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Experts Fear Post-Labor Day Surge as Crowds Gather for Holiday; California Declares State of Emergency as it Battles Multiple Wildfires; India Now has Second Highest Number of COVID-19 Cases in the World. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired September 07, 2020 - 10:00   ET

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

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[10:00:00]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN NEWSROOM: Happy Labor Day, everyone. Top of the hour. I'm Poppy Harlow. Good to be back with you. Jim has a very well deserved day off.

This morning though, fears that the fun some are having this holiday weekend is just going to lead to another surge in COVID cases. Scenes of crowded beaches and huge parties, few masks, little social distancing among some crowds as the nation marks another holiday weekend against the backdrop of rising COVID-19 cases.

Cases spiked, you'll remember, after Memorial Day and after the 4th of July. And now, doctors are sounding the alarm warning it could happen again after this holiday weekend, and as millions of kids head back to school.

Also, college campuses emerging as new hot spots, some students now getting expelled for not following safety rules. Also, 57 days until the election, and this morning, new pushback against the president's vaccine promise.

We're covering all of this. Let's begin with the crowds. Rosa Flores joins us in Miami on the beach appropriately where it doesn't look too crowded.

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's really not very crowded at this hour, Poppy. Take a look around me, because you'll see that people are social distancing. You don't see a lot of masks, but you do see that people are staying with their groups, and also the beach furniture that is out here has been spaced out to allow for social distancing.

But, again, the big worry from experts right now is that the United States is still seeing about 40,000 cases a day, and so they are warning that we saw spikes right after the Memorial Day holiday, right after the July 4th holiday. And so that's why there's a lot of added concern.

Here in Miami Beach where I am, city officials have deployed about is 20 what they call beach ambassadors. And what that is is they are individuals that are going out and about and warning people that they should social distance, that they should wear a mask and that they should keep on washing their hands.

Now, there is a mask-up or pay-up campaign here in Miami-Dade, and what that means you must wear a mask when you're out and about in public spaces. Now, if you take a look at people in the water, obviously not wearing a mask because they are in the water, and they are swimming.

But, again, Poppy, the big concern here and the big push is that even though this is a holiday weekend and people are just tired of the pandemic, officials and experts are urging people to please, first of all, wear a mask to keep groups to a very small gathering, and, if possible, to have those gatherings outside and, of course, social distance, wear a mask, wash your hands, and that, of course, is to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Poppy?

HARLOW: Rosa, so well said, so important. Thank you very much.

Let's go now to Natasha Chen. She joins us this morning in Atlanta. Good morning, Natasha. Georgia just passed 6,000 COVID deaths from COVID-19. The holiday weekend a reminder to everyone about, you know, particularly the toll the pandemic has taken there and in a state that opened up really early.

NATASHA CHEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Good morning, Poppy. Well, that's 6,000 deaths in Georgia since this pandemic began. And if you look at the trends, the seven-day average of new deaths has really climbed upward and spiked a little bit in the last few weeks or so. But if you also look at the seven-day average of new cases, that has actually steadily come down since mid-July.

Now, the increase leading up to mid-July, as some were pointing to some of the larger crowds that gathered over Memorial Day weekend, and that's why there was some concern about what the crowds would look like throughout the state Labor Day weekend, really discouraging large crowds from gathering, so that that kind of increase doesn't happen again.

What we've been seeing is that events like the Atlanta Black Pride is still going on. We tried to reach out to them to see how they might be having a different protocols in place with the pandemic. They hadn't quite responded to me about those issues yet.

Tybee Island, the beach where we were on Memorial Day weekend, they saw pretty typical big crowds for Labor Day. Now, they are not required to have people wear masks on the beach. There is a mask mandate in that county. The county, however, told me on Friday that it's really been more of an education campaign rather than citing people or fining them.

[10:05:04]

Now, if we look at the Labor Day events around Atlanta that typically happened, a lot of them were canceled for in-person. So, Dragon-Con, which would have had 87,000 people for this massive convention of comic sci-fi, gaming fans, they went all virtual. And then you're talking about two college kickoff games, football at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, that got canceled.

