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Interview with Harris County Public Health Executive Director Umair Shah; Joe Biden Plans Policies to Help Women; Russia May Be Underreporting COVID-19 Infections. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired November 17, 2020 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

UMAIR SHAH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HARRIS COUNTY, TX PUBLIC HEALTH: And I will say that there's also -- the other piece of this, which is that, you know, everybody -- this is a pandemic. Everybody across the country is looking for vaccine across states and all communities, and so we really need to be thinking about where are the most need and how do we get the vaccine to those communities as quickly as possible?

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: You said this is, quote, "like we survived the Titanic, and now we're looking at the tip of an iceberg and pretending the tip is the whole thing." What do you need right now to stop your county, the largest and most populous in Texas, from sinking?

SHAH: Well you know, what I would say is that there are a couple things, Poppy. Is that first, we have successfully fought this pandemic twice in our community in the spring, and certainly in the summer. And things were really bad, and we came together as a community, we did everything that we needed to do from public health, health care, our community, you know, wearing masks and doing all sorts of things to fight the pandemic.

And that's what we're looking to do again. And when you're hearing stories unfortunately, really tragic stories from El Paso and other parts of the state across the country, we want to make sure that everybody's focusing on those three Ws of wearing the mask and watching your distance, watching your hands. But fourth is the W of will, political collective will, and individual will. We've got to do this together, otherwise we do not want to see our community get overrun.

Now, that said, Houston-Harris County, thus far, has not seen the increases elsewhere, but that is in my mind the concern, is that we want to make sure it's not a rubber band that stretches and eventually breaks, we want to prevent it in the first place.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Dr. Shah, I wonder if, sadly, that portions of the population in terms of attitudes are a lost cause here, right? That the politicizing of this is so baked in -- and by the way, you have many politicians including the president sticking with this line, that these -- you know, that the threat is overdone, that these changes are an infringement on your freedom, et cetera -- that even as we're in the midst of numbers like this, that for some portion of the population, it's over, right? In terms of coming around to accept this.

SHAH: Oh, Jim, it's far from over. This is like the first half, right? 2020 was like in a football game, the first half. The holidays and where we are right now is halftime. We've got a whole half ahead of us. And if we don't do the right things during this halftime to strategize and get our act together so we're ready for the second half, guess what? We're going to be overrun by our opponent, and that's the COVID-19 and so --

(CROSSTALK)

SCIUTTO: Yes, no, no, I know that, I'm just talking --

SHAH: -- we've got the ability to do that -- yes.

SCIUTTO: I'm talking in terms of people accepting that fact, right? I mean, because the politicized view of this --

SHAH: Well that's the issue, right? That's right.

SCIUTTO: -- is so baked in.

SHAH: That's right, and that's what the concern is. Look, as a doc who's been seeing patients for 15, 20 years, I'll tell you, I have never seen it like this. If I ask a patient to take a blood pressure medicine, I don't get the question about, well, if I take a blood pressure medicine, you know, it's -- you know, I don't believe you that it's going to help my blood pressure.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

SHAH: Wearing a mask is the very simple treatment, in essence, to prevent you from getting sick. But we've politicized it. That's sad, and that's the state of our country right now.

HARLOW: We wish you luck, Dr. Umair Shah, thank you for being with us this morning.

SHAH: Thank you for having me.

SCIUTTO: Real shame.

[10:33:35]

Well, coming up, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell issues a serious warning about the economy after the pandemic. Why one expert is concerned the financial struggle could last longer than the virus itself.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: Welcome back. So President-elect Biden, speaking yesterday about his concerns about the economy, the economy that his administration will be inheriting in just a matter of weeks.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: We all know that this pandemic and this recession have hit communities of color particularly hard.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Right now, Congress should come together and pass a COVID relief package like the HEROES Act that the House passed six months ago. Once we shut down the virus and deliver economic relief to workers and businesses, then we can start to build back better than before.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Remember, our economy is still down 10 million jobs from pre- pandemic levels. With me now, Jason Furman, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and former top economic advisor to President Obama; also Joanne Lipman, former editor in chief of "USA Today," also the author of a fantastic new book, "That's What She Said."

Good to have you guys. And Jason, let me just begin with you because you had the experience working on the White House team, dealing with the last financial crisis that we had, albeit a very different one. But you saw what worked and what should have been done better. This time around, you have a pretty clear message to Democrats on stimulus, and it seems to be "don't wait."

