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New York Deaths Rise as Hospitalizations Fall; Trump Administration Pushing to Reopen U.S. in May; Michigan Ban on Travel Between Two Residences Begins Tomorrow; Michigan Forms Task Force on Racial Disparities in Coronavirus Deaths; Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Clinic Team Up to Deliver 15,000 Pieces of PPE, ICU Gowns to Detroit Hospital. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired April 10, 2020 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:01]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good Friday morning, everyone. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

The country is now days away from the projected peak of this pandemic where deaths will surge to their highest daily number. The White House pushing to reopen the U.S. as soon as May 1st. Dr. Anthony Fauci on CNN this morning urging caution.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: The virus kind of decides whether or not it's going to be appropriate to open or not. Now is no time to back off. As I say so often, now is the time to actually put your foot on the accelerator because we're going in the right direction. Let's keep in that direction.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: And here is where we are on that direction this morning. Here in New York, hospitalizations are going down, but the number of deaths is going up, as the governor signs an order to bring more funeral directors into the state to help.

The one thing public health experts warn is vital for getting America back to normal? Widely available testing. The president says America is ramping up testing, tests for everyone is, quote, "not going to happen."

Let's begin here in New York with our national correspondent Athena Jones.

Good morning, Athena. It's just such a sad image, more funeral directors being brought to the state.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Poppy, it is sad. And you know, as we begin this holiday weekend, there is more bad news, but it does come wrapped in at least not -- if not good news, better news.

New York state reporting its highest single-day death toll for the third day in a row. But there is progress. As you mentioned, hospitalizations are down, so are intensive care unit admissions. In fact, hospital admissions are down pretty dramatically. They went to 200 on Wednesday from 585 the day before. So that's certainly a good sign.

Governor Cuomo is saying that there's been so much focus on New York City, they're now watching counties around New York, Rockland County, Nassau County, Suffolk County, because the numbers are beginning to rise there.

More than 7,000 New Yorkers have now been killed by this virus, this coronavirus. And as you hear the governor mention often, that's double the number that died on 9/11 and it's putting a lot of pressure on funeral homes. One funeral director told CNN that he typically gets 30 to 40 calls a month, now he's getting that number in a single day.

That is what led the governor to sign an executive order last night that will allow licensed funeral directors from all around the country to come to New York state to be able to help out with this backlog of bodies.

And one more thing I should add, and that is that Hart Island, which is an island off the coast of the Bronx in the Long Island town, it's now going to be used for unclaimed bodies. According to new rules issued by the New York medical examiner, bodies that are not retrieved or claimed within 14 days will now go to that island for burial.

They will be, we understand, from funeral directors, they're well marked, so it's possible for families to later on get those bodies interred and give the proper burial they would like. But that just gives you a sense of just how much of an impact this virus is having on a city like this one, in a state like this one -- Poppy.

SCIUTTO: For sure. And Athena, we saw some uniformed service members walking behind you there, going to report to duty and the military stepped up really across the country.

Athena Jones, thanks so much.

John Harwood joins us now from Washington.

John, President Trump wants to get the government, the economy in particular, open quickly even as we heard, for instance, Dr. Fauci urging caution. I wonder, you know, the president has floated this kind of idea in the past and then backed down. Do you get the sense this is one that he might back down on or is he becoming increasingly committed to moving forward in May? JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It's possible he'll back

down again. But, Jim, this is precisely the moment that public health officials have feared in this crisis. There are signs that the mitigation efforts are working. Social distancing is working. That produces some good news in hardest hit areas like New York. But in turn, it also provokes the reaction of those who are impatient with these measures including most of all President Trump who said this yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You see what's happening and where we are, where we stand, and hopefully we're going to be opening up. You can call it opening, very, very, very soon, I hope.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARWOOD: Now, the problem with that, of course, is that unless you keep your foot on the accelerator, as Dr. Fauci said, it's hard to sustain that progress. We've got through the end of the month with the current guidelines. Some states like Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C. where I am right now have not even hit their peak yet and so they're concerned about backing off prematurely.

I talked yesterday to Cordelia Griggs who's been on our air. She's a front-line doctor in New York City who said this is the really, really hard part, trying to sustain discipline and vigilance as we plateau.

[09:05:02]

The question is going to be how does President Trump juggle the intense collision of those interests, all the economic forces and the conservative Republican forces? We've heard from Bill Barr, his attorney general, in recent days saying we need to get off these draconian measures and stop telling people to hide under their beds. How he resolves those in the next couple of days, next couple of weeks, rather, is going to be crucial to how long this crisis lasts and whether we actually have a relapse into a second hump in cases in the second extension of the kind of lockdown that produces economic damage he's concerned about -- guys.

