Return to Transcripts main page

The Lead with Jake Tapper

U.S. Averaging Over 1,000 Coronavirus Deaths Every Day; One-on- One with Trump's Testing Czar, Admiral Brett Giroir. Aired 4-4:30p ET

Aired August 14, 2020 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:00:00]

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: And if you would like more information those stories, please visit CNNHeroes.com.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you for being with me.

"THE LEAD" starts right now.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Pamela Brown, in for Jake Tapper today.

And we begin with the health lead.

The CDC is now projecting the U.S. could see up to 200,000 total deaths in a matter of weeks. The U.S. has continued to average over 1,000 deaths every day for 18 days in a row now. Take that in.

California just became the first state to mark 600,000 cases. And Florida and Georgia lead the nation in the number of new infections per capita. In fact, the White House Coronavirus Task Force has even urged Georgia to adopt a mask mandate, according to "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution."

As CNN's Kyung Lah reports, it comes to schools and families grapple with the realities of reopening.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HILARY PORTERFIELD, PARENT: It was terrifying. It was, my worst fears had come true.

KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That's how this Georgia parent ends a traumatic back-to-school week, her child quarantined, like more than 2,000 students, teachers and staffers across five states, at least 230 positive COVID cases now reported from schools.

The head of the CDC says reopening schools can't be done quickly.

DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, CDC DIRECTOR: Yes, we don't want to pressure anybody. Our guidance is there to help them begin to open, as I said, safely and sensibly. The timing of that is going to have to be decided one school at a time. LAH: Given what he's seen, this Arizona teacher says he's quitting.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We weren't given the option to teach from home, no. It's a small room. There's one exit. There's -- the ventilation isn't all that great for schools. And so it's just -- it's not a good situation.

LAH: But the Trump administration continues to assist schools reopen. The radiologist tasked to back up the president's own theories driven by this belief:

DR. SCOTT ATLAS, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: We know that the risk of the disease is extremely low for children, even less than that of seasonal flu. We know that the harms of locking out the children from school are enormous.

LAH: While COVID does rarely kill children, they can infect their homes and community. One state pushing schools to open while resisting a statewide mass mandate is Georgia.

"The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" obtained White House Coronavirus Task Force recommendations stating: "There is widespread and expanding community viral spread," and it would strongly recommend a statewide mask mandate.

The spread of COVID in California is slowing. But the state reported a grim marker, more than 600,000 cases, the most of any U.S. state.

REP. RAUL RUIZ (D-CA): The numbers are very high, and they're actually much higher in underserved and disproportionately affecting people of color and Latinos here in California.

LAH: Nationwide, cases are trending down in most states, seen here in green. But in the last week, the U.S. reported more than 360,000 cases, enough to fill Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium more than five times, and the death toll continues to stand at more than 1,000 lives lost every single day.

In three weeks, predicts the CDC, between 180,000 and 200,000 Americans will have died from COVID.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NIAID DIRECTOR: I'm old enough to have been a baby during World War II, but I remember how the country absolutely pulled together. We put together after 9/11. This is equivalent to that, Matt. And we have got both together.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LAH: And we're learning this guidance from the CDC, updated guidance, that if you get COVID and you recover, the CDC guidance now says that you do not have to quarantine or get tested for three months.

Pam, it is only, though, if you're not showing symptoms -- Pam.

BROWN: All right. Kyung Lah, thank you so much for bringing us the latest there. And I want to turn now to Michael Osterholm, the director of the

Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Michael, great to see you.

DR. MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH: Good to see you again.

BROWN: I want to start with what we just heard from Dr. Scott Atlas, who we know is an adviser to President Trump on coronavirus.

He was talking about young people. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ATLAS: Young people are not at risk for serious disease from this. If you look at New York City, of the night 19,000, roughly, 700 deaths in New York City, people under 18, that's 13 of them. And there's only one child, which is very tragic, of course -- I'm a father myself -- but there's only one child that was otherwise healthy out of all of those deaths. It's really very low risk here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: According to the CDC, it is true that people under 18 have a lower risk of getting hospitalized or dying from the virus.

But there has been a 90 percent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases among children in the U.S. and at least 90 children have died from the virus.

[16:05:01]

How do you describe the risk for young people and their role in spreading this virus?

OSTERHOLM: Well, thank you.

First of all, we have to understand that we're calling children everyone basically under 20 years of age. And for this disease, that's not really helpful.

Right now, we know that kids under age 8 or 9 do act very differently than do their older siblings who are in junior high or high school. And we do see fewer cases.

