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CDC Director Warns to Stay Vigilant as Cases Decrease; Pence Says Cases Were Declining Until Memorial Day; Pence: Suspending Travel from China "Bought Us Time"; White House Declares Teachers Essential Workers; Biden's Virtual Champaign Challenge; Lieutenant General Mandela Barnes (D-WI) Discusses Biden Campaign, Wisconsin Missing the Spotlight with Campaign Events in Delaware. Aired 11:30a-12p ET
Aired August 21, 2020 - 11:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[11:30:00]
JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: They think maybe behind the scenes there are different things going on than Mr. DeJoy testified in public. We'll see if we got those documents.
And remember, he's due for a House hearing as well. We'll stay on top of this story. Mail-in voting, the postal service critical through the election.
Phil, Abby, Kim Wehle, thank you.
Kaitlan Collins, we lot that shot. Thanks to her as well.
Up next for us, the coronavirus in the health. We see a decline now in several states. But the CDC director says, in middle America, he sees warning signs.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KING: There are some positive developments when you go state by state through the new coronavirus data. The CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, says things are getting better but urges Americans to stay vigilant.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, CDC DIRECTOR: These interventions are going to have a lag. That lag is going to be three or four weeks. You and I are going to see the cases continue to drop. And then, hopefully this week and next week, you'll see the death rate really start to drop again.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[11:35:11]
COOPER: Dr. Redfield also says he's watching the Midwest, several heartland states, because he says out there there's some concerning trends. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REDFIELD: So middle America, right now, is getting stuck.
With the Nebraskas, the Oklahomas. We need to see those. We don't need to have a third wave in the heartland.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Let's take a look at the numbers and what Dr. Redfield is talking about.
First, let's look at the state-by-state trends on the 50-state map. Ten states trending up, meaning reporting more cases today than a weeks ago.
Ten states heading in the wrong direction as we speak. That's the orange and the red.
Nineteen states, that's the beige, holding steady, including Texas and California. Those were two big, big drivers of the summer surge. They are going down at the moment.
Going down, 21 states. You see them in green, including Florida and Arizona. They also, along with Texas and California, were the big drivers of the summer surge.
So an improving situation in the states that caused the summer surge.
And across the southeast, also a big part of the summer surge. Today, it looks better. This week looks better than two or three weeks ago.
Dr. Redfield says he hopes this changes soon, when you look at this map, which is deaths. It's a lagging indicator. It takes a couple of weeks for the death toll to drop down.
This is still a pretty depressing map. And 23 states heading in the wrong direction, meaning more deaths reported now than they did a week ago. And 23 -- you see them in orange and red.
And 11 states holding steady in terms of tabulating the death toll on Americans. And 16 states, in the green, trending down.
This is interesting to watch from this perspective. So if you look down here, this is Nebraska and Oklahoma. They do not look like they are part of the problem, especially when you compare them to California, in yellow, and Florida, in blue, and Georgia, in red.
These states have been driving the summer surge in cases.
And if you look at it from this perspective, these two don't look like a problem.
But let's look at some of the states in the heartland from this perspective. The issue is you're at 42,000 per cases per day while these states are starting to add to it. Dr. Redfield talking about they're stuck.
You see green is Nebraska, yellow is Iowa. This is Oklahoma in pink up here. Not a huge number of cases, but trending in the wrong direction. That's what Dr. Redfield is worried about.
Let's just look overall here. This is the saddest statement of all, the peak back in April and May and we come back down. This is 1,000. We see this right across the month of August, 1,000 Americans a day diving from the coronavirus.
And this is where we are in terms of the case count. I'll pull this out and stretch it a little bit. You see right here the peak of the summer surge starting to come down. And 45,000, 44,000 cases reported yesterday.
The question is does that continue to come down? Or because of what Dr. Redfield was talking about, the midwestern state, does it get stuck?
Are we at a 40,000 plateau or is this finally beginning to drop down?
Many public health experts will tell you -- look where we were in the middle of June. They will tell you all of this is unnecessary. That's part of the big debate.
Vice President Mike Pence says, well, this happened. And he says things were going well and then Memorial Day came.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE PENCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We were seeing cases declining from the dramatic rise in cases and the loss of nearly 2,500 Americans a day at the height of this pandemic.