HARLOW: Absolutely. I mean, it's just so many people around him saying, John, don't do this too quickly or the price you pay economically is going to be so much worse in the long term. We'll see if he heeds that.

Thank you very much, John. Have a good weekend.

Joining us now, Dr. Celine Gounder, clinical assistant professor of Medicine and Infectious Disease at NYU Medical, emergency room physician Dr. Jose Torradas.

Thank you both very, very much for being here. If we could just begin with the discussion, Dr. Torradas, about antibody testing. We are hearing more about this. Dr. Fauci talked about it on CNN this morning. And I just wonder if you could explain to the American people as they start to see more headlines about this, what it actually is, what it means, and what the implications are for the country.

DR. JOSE TORRADAS, EMERGENCY MEDICINE PHYSICIAN: Poppy, thank you so much for having me on. The reason that antibody testing is so important, essentially antibodies are our way to identify how our body's own immune system is reacting to exposure to certain viruses or bacteria. So for example, this is a new virus, we do not have any previous exposure to it.

So while the initial focus was on testing so that we could identify those individuals who were infected and try to quarantine them, the reality is that since testing has been slow to roll out, and even now across the country, healthcare workers are unable to easily get tests in certain areas, we need to be able to know who has been exposed since some patients may have absolutely no symptoms whatsoever and that way we can identify people who are now more immune to this,

And it's particularly important for our healthcare workers to be able to know if they have any immunity given the unfortunate national calamity that is our PPE shortage.

SCIUTTO: Yes. So, Dr. Gounder, let's plug this possibility of this coming antibody test. I mean, the big question, of course, is how widely available it will be. Let's plug that into the debate, how soon you open up the country again and start to relax some of these social distancing measures. Can you relax them without broad based testing to know who has antibodies or who has been infected?

DR. CELINE GOUNDER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Well, Jim, one important question that has not been resolved yet is what the antibody tests really tell us. We're not 100 percent sure that that does truly indicate immunity. So that is one big question mark.

So some of these tests do need to be studied a bit more carefully. That said, assuming it does indicate immunity, it would allow you to be a bit more targeted and saying if you're immune, you're somebody who can go back to work because not only are you immune, you're not contributing to further community transmission.

But, you know, there are other really important steps that we need to implement here, one of which is being able to also test people who have symptoms with the older tests that we've had up until now and then also being able to do contact tracing. So right now we're completely unable to do that because the spread of disease is so -- there's so much of it in the community. It's sort of like a bowl of spaghetti, you know, how do you trace one strand.

You need to get to the point where you can go from A to B to C in terms of transmission and we're nowhere near that right now.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: There was also, Dr. Torradas, a letter sent from the National Academy of Sciences, a committee there, to the White House just on Wednesday of this week, talking about just concerns in terms of testing, looking at the number of tests that have come back, that were negative, but those folks were positive, basically missing things here. Is the testing not full proof?

TORRADAS: Well, the testing is certainly not full proof, especially the type of tests that I underwent several weeks ago when I developed mild symptoms. The sensitivity rate was about 70 percent, which means that that's about a 30 percent false negative rate. We've had examples in our hospital and colleagues of mine who were tested once, twice, both times negative, and it wasn't until they deteriorated that the test then became positive. So that is accurate.

And I'd have to agree with the other guest here that many of the things that she did say are true. Also, being able to get an adequate sample.

[09:10:0.3]

It's a difficult test, they have to go very far up your nose, and as well some patients may have symptoms but may not be viral shedding enough to be able to get enough sample. So it is true that these tests are certainly far from perfect.

SCIUTTO: So, Dr. Gounder, given the failure in the early stages of this disease in this country, getting broad-based testing for who was infected, what needs to happen to prepare for the moment when you do have a reliable test for antibodies so that that doesn't happen again? I mean, who's going to be managing this so that it's not like a random parking lot, you know, somewhere where one in one state, an entire state where people can get tested, but you have it broadly available?

GOUNDER: Right. So there are dozens of companies that have come up with these tests, then in addition to the commercial tests you have different academic medical centers that are developing their own. And we really need to have a plan for how to scale up so this needs to be done in collaboration with local and state public health departments, and it shouldn't be just a, you know, eBay, first come, first serve kind of situation.

This really needs to be done rationally on the basis of population size, on the basis of how many cases you have in an area, and then doing some random surveying of the population, in addition to that, to get a better handle on how much transmission has been occurring in the area. But that requires planning ahead of time. You don't just wait until the tests are available.