For example, here in the state of Minnesota, we have actually had our child day care centers open all through the summer, and we have not seen any problems whatsoever in that area that would be of major public health concern.

So I understand that, while we surely can handle the younger kids, and potentially bring them back to school when communities are not themselves on fire, the older kids, i.e., the adolescents and the young adults, are very different. Their situation is, they do have a higher risk of some severe disease,

although still low. But what their real risk is, is bringing the virus to the rest of the community. I worry very much about what's going to happen post-Labor Day, as our high schools, our colleges and our universities come back together.

We're already seeing evidence of widespread transmission. Even the earliest activities, I think they pose a great risk to our communities.

BROWN: Yes, I mean, there's two aspects of this, how sick kids can get and how they transmit.

I know, as a mother of two children, how often my toddler son would bring home germs and I would get sick. All last year, I was sick constantly. And you heard Dr. Atlas talk about the flu, saying that fewer kids have died from COVID than the flu, which is true as of now.

Is that a fair comparison, though?

OSTERHOLM: Well, I guess any comparison, you can say, is fair or unfair.

All I would say is, I don't think it's helpful. I think the challenge we have is getting information to parents and to educators about what we might expect. I think that it's fair to say, with what we know now, younger kids, kids under age 8 or 9, will in fact transmit less, they will not see as many -- nearly as many problems as those older.

Where I concentrate my big concern right now for our communities is in adolescents and senior high school kids, young adults. At this point, that's where we're going to see a lot of the transmission that could pose then a risk to teachers. It could pose a risk to other members of the community. That's what we need to really work on right now.

BROWN: Right.

And there was that study out of South Korea showing that young adults, like you pointed out, are just as likely as adults, or nearly as likely as adults, to transmit.

You wrote this op-ed in "The New York Times" I read, and this is what it said.

You said, in order to save lives and save the economy, we need another lockdown.

Do you really think Americans can tolerate another lockdown? Because, as you know, Dr. Fauci has said it could be something in the middle. It doesn't have to be binary.

OSTERHOLM: Well, I am not sure that that's the case.

Let me just say that, right now, the best evidence we have is, until we keep people separated enough, so that we can really slow down transmission, at best, we have a lukewarm response, and we kind of do it, just like we did last March, April and May. We kind of did it, a slowdown, not a lockdown.

If you look at the other countries of the world that really kept people apart until they drove the virus level down to less than one case per 100,000 population per day, they are the ones that basically have largely been able to reopen, even though they're still seeing cases, and they're still dealing with it. They have a very different situation.

So my responses to those that say, can we do this or not, you're right. I understand completely. But in that same op-ed piece, we laid out the economic issues, and talked about how we have to hold America whole, all the workers, all the small businesses, city and state governments, and we can do that. We can afford to do that.

I think the most important message is, If we don't do that, we are going to be talking about potentially over 100,000 cases a day. We're going to see those cases country bleed slowly to an economic death. And that's what we have to understand.

So we have a choice. You can pay me now or pay me later. And doing it now is going to save many, many lives and, actually, in the long run, has a much, much more positive view on the economy outcome.

BROWN: So you don't think that the mitigation efforts, social distancing, wearing a mask, you don't think that that's enough right now? You think that the country needs to go into total lockdown to get this pandemic under control?

OSTERHOLM: Well, let me just ask you.

I mean, you have been watching all of this, as has every other American for the last months, and you saw what happened just within within recent weeks of these large, large case numbers around the country.

We still are seeing cases increasing. And I think that the challenge is, is that, right now, we're not even getting close to driving it down. I think what we're going to do is probably level off at the high 40s, low 50,000 cases per day, and then post-Labor Day, we're going to have an explosion of cases.

It's going to go much higher than the 65,000 cases a day. That sure doesn't look to me like we're doing much, even though we have been preaching, distancing, we have been preaching masking, we have been preaching responsibility.

[16:10:08]

BROWN: Right.

OSTERHOLM: Have you seen what that's done yet?

BROWN: So, I want to look at the other countries, because you did mention that other countries implemented the lockdown, their cases went down. But now we're seeing a resurgence in several countries, particularly

when you look at Europe. So what do you think then? Would a lockdown then be necessary until a vaccine is created? Is that the only solution here?

OSTERHOLM: Well, see, this is a an example of using the brake appropriately.

What I mean by that is, you got to tap it a little bit, you got to let it up a little bit.

There's actually a wonderful op-ed in today's "New York Times" from a leading researcher in Great Britain, who basically pointed out the fact that what Europe did is, they did lockdown, they got it down, they had it down. And then they said, well, just like America, hey, we will just let it go.

