU beds all throughout the country. These are things that we know we're going to need.

One of the biggest things that's hampering us is the lack of testing, right? It's hard to know if you're dealing with coronavirus patient if you can't diagnose someone with coronavirus.

We know that somewhere around one in six patients that get coronavirus are going to need admission to the hospital. We have been seeing about one in 20 are going to need some intensive care. And unless we're able to slow the spread -- the speed of spread of this disease, and really slow down the transmission with things like social distancing, from preventing the virus from spreading within our communities at conferences, in concerts, et cetera, then there's a real possibility that the number of cases will overwhelm the capacity of many of our structures. TAPPER: So we have seen organizations like the NBA and Major League

Baseball and NHL and the NCAA take steps to try to stop groups coming together.

We have seen Disney say that Disneyland is going to be closed starting Saturday. But have you seen the kind of dramatic steps that you think are necessary for President Trump and for the governors across the country to take?

Are leaders doing what needs to be done to prevent us from becoming the next Italy?

SPENCER: Look, I said this last night.

I got more phone calls from friends and family last night after the NBA announced that they were closing down. And so really the public health messaging from the NBA seems to be stronger and more reliable than from some of our politicians right now, unfortunately.

I think what we need to do right now, us, as individuals, is, we need to focus on solidarity over hysteria. We need to focus on preparedness over panic, because if we do that as individuals, as much of what we're doing in the community can have as much or more of an impact than what we're able to do on the front lines in hospital.

This disease, this virus does not care about the color of your skin. It doesn't care about your passport. And it does not care how big of a bank account you have.

At times like this, we are often forced to think inward, out of fear and hysteria, but I want to challenge everyone to think outward. Think about the most vulnerable people in our communities. Think about the elderly neighbor that we can be doing shopping for.

Think about the food bank that we can donate to. Think about the people that we can help who have medical conditions where we can help pick up their prescription medications.

We need to be preparing now for where we could potentially be in the next two weeks. And if we don't take those actions right now, we're at risk of not averting the worst-case scenario that we're seeing in many other places in the world.

TAPPER: And, obviously, when we talk about a patient with coronavirus that needs hospitalization, you're talking about one in six, possibly one in 20 who really need dire treatment.

We're talking about serious hospital resources, right?

SPENCER: Absolutely.

One, it's going to take a lot of providers, right? There's a lot of people that are on the front lines. We have nurses, techs, lab staff. We all have experience working with things like the flu and other respiratory viruses. We don't have the same experience with something like coronavirus. We

have personal protective equipment. We can prepare ourselves. But we need to be thinking more in terms of our resources, our supplies, and how we're going to really cut this off in the community before this spreads.

TAPPER: Dr. Craig Spencer, thank you for your time, for your expertise, sir. We appreciate it.

SPENCER: Thank you.

TAPPER: Since we came on the air, there have been several major closures and cancellations across the country.

We're going to have more on those right after this.

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[16:53:15]

TAPPER: In just this hour since, I came on TV, more major cancellations have been made over coronavirus.

Disneyland in California will close beginning Saturday. Maryland and Ohio are both ordering schools closed; 35,000 New York City employees will be told to work from home. The NCAA is now canceling its basketball tournaments, men and women.

CNN sports correspondent Carolyn Manno joins me now.

And, Carolyn, just yesterday, the NCAA announced it would ban fans from games. What led to this decision to just end the games?

CAROLYN MANNO, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: I think there were three things, Jake, that ultimately led to this decision.

The first was the news last night that the NBA is going to suspend play indefinitely because one of their players had contracted this virus. We now know that it's multiple players who have this virus, but still that's an emphasis on player and team safety.

Then, today, we learned earlier in the afternoon that all of the NCAA men's conference championship tournaments were completely scrapped. Some players were warming up on the floor when that happened. That was a strong indication that changes could be coming to March Madness.

Then lastly, you had first Duke University and then the ACC in its totality issuing a statement saying that they are going to suspend all athletics. So all of those things combined, it was a very difficult decision for the NCAA.

I mean, look $900 million in ad revenue, tens of millions of people watching March Madness, but this was a unanimous decision that was made by the NCAA board. And I don't think they had a choice.

TAPPER: And it must be crushing to some of the players for whom this is really their last opportunity for athletic glory.

MANNO: Yes, listen, the players -- March Madness for some young kids is the dream of all dreams.

I mean, we all have the images burned in our brains of cutting down nets and crazy, screaming fans. I mean, players live for this. Fans wait all year for this. They circle it on their calendars.

[16:55:00]

And while these players don't necessarily fit into this vulnerable category of people who need care -- I mean, a lot of them are young. They have access to world-class medical care. It's still a crushing blow for everybody in sports, but it's setting the tone now that this is going to be brought to a complete standstill.

With the exception of some leagues who are toying with the idea of doing things without spectators, sports is at a halt-right now. And it's where we need to be. Everybody's going to take a break and reevaluate things, and now we know that March Madness is no exception to that.

TAPPER: All right, Carolyn, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

For more on the coronavirus pandemic, tune in to CNN tonight for another global town hall, "Facts and Fears." It's at 10:00 p.m. Eastern tonight with Anderson Cooper and, of course, our own Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

And then, this Sunday, CNN and Univision will be hosting the Democratic presidential debate with Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders. There will not be an audience. I will be moderating the debate live here in Washington, D.C., along with Dana Bash.

It's at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Sunday night.

We're going to take a quick break. We will be right back.

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