HARLOW: To you, Dr. Torradas, the fall, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of family and friends about this, and there are concerns also from medical experts, Dr. Fauci said there could be a resurgence. If this thing normalizes as much as possible in the summer and comes back in the fall and winter then, and we're still, you know, 18 months out from a vaccine, they think, should Americans brace themselves for a repeat of this in, you know, five months?

TORRADAS: Well, I mean, I think that this is going to be an issue. Until we find some way to appropriately vaccinate or find some cure, I think that this is not going to be going away anytime soon. Right now we're seeing this on the coasts, in large urban centers where there is a lot of population density, multigenerational households that live together. This is why it's affecting those areas more.

But let's not fool ourselves. I think at this point most recently it came out that two-thirds of rural counties have at least one case going on right now. So this virus doesn't care who you vote for, it doesn't care what news channel you watch.

HARLOW: Yes.

TORRADAS: Doesn't care who you pray to, this will eventually affect every single part of the country. And unless we are smart and diligent about how we approach this with social distancing, wearing cloth masks when we go out to areas like supermarkets, where we're going to be around other people, unless we do that, it's not going to be a flattening of one curve, you're just going to see spikes in different parts of the country.

And what concerns me more is that one out of four rural hospitals before coronavirus were already on the verge of closing, 19 closed in 2019, and these hospitals, these are not areas that have world class centers like New York, Boston, California.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

TORRADAS: These are areas that have thin medical staffs with very poor resources. And if those communities that have high rates of obesity, smoking and diabetes get affected, we are in deep trouble.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes. And we've been talking to doctors in those rural areas across the country in recent weeks. We've heard the same message.

Dr, Torradas, Dr. Gounder, thanks to both of you.

TORRADAS: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Still to come this hour, we're going to speak to the CEO of Michigan's Henry Ford Health System where more than 800 healthcare workers have now been diagnosed with coronavirus.

And this man spent six days on a ventilator in intensive care. Young man, only 44, he says he would not be here without that lifesaving machine. We're going to speak to him.

HARLOW: Wow. Also ahead, a CNN exclusive, we talked to Melinda Gates about how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now spending billions of dollars to try to stop the spread of coronavirus. What is the one thing that keeps her up at night?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MELINDA GATES, BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION: What keeps me up at night are the vulnerable populations. The kids who are falling behind because they don't have access to broadband or to a computer.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[09:15:00]

SCIUTTO: Well, you might imagine these more suited to war zones, but right now, another field hospital like the ones we've seen in Central Park and New York is being set up just outside Detroit and Michigan.

This as the state announces that after today, travel between two residences will be banned. CNN's Ryan -- CNN's Ryan Young is in Detroit. Ryan, these new travel guidelines, extremely strict. You can't go from one household to another. Tell us what's behind that and are people following it?

RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And absolutely, Jim. They're doubling down on this right now, trying to make sure that more people don't get sick from the coronavirus. They're telling the family members they don't want them traveling from one family house to the next, maybe even bring food over to the next house.

They want to make sure that people don't get infected with the coronavirus and then take it somewhere else. Look, we've talked to folks who have lost multiple family members and some of that comes from somebody being infected and not knowing it, then going to another house and spreading it. In stores, they're going to increase restrictions as well.

They want to make sure that one person per thousand square foot inside one of these stores, and they're also going to have social distancing lines outside the store to let people in. But we also wanted to show you something else, a grim reminder of what's going on here. Look at this video from the medical examiner's office, these are the trailers that had been brought in just in case they have overflow when it comes to all the people who are dying here.

[09:20:00]

We know that more than a 1,000 people have lost their lives in the state of Michigan. So they're trying to beat back that curve. But to come back live to where I'm standing, we're at the TCF Center, that's where this mobile field hospital is getting ready to open up. In fact, members of the Police Department, National Guard are all starting to walk in the inside. We know 25 patients are going to be put into this -- COVID patients are going to be put into the field hospital just today.

But with all this going on, you think about the disparity, you think about the health concerns. We talked to a local reverend about what's going on in the state and how we need to keep an eye on the health concerns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES ADAMS, REVEREND MINISTER, HARTFORD MEMORIAL BAPTIST CHURCH: The virus and the nation's response has revealed the inequities that we have been complaining about for years. Access to economic opportunity is a matter of life and death.

(END VIDEO CLIP) YOUNG: So everyone is trying to get their own little part of this to

make sure people stay home. Look, this will be Easter Sunday, so people are worried about people going out for that. But one thing I'll bring up before I leave, guys, is the police department is having to give out tickets to people who have decided they don't want to do social distancing. That they've been having parties. Those first responders are having to go to these calls to break that up, putting their lives in danger.