And most of our scientists believed that we were -- we were well on our way toward -- towards lowering cases and that perhaps the coronavirus, like the flu, would be seasonal and that we would have a summer respite. But sometime around Memorial Day things changed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Our chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, joins us now.
Sanjay, sometime around Memorial Day, things did change. Part of that was Americans getting out to start celebrating the traditional summer holidays, if you will.
But part of it also was that's when the reopening accelerated. And even though the White House put out very clear reopening guidelines, a tiered process, you must pass this test before you move to this phase, the president essentially said never mind. Green light. Blow through them.
The vice president left that part out.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: We'll go back through our reporting over the past couple of months and look at every state. Many of them sort of followed these guidelines.
Where I live, in Georgia, they started opening up even before Memorial Day as I remember.
Put this together. A contagious virus, people became increasingly mobile, and you saw what happened.
What we're seeing now John, as you pointed out, is the numbers are coming down, though they are still higher now in terms of new people becoming infected versus what the -- what the peak was back in April.
The demographics have changed. People who are getting infected now are likely to be between the ages of 18 and 29.
And we're also -- you know, we have seen some improvements in terms of how we take care of patients and hospitals. We know, for example, ventilators aren't as useful as we thought they were. There are medications like Dexamethasone and Remdesivir.
[11:40:04]
So I think when Dr. Redfield says the death rates should continue to come down, it's probably true for a couple of reasons. One is, if the case counts come down, death rates will come down a few weeks after that. And we've gotten better treating patients.
The big question, John, you're alluding to is this a roller coaster, or is this going to be a continued downward slope. We don't know the answer to that right now.
KING: We don't know the answer to that.
But the vice president -- look, he's speaking this morning. We're having a public health conversation.
But we're also having it the morning after the Democratic National Convention closed. He knows the case Joe Biden made that the president has failed them when it comes to controlling this pandemic and doing everything necessary to try to control this pandemic.
Listen here. The vice president disagrees.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PENCE: I truly believe that when President Trump suspended all travel from China before the end of January and stood up the White House coronavirus task force, that bought us an invaluable amount of time to begin work on a vaccine.
We're already in phase three clinical trials. To stand up our national response for doing 800,000 tests a day, to develop hundreds of millions of medical supplies.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: I get it. He's the politician and we're in an election here but they leave out a lot there, Sanjay. They leave out February and March. He leaves out the fact that it wasn't until the middle of July that the president said masks were a good idea.
He leaves out quite a bit.
GUPTA: He does, John.
Look, on the right side of the screen people can look at what the outcome of that is. We are not even 5 percent of the world's population and there are 25 percent of the world's infections in this country.
You can look at the death toll there as compared to the rest of the world, significant obvious and much out of proportion here in the United States.
You know, I've met with the vice president in the White House and talked to him about this a few months ago. And even back then he says, look, it was all about the travel ban. The travel ban was key.
And, you know, the reality is that we now know that when the travel ban was actually implemented, there was already a fair amount of virus in this country.
We also know that travel ban, if you can even call it will that, was pretty porous because a lot of people were still coming back into the country.
They were doing temperature checks at airports and things like that, but nobody was actually at that point from temperature check prevented from coming into the country.
And then what happened, as you mentioned, February and at least the first couple weeks of March, largely, you be checked, a very contagious virus was allowed to continue to spread. That's the real problem. And the numbers on the right side of the screen tell the story.
Look, I hate to -- I get no joy in saying this. But there are so many examples of the countries with the exact same head use's u and resources, the travel ban, that's what they keep pointing to, it didn't really make a difference.
KING: May have helped some. Once the pandemic was here -- may have prevented more case but once it was here, inside the borders of the United States, that's February, March and April, and I can leave that to history books.
Another interesting thing this morning, the president signed an order designating teachers as essential workers.
And John Berman asked the vice president about that this morning. Let's listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Does that mean that they will be forced to work if they come into contact with someone with the coronavirus?
PENCE: No, absolutely not, John.
To keep our economy rolling and to keep our health care economy rolling and to keep food on the table, we recognize that there are essential workers in America.
(CROSSTALK)
BERMAN: Mr. Vice President --
PENCE: What it does, John, it prioritizes supplies and PPE and testing. So we want our teachers to know we're going to continue to prioritize their health, their safety, the safety of our schools, but we're going to work every day.