And what happened is, they loosened up very, very quickly. And so now, in the last three weeks, we have seen increasing cases. They're already having the same discussion in Europe we're having here. The difference is, they are order of magnitude lower in case numbers.

It's much easier to deal with 6,000 cases than it is to deal with 60,000 cases. And so I think that you're going to see them actually tightening up issues in Europe, again, as you said, to get us through to a vaccine.

BROWN: All right, Michael Osterholm, thank you so much for that. Really interesting discussion.

OSTERHOLM: Thank you.

BROWN: Well, up next, the Trump administration testing czar joins me live to discuss why he says the U.S. does not need to be conducting millions of tests a day.

Plus: multiple states receiving new warning letters from the Postal Service about the election -- what it could mean for your votes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:16:01]

BROWN: Well, the number of coronavirus tests nationwide may be declining, but Admiral Brett Giroir, member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said people should not get hung up on the number.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

ADM. BRETT GIROIR, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE MEMBER: You beat the virus by smart policies supplemented by strategic testing. You do not beat the virus by shotgun testing everyone all the time. And I'm really tired of hearing it by people who are not involved in the system that we need millions of tests every day.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

BROWN: So, right now, about 700,000 to 800,000 people are being tested daily.

But Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, says the U.S. should be conducting 4 million to 5 million tests daily.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ASHISH JHA, DIRECTOR, HARVARD GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE: I don't know why Admiral Giroir thinks that we are doing plenty of testing when literally no public health expert I know of in the entire country agrees with his assessment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: And I want to bring in Admiral Brett Giroir to discuss all this.

Thank you for coming on, Admiral.

GIROIR: Really thank you for having me on this afternoon.

BROWN: I want to start with your response to Dr. Jha. So you think testing is where it needs to be right now?

GIROIR: Well, I really felt compelled to come on this afternoon after hearing Dr. Jha this morning. Because just about everything he said was the opposite of what reality is. And that really troubled me. And I want to make sure the American people understand where we are and where we're going.

No, we're never going to be satisfied with testing. We need to do more. We need to do more different kinds. This morning, it was discussion about the vulnerable. We don't test the vulnerable, we're ignoring the wildfires in the nursing homes.

Nothing could be the opposite of true. Not only have we prioritized nursing homes. Not only have we done guidelines, but the administration announced that we are delivering point-of-care tests to every single nursing home in the country that has a clear waiver. That's over 14,000 of them that are going to be done by the end of September. How much more aggressive can you be on testing in nursing homes than that?

Dr. Jha says we're only testing the sick, the symptomatic. I'm acting like a doctor, not a public health person. Again, the opposite of true.

Ninety percent of the people we test are asymptomatic. We've sent surge sites. We've sent it to 13 different jurisdictions in the last three weeks just to test asymptomatic people who could be spreading the virus. That's what we're talking about.

So I want to make these clarifications. BROWN: Right.

GIROIR: And finally, what I talked about is, you know, after Dr. Jha had been on TV so many times, he never once contacted the administration. I called him up. I said, look, if you have ideas of what we need to do or justify it, please tell me.

I realize that the same generalizations get said over and over again without a justification. Yes, we want to increase testing. There is no physical way to do 5 million tests per day in this country. If there is a way to turn it from 1 million to 5 million today, let me know.

We are investing in new technology. We are providing new EUAs. We're investing heavily into point-of-care tests. Everything that we can do to increase the testing capacity of the country, if there is something this administration --

BROWN: Is that true? Has the administration exhausted all of the executive authorities? Look, if you look under DPA as the president touted today he used it so much, has the administration actually exhausted it to get more supplies like reagents and tips and other testing supplies to the labs? Is that true, everything's been done?

GIROIR: I'm going to say definitively yes.

BROWN: Definitively yes. There is nothing else the administration can do to get more testing?

GIROIR: Well, you'll hear a DPA action coming up early next week.

BROWN: OK. And what will that do?

GIROIR: Well, we continually use DPA and investments every day. The DOD, the NIH, FEMA, myself, we sit down and discuss, is there an investment we can make? Is there an order that we can rate? And we've done many of them, from $120 million into swabs --

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: But it's not enough. I mean, would you say enough has been done? Enough has been done to make sure that everyone who needs a test gets a test in this country?

GIROIR: Everything that can possibly be done has been done.

[16:20:00]

If somebody has an idea -- and I mean this -- we have an opening testing forum. We've opened it up to multidisciplinary groups. We met yesterday, we met two weeks ago. I'm in the phone constantly.

If there is a good idea, I want to hear it. We'll use investments. We use the DPA. We do everything.