JASON FURMAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS: Yes, absolutely. You know, we started out doing something really big to combat the virus in the CARES Act. That made our economy get halfway back faster than we thought. There's still 10 million jobs short. We can't wait until January or February to do the perfect thing, let's do something, you know, pretty good now. But waiting is something that just people in our country can't afford, our economy can't afford.

[10:40:10]

HARLOW: I hope a lot of them are listening to you because that is not what has been happening since, frankly, the end of July.

I mean, it's amazing to me, Joanne, that we are still in this place where infighting in Congress means that millions of Americans are not getting the help they need, and particularly on the women front. I mean, this is being called a she-session (ph) for the reason that more women are out of work than me this time around, and you just wrote a really important op-ed about it. And you say we are missing what is perhaps the greatest opportunity to recharge the battered economy. Make the case.

JOANNE LIPMAN, FORMER EDITOR IN CHIEF, USA TODAY: Absolutely. So yes, as we've spoken about before, we're in this she-session. If you look at just August and September, more than a million people dropped out of the workforce, 80 percent of them were women, 866,000 women. Women were actually the majority of the workforce at the beginning of the year, we've lost 2.2 million of them because of the stress of COVID, of homeschooling, child care. And this burden falls especially heavily on women of color. If you

look at black and Latina women, their unemployment rate is now nine percent or above versus less than six percent for white men.

So we've got to take steps to bring these women back. We know that when you bring women back to the economy, it increases GDP. It is the best thing you can do to supercharge your economy.

HARLOW: So I mean, the numbers on that front, Jason, don't lie. It's women, particularly women of color, that are feeling the brunt of it this time around. We heard Senator Harris, Vice President-elect Harris, talk about that yesterday. What would your advice be to the incoming administration about specifically targeted stimulus to help that sector?

FURMAN: Yes, look, Poppy, if you are providing relief to the people who need it most, you're not just helping them, but they're more likely to go out and spend the money as well.

So expanding unemployment insurance benefits, getting money to all the people that are left out through things like nutritional assistance, I think another round of checks, maybe more targeted at modest income households, all of that helped our economy and helped people be resilient the first time around. But all of that came to an end at the end of July, and people are really adrift now, still without jobs and not getting support from the government either.

HARLOW: There was this warning, Joanne, from the Fed Chair Jerome Powell last week that I think actually didn't get enough attention, and he essentially said, by the way, even after a vaccine, we are going to be re-entering an economy that is completely different than it was before, for a really long time.

The people on the lower end are going to hurt for longer and they're going to hurt more, right? So how does the Biden administration appropriately address that new economy?

LIPMAN: So right, right. So theoretically, a Biden administration should be helpful to those who are being hurt the most. If you look at some of the planks in his platform, the question will be whether with a divided Congress, he can get any of these through. But let's just walk through a couple of these steps.

One is he is advocating for 12 weeks of paid family leave and paid sick leave. This is incredibly important. We in the United States, we are the only developed country in the world that does not offer some sort of paid parental family leave.

He's also advocating for access to affordable child care, and also universal pre-K. Again, this would help those women in particular, but all parents who are struggling now to care for these young children.

One other -- he's talking about wage gap audits, wage gap transparency, looking at these audits for gender, ethnicity, race. Again, we know there are huge wage disparities so that would make a difference. And finally, I would throw in there the $15 an hour minimum wage that he's advocating for.

Here's the thing, though, Poppy, so all of these measures would make a difference. The problem is going to be obviously, with our divided country, divided Congress. But what we need to understand is this is not a red versus blue issue, and it is not a --

HARLOW: Sure.

LIPMAN: -- male versus female issue. This -- really, these measures and bringing women back into the economy is going to help all of us, it's really going to improve the economy.

HARLOW: A hundred percent. They're big things, though, that are very tough to get through a, you know, divided Congress. But we'll see.

Jason, before you go, I just wonder, looking back at lessons learned, we did see, before the pandemic, under the Trump administration in 2019, last year, median household income grew 6.8 percent, the most ever on record, and it grew even more than that for Hispanics and for black Americans. Are there any lessons you think the Biden administration should take from things the Trump administration did well on the economy pre-pandemic?

[10:45:20]

FURMAN: Yes, I think the Fed has done a great job in recent years, including --

HARLOW: My question was about the administration, but I see your dodge.

