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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Trump Continues Large Rallies; COVID-19 Cases Surging Across United States. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired October 14, 2020 - 15:00   ET

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

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DEMI LOVATO, SINGER: Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, just get out and vote.

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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Our special coverage continues now with Jake Tapper.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We begin today with the national lead and an alarming rise of new coronavirus cases across the United States. There is not one state currently headed in the right direction. And for the first time in two months, the nation is averaging in excess of 50,000 cases every single day.

However much President Trump lies to the voters about the U.S. turning the corner of this pandemic, the facts, tragically, speak for themselves.

Hospitalization numbers are also growing in 43 states. This is the largest number of people hospitalized since the end of August. And, as the percent of people testing positive continues to grow, Dr. Anthony Fauci is now warning Americans there will be an even greater resurgence of COVID and, ultimately, an increase in deaths, as CNN's Nick Watt reports.

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NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A field hospital opened outside Milwaukee today. Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Over the last month, our hospitalizations have nearly tripled.

WATT: Now at an all-time high in Wisconsin, similar situation in these five states, record numbers in the hospital now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Maybe people are just getting a little bit tired of having to deal with a pandemic. The trends are very worrisome.

WATT: Average new COVID-19 case counts rising in a staggering 36 states, not a single state moving in the right direction.

Florida, once more on the rise, Saturday, the Gators' football coach was bullish.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hopefully, the university administration decides to let us pack the Swamp for LSU next week.

WATT: That game now postponed, their entire football program paused; 21 players have tested positive.

Across this country, we're averaging more than 50,000 new cases a day for the first time in two months.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For the short term, we have to hunker down.

WATT: There are masks, distancing, regulations in many public places. But we're spreading the virus at small family gatherings, says the CDC director. Got to be vigilant at Thanksgiving.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Frankly, I'd rather do it a Zoom Thanksgiving with people that I love than expose them to something that might kill them.

WATT: Some new info about this deadly virus, immunity after infection can last months, according to three new reports. Good news for the vaccine hunt, and good news if your blood type O. You might be at less risk of infection or severe illness, according to two new studies.

Meanwhile, in New York, they're playing life or death, Whac-A-Mole.

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D-NY): What you see are what we call mini- clusters. That's what this virus is going to be doing. It's going to be popping up in small areas. One sweet 16 party created 40 cases.

WATT: And here's a harsh reality check.

CUOMO: This is not going away anytime soon. I think, best-case scenario, we're looking at another year by the time -- even if everything works out well.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WATT: Now, I mentioned that, in 36 states, the average case count is rising right now. And President Trump is on an ill-advised whistle- stop tour of some of those states right now.

He will be in Des Moines, Iowa, tonight for a MAGA rally, where a group called Rural America 2020 says they have put up this billboard outside the venue. Tomorrow, he is going to be in Greenville, North Carolina, Friday, Ocala, Florida, Saturday, Janesville, Wisconsin.

Now, the president himself may no longer be contagious, but there's a decent chance that at least a few people in those crowds will be -- Jake. TAPPER: All right, Nick Watt, thank you so much.

Let's bring in the dean of Brown University School of Public Health, Dr. Ashish Jha.

Dr. Jha, good to see you.

Many Midwestern states are seeing record high coronavirus cases and positivity rates. Dr. Fauci said that the increased positivity rate could ultimately mean more deaths. Are we at the point now where this is all inevitable, we will definitely have 400,000 dead Americans by February?

DR. ASHISH JHA, DIRECTOR, HARVARD GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE: So, Jake, thanks for having me on.

And I don't think 400,000 dead Americans is inevitable. But it will not get better unless we change our behavior, and unless policy-makers start acting seriously about this.

And I know we have talked about the president, but we need to also see leadership from state governors, state legislatures, mayors. Everybody's got to pull in the same direction here.

TAPPER: Now, just for people who don't understand, the positivity rate is the percentage of people out of 100 who take a test for COVID and test positive for it.

Dr. Fauci says that experts would like to see a positivity rate of less than 3 percent, that that would be ideal.

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But Wyoming, Iowa, Wisconsin, Idaho, South Dakota all have a seven-day positivity rate that is more than 15 percent. What is the biggest driver of this?

JHA: Yes, so high positivity rate means a couple of things.

I mean, one certainly tells you that the infections in the community are accelerating. And, second, it tells you that you're missing most of the cases. So, when I think about a place like North Dakota, where the positivity rate is about 30 percent, they are probably missing 80, 90 percent of the cases in their testing. They're only catching a sliver of what's happening.