So, and I kind of feel okay because when Dr. Jha comes on TV and attacks whether I care about this country and my patriotism, I figure if you have to stoop that low, the other things must be doing okay.

BROWN: Look, there's no doubt as the leader in this country on testing that you're working hard, that you want to make sure Americans get tested. But when you look at the numbers, Dr. Giroir, we are six months into this pandemic, and yet the positivity rate is still above that key marker of 5 percent in at least 33 states. At least 33 states have a rising positivity rate.

You said 90 percent are asymptomatic that are tested. But doesn't -- don't those numbers show that there is a real problem here?

GIROIR: You stop the virus by instituting smart policies. Wear a mask, watch your distance, and wash your hands.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: You've said that so many times though. But hold on, testing all public health experts agree that testing is a very important part of the component --

(CROSSTALK)

GIROIR: Yes, absolutely it's an important part I agree 100 percent. If you test people --

BROWN: OK, it's part of smart policy, no?

GIROIR: It's, of course, part of smart policy. That's why -- look at Arizona. They only meet 13 percent of the metric that Dr. Jha has. But they have only 21 days of decreasing cases, dramatic drops in hospitalizations because they had smart policies.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: But, hold on. Are you concerned in states like Arizona because Arizona is one of the several states across the country that has a decrease in cases but also a decrease in testing? So are you concerned that could be a warning sign that people just aren't going to get tested because they don't want to have to wait so long to get their results back or wait in line?

GIROIR: So there are three questions and assumptions there and all of them are wrong.

BROWN: I'm asking you. I'm not assuming anything. I'm just telling you. I'm looking at the numbers. And I'm asking --

GIROIR: That's right. You're telling me, you're not asking. You're telling me.

BROWN: I'm looking at the numbers and I'm asking you a question based on the numbers.

GIROIR: So let me answer based on the numbers. We believe the cases are down and that's real because hospitalizations are down, COVID-like illnesses are down. This is a real decrease in the infections. Number two, in terms of turnaround time, we had a problem with

turnaround time. There is no question a few weeks ago we have had multiple different actions both Quest and LabCorp, which was the source of the turnaround time are now under three days.

BROWN: But --

GIROIR: So, that turnaround issue is not there and we sent specific surge testing into Phoenix --

BROWN: Wait, hold on a second.

GIROIR: Yes?

BROWN: It sounds like you're passing the buck to these private laboratories. And, by the way, Quest said last week the average turnaround time is seven days, OK?

GIROIR: This week, this week, have you checked this week? It's two to three days because of all the different policies --

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: OK, but how much of that -- the two to three days though, how much of that is dominated by people in hospital who get those category one patients versus people out in the community who are more likely to spread the virus?

GIROIR: Zero --

BROWN: Do you have the breakdown?

GIROIR: Zero -- yes, I do. The normal turnaround for normal patients is two to three days and LabCorp is one to two days. We work with them, I talk to them multiple times a week.

BROWN: But that's not the reality on the ground, like people we've been speaking to consistently say they're waiting more than a week to get their results back.

GIROIR: So, let me tell you, people you're speaking to -- I get the data from all the labs, millions of tests each week, the time they're ordered to the time they're resulted.

I am not disputing that there's going to be a lab here or there, or there's a private lab somewhere where turnaround time is long. We are attacking this on multiple fronts. By next month, we'll have more point-of-care tests than we have laboratory results. That's instantaneous results.

Number two, we're doing all types of technologies like pooling, like different extraction methods that increase efficiency. I said publicly, I will not be happy until everybody can get a result within 24 hours with the dominant being point of care.

By October or November, we're going to have tens of millions of point of care, probably over 50 million point of care compared to only 20 million or 30 million or 40 million laboratory tests. It's going to be dramatic. And we are going to use that to support things like school opening.

But the ideas that were said this morning that we are not trying to expand testing or believe testing, wrong. That we're not shielding the nursing homes, wrong. That we -- you know, that we're not testing asymptomatic people, it's just not true.

Look, we have a long -- we've come a long way, we have a long way to go. But the picture was paint completely opposite of what reality is. And again, I'm happy -- if somebody has an idea to increase testing to 5 million tomorrow, I want to hear it.

Everybody knows that. I've called Dr. Jha to get his ideas. I talk to dozens of people every week.

BROWN: I have someone who I can actually bring in right now who can add to this conversation and that is my colleague, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

Sanjay, thanks for joining us.

You know, one of the things we did get to is, is the administration ready, right? Sanjay, as a parent who's decided not to send their child to school, is the administration ready for the onslaught of schools and colleges being back?