BERMAN: OK.
PENCE: And states around the country are safely reopening as we speak.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Teachers, largely and local. It's a city decision, local school district decision, for the most part.
GUPTA: Yes.
COOPER: But what is the significance of this?
GUPTA: Yes. We've been following it very closely in our community. I think a lot of people follow it in their respective communities.
The gist of this, John, is that people, in this case teachers, critical infrastructure workers, essential workers. That's a definition that would be allowed to continue to work, even if they have come in contact with someone with COVID-19.
As you know, you know, early on, we didn't have as much knowledge about the idea that people could be spreading this asymptomatically. Now that's become clear.
Now what they're saying is, they'll allow, not force, to be clear, but allow a situation where someone has come in contact with COVID-19, in most situations, that person would be quarantined and monitored to make sure they don't develop symptoms.
And they are saying, for teachers, that doesn't have to be the case. They can continue to teach your kids in person, learning, even if they have come in contact with COVID-19.
A lot of public health officials are concerned about that. They may not know they have COVID-19. They could continue to spread it.
[11:45:06]
Could they potentially spread it to people within the school, even kids? That is the big concern.
I mean, if there was adequate testing and adequate assurance testing, maybe that would obviate some of that concern, not entirely, but at least somewhat. We still don't have that in most places around the country.
So I've got to tell you, having followed the story for some time, this idea of classifying teachers as essential workers -- of course, they are essential. I mean, they are essential to teach our kids.
But the idea that they could become potential vectors of disease and spread, that's what people are trying to avoid.
KING: Yet another complication to the back-to-school dilemma that's going on across the country in just about every household.
Dr. Gupta, appreciate your insights as always and expertise.
Up next for us, the Democratic convention is over. Now comes the campaigning. How Joe Biden plans to make his case, virtually.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[11:50:52]
KING: The very unconventional Democratic convention is now in the history books. Joe Biden accepting the Democratic presidential nomination last night, 33 years after he launched his first presidential bid.
Speaking in Delaware, the vice president said, look at the facts, making the case, Donald Trump does not deserve four more years.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES & DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: If you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us, not the worst. I'll be an ally of the light, not the darkness.
Our current president's failed in his most basic duty to the nation. He's failed the protect us. He's failed the protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Joining me now, CNN senior Washington correspondent, Jeff Zeleny.
Jeff, in a normal world, the vice president, A, waking up in Wisconsin. He is in Delaware.
Number two, getting on an airplane after a morning event and going to my Michigan or to Ohio or to Pennsylvania or a battleground state. Instead, he is still in his home state of Delaware.
What do they do now?
JEFF ZELENY, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: John, he would probably be going to all of those states.
I was looking at the post-convention trips and, usually, nominees hit all those states, sometimes by bus or train or by boat even. Remember that Mississippi River tour back in 2000.
But, look, there are also Democrats in that mix who lost during those post-convention tours.
And the reality is this is a new type of campaign.
And the Biden campaign this morning, talking to officials, believes that the success of the virtual convention gives them confidence for how they can campaign going forward.
Look, it is not about winning the convention. It's about winning the election.
But when you look at what the Biden campaign and the former vice president himself accomplished this week, it is several things.
One, party unity. The fact that there was a virtual convention has essentially extinguished any visible dissent among progressives in the group.
How many Republicans did we see? That was by design to push back against the idea that the Biden/Harris ticket is the radical left here.
So when you sum up everything that happened this week, I think, A, Joe Biden reintroduced himself and introduced himself to the country. And showed that he is a man of this moment.
But now the hard work begins. And 74 days, they still have an election to win. Winning a convention doesn't do much if you don't win the election -- John?
KING: The veteran Democratic pollster, Peter Hart, in a memo, said Joe Biden is well-known but not known well. I thought that was an interesting way to put it.
One thing they tried to do with this convention was introduce more of him.
He clearly thinks is the contrast that works My dad lost his job. I understand the pain of the economic recession right now. I will act on science on the coronavirus. I have lost a wife and children. I understand the pain of you who lost people to the virus.