And so the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau told me that, you know, we're talking about nearly a quarter million people who did not come into Atlanta who would typically be here Labor Day weekend, and, of course, that's also a great economic loss as well, about 150 million at least.

But people are telling me that the most important thing is the health and safety of their attendees even if this is a great economic loss. Poppy?

HARLOW: Of course it is. Natasha, thank you very much for that reporting.

Let's talk about college towns now because across the country, they have become, as was largely expected, the latest COVID hot spots. Evan McMorris-Santoro is with me again. Good morning,Evan.

The worry here among so many experts is that, you know, even if these students aren't dying from COVID and younger people aren't getting as sick, they are very likely to infect older, more vulnerable populations in their schools and in that community.

EVAN MCMORRIS-SANTORO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's exactly right. You know, we've been talking this hour about things we saw before. Holiday weekends, adding to -- you know, leading to outbreaks, you know, large gatherings like football games, leading to outbreaks. This is the new thing. The new thing is colleges are reopen under the pandemic. And what we're seeing is students getting coronavirus, and, you know, the concern is that will spread.

Now, colleges are trying to lock this down as best as they can. They have put in very strict rules about social distancing, and they are backing those rules up with action. Here in New York City, where I am, NYU suspended at least 20 students, they announced over the weekend, for violating social distancing rules at off-campus events. Northeastern University, they have dismissed 11 students, keeping their $37,000 in tuition for a party that those students had in a hotel room at a hotel that they were being placed in to socially distant from campus.

So schools are trying to thread the needle between welcoming students back, telling students that college is different now and not to party and be careful outside but also like enjoy their college experience. So it's a very tough needle to thread. And right now, what we're seeing is those cases are rising, students are getting suspended and schools are trying to figure out what to do next, Poppy.

HARLOW: Expelled, right? Some of them expelled totally, no?

MCMORRIS-SANTORO: Well, that's right. What happened at Northeastern is they are gone for the rest of the year. Their tuition is gone, but it's unclear as to whether or not they will be able to come back in future years. But for now, those 11 students are out a lot of money and out of campus.

HARLOW: Almost $40,000. Evan, thanks very much.

Let's talk about all of this with Dr. Colleen Kraft, Associate Chief Medical Officer at Emory University Hospital. Good you have to, Doctor. Thanks for the time.

DR. COLLEEN KRAFT, ASSOCIATE CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER AT EMORY UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL: Thanks.

HARLOW: So, the new IHME model that they have been pretty accurate, if not, conservative in predicting how many deaths we could have as a country from COVID now says upwards of 410,000 by the beginning of January. How should we think about that coming off the Labor Day weekend and heading into flu season?

KRAFT: Right. So I think it's a staggering number of deaths to predict, and I think that more and more people are going to be finding that it's going to affect them personally. And so I think that's one of the things that I think we've struggled in this outbreak is that -- it seems very far away for some people.

But as these numbers grow and as these individuals are really -- you know, get disease and don't do well or they do do well, I think it's concerning that we're reaching almost -- potentially almost half a million even by December.

HARLOW: It's hard to put your head around. You're absolutely right. One thing you point out that has not gotten a lot of attention but probably should is that sort of the same platforms that we use and some of the reagents that we use, et cetera, for flu tests are what we use for COVID tests. So is there going to be enough? And if someone, you know, if I think my kid has the flu and I take them to the pediatrician to get a flu test, if you can have are the flu and COVID at the same time, then do they need a COVID test as well?

KRAFT: Yes, I think so, because we don't real -- can't distinguish these yet. And you are exactly right, Poppy. This is actually something that's consumed a lot of my time over the last month, has really been trying to figure out just for our health care system alone how we're going to test for flu and COVID at the same time when some of these platforms are moving to just testing flu and COVID together.

[10:10:04]

And that's a great strategy, except that their supply chain hasn't been remedied yet.