[16:25:04]

Sanjay, what do you want to say to that?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. I mean, look, you know, the idea of assurance testing, giving people some assurance that they don't have the virus, that people around them don't have the virus, I mean, I think you'd agree, Admiral, and I sense your frustration, I think you'd agree we're nowhere near that yet. And it seems like you don't think that that's a good idea.

But I do just want to come back to what I think is maybe the most salient point here, Admiral, and I just want to make sure I understand, because I'm reading now what you said from before. And you said the winning strategy is to basically have quick testing of anyone who is symptomatic and any of their contacts. You just told Pamela that you're doing a significant amount of asymptomatic testing. Which is it, admiral? I'm a little confused.

GIROIR: No, they're both. They're both.

GUPTA: Because it's very hard for asymptomatic people to get tested.

GIROIR: No, they're both. I have to look at the numbers, but it's something like 80 or 90 percent of people being tested in our community-based testing sites are asymptomatic, they're either contacts or worried well. I believe, of course, and the data say that, we do need to test asymptomatics particularly when they're in outbreak areas and that has to be large numbers. That's why we're doing that. And we've sent teams to 13 different areas. We support asymptomatic

testing. So, we do need symptomatic and contact tracing. We do need asymptomatic. That is what we have been doing and we'll continue to do.

And in terms of schools, Sanjay, I absolutely support surveillance testing. Francis Collins and myself, Seema Verma, we're on the phone with literally 500 individuals from universities, provosts, BPRs (ph), from all the university systems, to turn on the non-clear university platforms to provide surveillance to universities and to schools and businesses.

And we're working aggressively to create technologies that we believe will be ready within the next six weeks that will be point of care, in the tens of millions, very simple and very cheap. We can't create that out of nothing. But, of course, we're working to support those strategies.

What is --

GUPTA: OK.

GIROIR: -- what I want to get out is that we are actually doing these things. It's not what was said before that we're not. We're not protecting the vulnerable, we are. We're testing asymptomatics all the time. This is all part of our strategy, and the strategy is working.

Eighty-four percent of jurisdictions are in a downward trajectory. Only three are in an upward trajectory out of 56. And that is Guam, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

The rest of the country is either stable or in a downward trajectory. We cannot stop what we're doing. We cannot stop. We have to keep pushing.

BROWN: How can you say -- I'm just curious -- how can you say it's working though when the average deaths around 1,000 a day still and the percent positivity is up in at least 33 states?

GIROIR: So, it's a very good point and I'm glad you asked that.

Deaths are a lagging indicator, and we see this, and it is tragic and being a lagging indicator is no solace for people who have lost their family members. But what we see is percent positivity generally starts going down, and it has across the country. Then the cases start going down, the hospitalizations start going down. All those three things have happened on a national level.

Deaths, unfortunately, and it is tragic that they are going to be up this week and maybe next. But if the trends continue if we do wearing a mask, watch your distance, wash your hands with smart strategic testing, including surveillance testing, including testing of some asymptomatics, particularly in the areas, this trend will continue and deaths will decrease. But we've got to keep doing that.

BROWN: Sanjay? GIROIR: We've got to keep doing that.

BROWN: Sanjay?

GUPTA: Look, I think the frustration, Admiral, is that we -- you know, so many months into this, you're talking about on one hand, you want to have all this assurance testing, you're working with technology to develop this. You just said yesterday that you can't test your way out of this.

I think what's confusing, Admiral, is sort of two different messages. I agree with you, we need some big technological breakthroughs in this assurance testing. It can be done. I know you agree with that. This technology can be developed. We're not talking about a fantasy.

I think the frustration that people have is that why haven't we done this yet? There does seem to be this minimizing of testing. I got to be candid, you sort of seem like you were minimizing testing yesterday again.

You're striking a different tune right now, which is great. But you were minimizing testing. You did talk about just focusing on symptomatic people yesterday. So --

GIROIR: No. I've never -- and I'm sorry if that's the way it was interpreted but we've never, ever talked about just testing symptomatic people. We want to increase testing. I spend every day trying to increase testing.

What I want people to understand though is that testing is not the panacea. It is not the answer. It needs to be in a supportive strategic role, where we do it in layers. Yes, we test the sick and hospitalized. Yes, we test the vulnerable --

BROWN: OK.

GIROIR: -- not just nursing homes but underserved minorities.

Yes, we test asymptomatic, particularly when they're in outbreak areas. And yes, we need to support school reopening.

BROWN: OK. Thank you so much, Admiral and Sanjay. Unfortunately, we have to go.

But that was a very lively, robust and important discussion. Thank you so much, Admiral, for coming on. We appreciate it.

And we'll be back.

[16:30:00]