SCIUTTO: Yes --

HARLOW: A 100 percent, Ryan Young, thank you --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

HARLOW: For that reporting out of Detroit. Let's stay focused on this city. Joining us now is the COO, the Chief Operating Officer at Henry Ford Health Systems, they oversee six hospitals in and around the Motor City right now. Sir, 872 of your employees have tested positive for COVID-19 -- Bob Riney, thank you for being here. How are they doing?

BOB RINEY, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, HENRY FORD HEALTH SYSTEM: You know, thank you for having me. And our first and our number one priority, of course, is the safety of our patients and the safety of our fellow team workers. And we have 33,000 employees and we have over 800 that have tested positive. Some of them through community contact, no doubt.

And certainly some of them from the risks of working in this environment. And most of them are doing incredibly well. In fact, we are down to only 200 of those individuals that are still off work quarantined. Many were -- and some have been symptomatic but have returned to health. But it's something that we worry about every single day, and it's why we make sure that we can give them every kind of support possible.

SCIUTTO: But Bob, you spoke this week with Vice President Mike Pence about the clinical trials, specifically for healthcare worker and first responders. Your hospital is conducting with hydroxychloroquine, of course, the anti-malaria drug that there's been a lot of talk about here. Explain from your vantage point the debate on this here because, yes, it has worked for some patients, but it does have risks for other patients.

And to date, the data on this, as Dr. Fauci has said is anecdotal as opposed to broad-based scientific. What are you discovering so far in your clinical trials?

RINEY: Well, I think what you just described is the exact reason that you want random studies and clinical trials, and you want them conducted by world class research institutes like we have at Henry Ford. Because the truth is we don't know what we're going to find. But having the right clinical talent oversee these studies is about discovery. And we need to find solutions, and we are hopeful that this will prove to be a solution in certain circumstances. But it's way too early for us to draw any conclusion. But it's our

obligation to make sure we're looking at every avenue.

HARLOW: Let's talk about a little bit of good news, right, on this Friday. And that is the Detroit Pistons, I think we have some video of this, I hope we do, NBA, stepping up, helping you guys out, delivering -- and the Cleveland Clinic as well -- look at that, bringing you guys some of that much needed supply. I mean, it was only, you know, a week ago that you called the need for daily supplies a daily battle. How much does this help?

RINEY: It helps immensely. And you know, one of the things that makes me so proud about Detroit is how collaborative this town is, when we are in dire straits. And it's been our history. And so whether it's the Detroit Pistons who have been amazing partners, Ford Motor Company, DT Energy and so many others, we're getting supplies. It's not a traditional way to get supplies by any means, but we are getting supplies and we're just so grateful for everything that they're doing.

SCIUTTO: Collaborative, and we've seen a lot of collaboration, inside communities, across communities. Sadly, a fact of this crisis has been a lot of competition, you know, state-to-state, bidding out for supplies, country-to-country, competitively bidding for supplies. Is that getting better in any way from your vantage point, and who is policing that sort of thing to prevent that from happening?

[09:25:00]

RINEY: You know, it's a great question and it's very complex because we're getting collaboration more from states that aren't experiencing great pressure themselves, and understandably, it's a big challenge when you've got multiple states that are all in somewhat of dire straits for supplies. I think that by and large, collaboration is happening between the federal government, the state government, and even the communities and business communities.

But clearly when we get past this pandemic, I think it will be one of the most important lesson learned for us as a country is, how do we prepare in a better way as we move forward?

HARLOW: You can only hope, right? That we take away some gain of knowledge in all of this. Bob Riney, thank you to your whole team and what you guys are doing there in Detroit --

SCIUTTO: Yes --

HARLOW: We're rooting for you.

RINEY: And can I end with a real quick positive story?

HARLOW: Please!

RINEY: We discharged our thousandth patient this week that we helped return to recovery and our staff at Henry Ford Hospital, as patients are discharged, they leave with the music of "Journey, Don't Stop Believing" playing. (LAUGHTER)

That's some personal hope for --

HARLOW: I love that.

SCIUTTO: I couldn't -- you couldn't pick a better song. You couldn't pick a better song, Bob. Well done.

HARLOW: Thanks, Bob --

RINEY: Thank you.

HARLOW: Good luck.

RINEY: Thank you.

HARLOW: In Florida, where cases have reached nearly 17,000, the governor, Ron DeSantis, saying he's considering reopening some schools, why? We'll take you there next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

END