And so we saw shortages, as we already saw with COVID testing, but now, we're about to see shortages with COVID and flu testing. And so we're trying to hold on to certain tests as much as we can in anticipation of having to sort of piecemeal together our diagnostic strategy in the health care system come the fall. HARLOW: There is a big difference between a vaccine and vaccination, and vaccinating enough of a country's population to have it truly be effective. The fact that this relatively new CBS/YouGov poll shows that only 21 percent of respondents said that they would be comfortable and confident taking a vaccine immediately when it's approved. What does that mean for us?

KRAFT: I think you hit the nail on the head on this one, Poppy. This is something that I think in an era where there's already vaccine hesitancy, for us to try to speed up a process that is designed to ensure safety and efficacy, we don't want a bad vaccine at the end of this or sort of accelerated vaccine that doesn't work. That's not going to help either solve our health care issues or our personal health issues with COVID. It's also going to lead to a distrust of sort of this creation of vaccines.

And so I think that we want this process to occur in a way that gives confidence to the consumer that's going to be getting the vaccine but then also actually helps us to get ourselves out of this pandemic.

HARLOW: So given that, let's just take a moment and listen to the president talking about vaccines just on Friday. Here he was.

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DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We remain on track to deliver a vaccine before the end of the year and maybe even before November 1st. We think we can probably have it sometime during the month of October.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: If that happens, do you think, you know -- hearing things like that, it even before we know if that can happen, gives people a false sense of security heading into the fall when the weather, when flu, when colds, when all the things we just talked about are really going serious complicate this?

KRAFT: Exactly, Poppy. So we need to be acting the same way we are for the pandemic for the upcoming flu season so we can both prevent sort of the mixing of those two viruses in the population, which is undoubtedly going to happen during flu season. And I also think it's also the difference so much between the idea of something happening and the practicality of actually doing a mass vaccine campaign.

Let's say that there is something that's actually available before November, which I think would be really overly accelerated for where we are in terms of phase three studies, but then also trying to get those scaled up. I mean, you know, we've seen the same thing with diagnostic testing, also figuring out who needs it first. That's the other thing that people don't realize is we have the ACIP that helps us decide who gets the vaccinations first.

And so I think that there's a lot of the pragmatic operational and logistical issues that don't really -- aren't summarized in some of those sort of one-liners of the statements that we hear in the news.

HARLOW: Dr. Kraft, I appreciate you, as always. Thanks very much.

KRAFT: Thank you.

HARLOW: Well, still ahead for us, India is now recording the second highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, and it's not the only country seeing infections spike. We'll talk about that it.

And in California, devastation from these wildfires. The governor declares a state of emergency as a record number of acres are burned. The state is also dealing with record-breaking heat. A live update from there.

And a new survey shows nearly two-thirds of restaurants across New York say they may have to close by the end of the year unless they get financial help. We're going to speak to one of the owners, next.

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HARLOW: Well, in California, wildfires continue to burn completely out of control. Five California counties are now under a state of many as this state faces one of its worst wildfire seasons ever. Satellite images, that's what you're looking at, they show the spread of smoke across the state.

Over the weekend, more than 200 people had to be rescued from Mammoth Pool Reservoir. Look at that. It is stunning to see this video from a family who was among those escaped on a boat after finding themselves surrounded by flames.

Let's go back to Kyung Lah. She joins me again this morning. Kyung, good morning to you. Thank you for being there, for covering this. And we've learned that one of these fires actually started from a gender reveal party, is that right?

KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. You may want to think of it as a gender reveal gone awry. The family lit pyrotechnics because they wanted to make a splashy gender reveal. But given California's drought, that is what Cal Fire says triggered this fire.

I'm at the edge of the El Dorado fire. That smoke that you were talking about, billowing across the satellite images, we're seeing it here on the ground as the smoke just simply covers this entire area, 7,000-plus acres.

We've got a brief update from Cal Fire. Acreage now of containment is -- sorry, containment is at 7 percent. So, this fire still a lot of work in order to try to draw that circle around this fire.

But bigger crisis is further up north from where I am. That is the creek fire.