Trying to make him empathetic, including the story from a young man, who like Joe Biden, has a stutter. And he now has a pretty powerful friend.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BRAYDEN HARRINGTON, 13-YEAR-OLD BOY BIDEN MET IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: He said we were members of the same club. We stutter. I'm just a regular kid. And in a short amount of time, Joe Biden made me more confident about something that's bothered me my whole life. Joe Biden cared.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Joe Biden cared. I think they think that -- that's a bumper sticker to take now to November.
ZELENY: No doubt about it. Brayden is not a regular kid but a courageous kid, who did well last night. And all of us watching that, I think America would agree with that.
Look, That was the case that Joe Biden was trying to make. And there are a million stories like this after a long life in politics.
So for the last year or so, some in the Biden campaign trying to present him in a different way, trying to not suggest he is, indeed, going to be the oldest person ever to be elected president, should he be elected.
But the reality is we saw that Joe Biden all week in full. The full measure of him, who comes to this with empathy, with a lifetime of wisdom and a lifetime of mistakes. That is what he presented there.
[11:55:08]
But I think, going forward, we are going to see this empathy message because that's what they believe draws the sharpest contrast with President Trump.
KING: One convention over. One next week. A campaign like no other.
Jeff Zeleny, appreciate the live reporting after your long night.
No packed arena for Joe Biden's big speech. Which means also no balloon drop or confetti. But there was this, an outdoors fireworks display in Biden's hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. Not Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The party was supposed to be in Milwaukee but the pandemic prevented that.
Joining me to discuss is the Wisconsin lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes.
Governor Barnes, good to see you.
I'm sorry we weren't in Milwaukee in person. And when we can travel, I will come. First beer's on me.
We are in a fascinating race now. If you look at our electoral map as it stands now, Joe Biden solid or leaning 268 electoral states. Wisconsin is a toss-up state.
If nothing else changed and he won Wisconsin and its 10, ten Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States. There's a Marquette poll that came out before the convention, showing
a dead heat. Joe Biden, 50, Donald Trump, 46.
You know your state well. What is the state of play right now? What does Joe Biden have to do to make it blue again?
LT. GOV. MANDELA BARNES (D-WI): As we've seen in 2016, Wisconsin is always in play. Wisconsin is always important.
But it doesn't matter what the polls say. Even if they have us ahead, we have to play like we are behind. Because 2016 also showed us we can't rely on the polling data.
And that's why you see Donald Trump making the desperate trips to Wisconsin, putting himself and staff and so many other people at risk, the lives at risk, people potentially contract coronavirus. And we are doing the responsible thing.
And the studies show, the polling data shows that most people take the pandemic seriously. And Donald Trump does not.
People have experienced the health impacts and economic impacts of coronavirus. And Joe Biden has laid out a plan to address both of them. And I think that's what voters in Wisconsin respond to.
KING: Listen to a bit last night. You understand. You lived 2016. People think, if there was higher turnout among African-Americans in Milwaukee, things might have been different.
Joe Biden trying to appeal to people saying elect me, please, this can be different.
Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: Maybe the George Floyd murder was a breaking point. Maybe John Lewis' passing the inspiration.
But however it's come to be, however it's happened America's ready, in John's words, to lay down, quote, "the heavy burden of hate at last."
In this dark moment, I believe we're poised to make great progress again, that we can find the light once more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: What did you think of that? We have talked through this largely of COVID and the impact on your state but also politics.
Where are we? What did you think of that speech?
BARNES: That was an emotional, passionate plea, as Barack Obama said, to save the democracy. And it is important that Joe Biden highlight those really low moments right now that we have been dealing with. While I would have been excited to have a convention, if you think
about where we are in America right now, it is not really a happy time. It is a very serious time. And it is a very urgent time as we talk about the pandemic.
But as we also talk about the frustration that's finally reaching that boiling point with racial injustice. People are standing up and they're demanding, asking questions and demanding answers.
And Joe Biden is delivering answers and at least a response to what people have been calling for all across the country, the things that Donald Trump continues to ignore.
So that passionate plea was right for the moment, perfect for the moment. And it struck a tone with the American people. And I think that people will respond in November.
But it won't be easy. We have to continue to organize.
KING: We'll continue to stay in touch going through the final weeks of the campaign.
Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, of Wisconsin, thank you so much for your time.
Up next for us, the coronavirus numbers do tick down. The CDC director says the real number of infected could be as high as 60 million Americans.