So, it's a combination of both underlying infections going up and totally inadequate testing to keep up with those infections.

TAPPER: On a call with reporters, Trump administration officials seem to be once again embracing this concept of herd immunity, touting Trump's push to reopen the country.

One of your colleagues, William Haseltine, says herd immunity is just another word for mass murder, the idea of letting the disease work its way through the population, estimates of about two million Americans dying from it.

Do you agree? Is herd immunity the same thing as mass murder?

JHA: You know, those are stark words.

Look, it's a terrible policy. It's a terrible policy, because it will lead to hundreds of thousands of Americans dying, unnecessarily, right? Like, if they -- if we had no choice, that would be another thing. But no serious public health person actually thinks herd immunity is a good policy strategy.

We should not be doing this. We should be protecting people and getting through this, until we have safe and effective vaccines.

TAPPER: I think there are a lot of people out there who think, oh, you just want to lock down the country again.

That's not the case, I know.

What do you want to do, other than masks, avoiding crowds, social distancing? I mean, how can we go back to some semblance of normal, while also protecting people?

JHA: Right.

So, we are in a pandemic, the worst pandemic in a century. We're not going to be able to go back to normal as we knew it in 2019. So the question is, what can we do? And the list you just gave, Jake, I don't have a much bigger and better list. It's masks, it's social distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings, and fixing our testing programs, which still aren't where they need to be.

Believe me, if we just did those things, we could probably get 80 percent of our lives back, which is probably as well as we can do in a pandemic. But vaccines are coming sometime in early 2021, I hope, and life will begin to get much better.

So this is not the long haul. I mean, we're going to have to deal with this virus for a while, but things will start getting better in 2021, once a vaccine becomes more widely available.

TAPPER: And when you say getting testing to where it needs to be, what does that mean, that schools can open, but the kids and the faculty and the people who work there get tested once a week, businesses can open, but before you go into the business, you have to get tested?

What are you talking about?

JHA: Yes, so there are different estimates.

The estimates we have made have suggested that, if you want a kind of a basic level of a functioning economy, it'd be nice to have about four million tests a day. Not just nice to have. We need to have about four million tests a day. We're about a quarter of that. If you want to be able to test kids in schools, if you want to be able

to test health care workers, everybody in nursing homes, essential workers, you probably need a lot more testing than that.

But we have been fighting this virus for nine months, and we're still doing fewer tests in the U.S. than they are doing in India. And we have a lot more resources than India does, and we have -- and yet we're still not able to figure out how to get our testing numbers to be where it needs to be.

TAPPER: And we still don't know when President Trump last tested negative before he got the virus. And, theoretically, he could have had the virus -- the White House says maybe he got it at that super- spreader event for Supreme Court nominee Judge Barrett.

If he got it then, he potentially, if he -- because we don't know when he last tested negative -- has spread it to the press corps, spread it to Gold Star families, spread it to Ohio, spread it to Minnesota, spread it to New Jersey.

But we don't know, because the man who has access to the best testing, the most frequent testing in the entire world will not tell us when he last tested negative. Thus, an entire apparatus of contact tracing cannot even happen.

JHA: Yes, this is really frustrating, because the bottom line, Jake, is contact tracing is a really essential part of keeping the virus under control.

And if the president won't do it, and if our political leaders, our senators won't do it, the signal the message, to the American people is, it's only for you, it's not for us, those of us who are the elite political leaders.

It's a terrible message. So, it's not just harmful for the people who came in contact with him, but it's also a really bad message to the American people.

TAPPER: There are new reports that show coronavirus immunity potentially can last for months, maybe even longer.

What do we know for sure about this?

JHA: Yes, there's a lot we're learning.

What I say to folks is, I am pretty confident that most people, not everybody, but most people have immunity for a certain period of time. What is that? Three to six months probably, maybe longer.

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We just don't know. But most people do seem to have immunity. But it does seem like a small fraction of people get reinfected. And some of them even get reinfected with more severe disease.

Thankfully, I think that number is very, very low. So, if you have been infected and recover, you have protection for at least some period of time.

TAPPER: But there are reports of individuals in various states getting it a second time and maybe even more seriously.

Dr. Ashish Jha, thank you so much. Appreciate your expertise, as always.

More on the key blood type that could protect you from COVID-19 ahead.

Plus, President Trump today heading to a state where the virus is out of control and planning to pack 10,000 people in for a rally. What could go wrong?

Stay with us.