[10:20:00]

That fire is 45,000 acres, a very large and dangerous fire. It is out of control, zero containment. And it is -- that fire came very close to a recreation area, that video you were showing us, Mammoth Pool is the area that there were at least 200 people who were trapped. They were crowding around the edge of a boat launch area, and then they had to be airlifted out to safety.

Some of those people, Poppy, they had broken bones. They had burns, and this is something that is extraordinarily rare, something I've rarely seen in covering wildfires here, so a very dangerous fire up north. Poppy?

HARLOW: Very. And that video, every time I see it, I can't get over it. Our thanks to the first responders who were able to rescue all those folks. Thank you, Kyung.

India now has a title it did not want, the country with the second most cases of COVID in the world. What is behind the surge there? We'll take you there to find out.

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[10:25:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back.

India has surpassed Brazil and now has the second highest number of COVID cases in the world. It's just behind the United States.

Let's go to my colleague, Vedika Sud. She's on the ground in New Delhi. Good morning. What is contributing to the surge? Is it a surge or is it more testing telling us what was already there?

VEDIKA SUD, CNN REPORTER: Well, Poppy, quite a few reasons. There is a huge surge that we've seen over the last month, I would say that. But the reasons would that India has a huge population. We have 1.36 billion, which is the second most populated country in the world.

Also along with this, the testing has been very aggressive in the last three weeks. Testing stands at about 50 million as of now when I speak to you, and the target is about 1 million samples being tested a day.

But another reason, according to medical experts, is also complacency of the people. They claim that this stems from the fact that there's this mixed messaging going on by the government where they keep talking about the low fatality rate and the height recovery rate, but the reason for the surge is really not addressed. This makes people complacent because we're still seeing people come out on to the roads without mask and not maintaining social distancing.

Another reason is that 70 percent of India's population lives in rural areas where the public health care system is so frail, they are not really getting the treatment they deserve, and that's really one of the reasons why we've seen cases go up in the rural areas as well, Poppy.

HARLOW: Vedika, thank you for that reporting. A pretty sad number to see for sure. Let's go now to London. My colleague, Scott McLean, is there. Good morning to you, Scott. Over the weekend, the U.K. saw its highest daily case number of COVID-19 since May. What are officials saying about why?

SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Poppy. Well, the British government, first and foremost, had insisted that schools across the country open, that employees get back into the office. And they are now even discussing ways to reduce the mandatory 14-day quarantine period that's now in place for travelers coming in from most countries just as, as you said, the country recorded its highest single day coronavirus case count since May.

This is really a trend across Europe where the second wave of infection is looking like it -- like it's likely to eclipse the first one. And while more testing is obviously going to capture more cases, the health secretary says that the trend in this country is concerning. Look at this graphic showing daily infections in Europe. You can see that the U.K. is trending upwards, France just saw its highest single day case count ever, and Spain is leading the way. It's on track to reach half a million total coronavirus cases likely today.

Now, these are countries that had some of the strictest lockdowns in all of Europe. In Spain, you could barely go outside in Madrid without attracting questions from police. And yet somehow Sweden, a country which had no lockdown at all, has the lowest number of daily infections, even after you account for population.

Now, luckily this time around, European health systems are holding up relatively well. In the U.K., for instance, there are 40 times fewer people today on ventilators than there were at height of the pandemic. Perhaps that's because the health second says that younger people, particularly affluent younger people not following the rules are largely to blame for this recent spike in infections. He is concerned that they will spread it to older, more vulnerable parts of the population as they started to see in Spain.

That country just recorded in a single day on Friday almost 200 deaths. That is the highest number that they have seen in one day since May, Poppy.

HARLOW: Wow. Scott, appreciate you being there very much.

Foreign journalists working for U.S. news organizations in China, they are in limbo this morning after the Chinese government has imposed new visa restrictions. Let's go to David Culver. He is on ground in Beijing.

Well, David, you're one of those journalists who works in China and do incredibly important work there. And as I understand it, you were told by authorities that this move to restrict your visa or severely limit it was a, quote, reciprocal measure.

[10:30:00]

DAVID CULVER, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Poppy. It is strange to think that what was supposed to be a routine renewal of my press card, which would allow me another 12 months of visa to.