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TAPPER: In our 2020 lead today: President Trump is headed to Iowa for another reckless rally, where supporters will gather, mostly unmasked, to bunch together in a crowd and cheer on the president, exactly the opposite of what health experts, including those in his own administration, say the public should be doing right now during a pandemic.

Iowa, of course, still battling coronavirus. Right now, nearly 20 percent of those getting tested in the state of Iowa are coming back positive, a very high positivity rate, putting Iowa among the top five states in the country with the highest seven-day positivity rate.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins joins us live from the White House.

Kaitlan, this is day three of Trump's comeback tour, where he is spreading lies, rhetoric and the coronavirus. Last night, he was openly pleading, begging for suburban women to support him. How's it going so far?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, I mean, the president's got this packed schedule for the next three weeks, where he's going to be going to these events.

And what he is doing is trying to make up for lost time, but also trying to make up with this ever-increasing deficit that he's facing with Joe Biden. And you saw that where he was saying, suburban women, please like me, but also, as the president is trying to appeal to seniors, knowing that he has lost footing with those two key groups of voters who helped him get elected in 2016.

But, Jake, the question is, is it too late for the president to try to appeal to voters? Is just saying, suburban women, will you like me, while ignoring the reasons why they do not like the president anymore, really going to be what helps him?

And, of course, with seniors, he's been trying to put out these prepared remarks lines where he says, I love seniors, we're looking out for you when it comes to the pandemic. And then, last night, he tweets a meme mocking Joe Biden, portraying him as someone who's elderly and disabled and in a nursing home.

And it's efforts like that by the president that undermine his efforts to actually get these voters back on his side with only really three weeks to go, and not even that, since people are voting early.

TAPPER: Well, I'm sure Matt Gaetz gave it a like, though. I mean, that's the important thing.

We also know that President Trump will hold a town hall tomorrow, the same time Biden is having one on a different network. This was, of course, supposed to be debate night, but once the Commission on Presidential Debates said that they had to be remote because the president had coronavirus, Trump bailed.

COLLINS: Yes, it seems kind of silly that they're going to both be taking voters -- or questions from voters in town hall-style situations tomorrow night, but not on the same stage with each other, as they were supposed to be doing in Miami. And, of course, that debate was scrapped.

And so Joe Biden is going to be appearing in Philadelphia with ABC. The president is going to be appearing with NBC in Florida. And that was actually just announced formally, even though we had heard it was in the works last week.

And, Jake, the reason that was is because NBC and their staff were looking out for their safety of their own staffers and their own workers. And they wanted to make sure there was an independent test done to prove that the president was no longer infectious when it came to coronavirus.

And, Jake, it's notable who they leaned on to get that evaluation, because it's someone the president has been feuding with this week and reviving his criticism. And, of course, that's Dr. Anthony Fauci. NBC had the NIH, where Dr. Fauci works, of course, conduct this test by the president, run it, evaluate it, and put out a statement saying they do not believe the president is infectious to people any longer.

So, it just goes to show you not only that Trump campaign ad, but this is the White House having to lean on Dr. Fauci's credibility when it comes to the president's health.

TAPPER: Yes, I wish NBC had not scheduled it for the same time as the Biden event. It might be good network counterprogramming. It is not in the best interests of voters in this country. '

Kaitlan Collins, thanks so much.

With 20 days to go, today, team Biden started selectively utilizing President Barack Obama, but the campaign is keeping the former president at a safe distance from voters, intentionally.

I want to bring in CNN's Jessica Dean. Jessica, to stay socially distant during the pandemic, today, President Obama is participating in the "Pod Save America" podcast, which is hosted by several of his own former White House aides.

I imagine that audience is already voting for Biden, and already fairly politically minded. What's the thinking behind deploying Obama there, as opposed to someplace where he could rally less motivated voters?

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's a fair question, Jake, because, to your point, if you're listening to "Pod Save America," chances are, you're already supporting the Biden ticket and planning to vote.

But, look, the Biden campaign is really using Barack Obama in this get-out-the-vote moment. We have now reached the time where it is time to convert support to actual voting. And a particular demographic the Biden campaign is counting on are young voters, again, people who would be reached by this podcast.

So they need to make sure that they're taking the enthusiasm from young voters and converting it into actual votes, especially in these key battleground states.

Now, we are expecting to see President Obama out on the campaign trail beginning next week, as we enter the final two weeks of this general election.

And again, we're told that he's going to be deployed very selectively to states where early voting is under way. Again, the Biden campaign looking to make sure that they're converting anyone who might be on the fence or thinking about voting, but perhaps doesn't have a plan to vote or isn't planning on early voting, to do so.

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The other key that they're really encouraging is in-person early voting, if it's safe for voters, so Barack Obama going to be doing that in the next two weeks.

And, Jake, we're also told that we could expect to see Joe Biden and Barack Obama together in a joint appearance as we get toward the end.

TAPPER: And, Jessica, campaign spending tells a lot about where the Biden campaign is putting its focus. Show us what you're learning.

DEAN: OK, so, interesting, this week, we see spending by the Biden campaign in states that you would expect, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, but in the top six, coming in at number six, Texas.

And we saw Jill Biden go to Texas yesterday, early voting under way there. Now, there's always been a Democratic contingent, Jake, that hopes that Texas will flip. But there are other Democrats who say, don't waste your money there, that's almost an impossible task, but very interesting to see the Biden campaign putting money there, $2 million worth, up on the air in the state of Texas. TAPPER: All right, Jessica Dean, thanks so much.

As President Trump continues to flaunt his lack of concern for COVID with these huge rallies, I'm going to talk to the filmmaker behind a documentary made in secret exposing the president's pandemic failures.

Stay with us.

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TAPPER: Back now with our health lead.

Some good news for people with O blood types. Two new study suggests that they may be less likely to contract COVID and less likely to get seriously ill if they do get infected.

Let's get right to CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

Elizabeth, give us a bit of reality check here on how big an impact blood type has on COVID.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I have to tell you, probably not a whole lot.

This is really intriguing scientifically and something that researchers will surely want to pursue. What it means for you or me or anybody else, really not very much, but, again, intriguing.

So let's take a look at what these two studies found. They were published in a journal recently. It was a Dutch study that looked at more than two million people in the general population; 42 percent were type O. You would expect the same among people with COVID. But, actually, only 38 percent of them were type O, which suggests that maybe, possibly there's some kind of protective effect for type O.

Now let's look at a Canadian study that looked at 95 COVID patients. Those who are type A or A/B, 84 percent required a ventilator. Those who are type O or B, only 61 percent required a ventilator. Again, sort of tells you that something might be going on there.

And so, again, what this means for you or me is nothing. If you're type O, you shouldn't say, woo-hoo, I'm going to go out there and I'm not going to wear a mask. That would be a huge mistake. And if you're not O, you shouldn't be despondent.

First of all, you can't do anything about your blood type. You are which you are, but, also, we should all be doing the same thing no matter what our blood type, wear a mask, practice social distancing -- Jake.

TAPPER: And, Elizabeth, a new national poll finds that African- Americans are more reluctant to take a coronavirus vaccine. We know that the virus has disproportionately affected the African-American community. Is this hesitance when it comes to a vaccine, is this a legacy of the

Tuskegee experiments? What's the reason?

COHEN: It is a legacy of Tuskegee, and it is also very much rooted in current modern-day injustices in our health care system.

People with darker skin aren't treated the same as white people. That is just the reality. Study after study shows this.

So let's take a look at this poll. What they found is, they looked at nearly 1,800 people, and black people, 49 percent said, no, I'm not going to take the vaccine. For white people, 33 percent said no.

This is a big problem. And I have been talking about this for months. I interviewed Chelsea Clinton about this, since she is a vaccine educator. For months, people like Chelsea Clinton have been saying, we need to do education, especially in minority communities, to encourage the uptake of a vaccine, but, so far, Very, very little from the federal government.

TAPPER: All right, Elizabeth Cohen, thank you so much.

Coronavirus is obviously one of, if not the critical issue for this election. President Trump is anxious to prove that his own bout with the virus is behind him. And he has another rally this evening. His struggle with a potentially deadly virus has not prompted him to push his administration to change its approach to fighting the virus in any way.

With me now, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. He's the director of the new documentary "Totally Under Control."

And, Alex, this new documentary gives us, frankly, a stunning look at the administration's handling, mishandling, really, of the pandemic in the first 100 days.

Let's play a brief clip from the trailer.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We, the scientists, knew what to do for the pandemic response. The plan was in front of us, but leadership would not do it.

It is time to lay our careers on the line and push back.

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TAPPER: You spoke with a handful of scientists, doctors, experts. What did you learn from them?

ALEX GIBNEY, DIRECTOR, "TOTALLY UNDER CONTROL": I learned that, weirdly, we were extremely well-prepared to take on this virus.

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