FURMAN: -- on macroeconomic policy -- no, I know, but that's the thing, including people that President Trump appointed to the Fed.

HARLOW: All right, fair.

FURMAN: That's been a really important part of maintaining low unemployment. Low unemployment disproportionately benefits, you know, folks at the bottom, it leads to the largest wage gains for workers, you know, maybe with just a high school degree instead of a college degree and the like.

And so I think those Fed appointments, and making sure they keep up that pressure might be one of the more consequential and important things that can be done on the economy.

And then I agree with the rest of the agenda in terms of paid leave, child care, you know, all that's so important. It will be challenging politically.

HARLOW: Thank you both very, very much. Jason, good to have you; Joanne, thanks so much. And Joanne again -- here's the book, sorry we forgot to show it at the top -- congrats, "That's What She Said."

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:46]

SCIUTTO: A CNN investigation has uncovered evidence that Russia may be severely underreporting its coronavirus infection numbers.

HARLOW: Our Matthew Chance is in Moscow with disturbing new video showing appalling conditions inside overcrowded hospitals and morgues all across the country. Matthew, we're glad you're here. What did you see?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, well of course, Poppy, Russia is one of the worst affected countries in the world when it comes to COVID-19, nearly 2 million confirmed infections. It's got just over 33,000 people who have been, according to official figures, killed. But you know, the Kremlin says it's all under control of course.

But you know, you speak to frontline medical workers -- doctors, nurses on the frontline -- look at the harrowing video that's coming out, and you get a sense that the real picture is much bleaker.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHANCE (voice-over): This is the pandemic response Russia wants us to see: a vast, state-of-the-art field hospital set up to manage the coronavirus surge.

CHANCE (on-camera): And we're just about to head into the red zone.

CHANCE (voice-over): It was a world championship ice skating stadium called the Ice Palace. Now, the view from the stands is 1,300 beds, and the staff of highly protected medics, apparently in control of this COVID-19 crisis.

We have all the necessary diagnostic equipment including ultrasound and ventilators, the chief doctor on the left tells me.

The Russian government is taking serious anti-coronavirus measures, he insists, not just here in Moscow but far beyond.

But there's another side of Russia's raging pandemic, one the authorities here would prefer that we ignore, with shocking evidence of an overloaded health care system buckling under the strain of COVID-19.

On social media, there are heartbreaking scenes like this one, of an ambulance medic trying in vain to get a 90-year-old patient admitted to an overcrowded ward.

I won't take her home to die, the paramedic shouts. Why do I have to weep and beg you to take in a patient, she cries.

The Russian authorities admit hospitals in some regions are at more than 95 percent capacity. But there's mounting evidence of a surging death toll too. In this video, recorded last month and sent to us by an opposition-linked doctor's union, a dead woman dangles unattended from her hospital bed while other patients gasp for breath just feet away.

We lost another two in the ward overnight, says a male voice on the video. This is how COVID-19 is killing everyone, he says.

There are horrific scenes of inundated morgues too, some too graphic to show, with corpses strewn across floors and stretchers.

It's also emerged that official Russian COVID death figures, suspiciously low compared to other badly affected countries, may grossly understate the real toll by excluding people who are presumed to have COVID postmortem, even those with pre-existing conditions that proved fatal due to the infection. If they were counted as in many other countries, Russia's official death toll of over 33,000 people would be higher.

ALEXEY RAKSHA, FORMER GOVERNMENT STATISTICIAN: From -- from above, it's not --

CHANCE (voice-over): Much higher, according to a former government statistician who has complied figures on excess deaths and spoke to CNN.

RAKSHA: I think it's 130,000 people.

CHANCE (on-camera): A hundred and thirty thousand people who have died --

RAKSHA: Yes.

CHANCE: -- in Russia with COVID-19?

RAKSHA: Because of COVID, because of COVID.

CHANCE: And do you believe that the Russian government is purposely hiding the real cost of the COVID --

(CROSSTALK)

RAKSHA: Yes, of course. They need to make people not afraid of the virus. It's very helpful for providing good picture. So we are Russians, we're very proud of our country, everything is good with us.

[10:55:00]

CHANCE (voice-over): Russian authorities haven't responded to the allegations they're downplaying the figures. But outside the highly organized and spacious field hospitals, the authorities are happy to showcase there are signs Russia's pandemic is getting worse.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CHANCE (on-camera): Well, in latest figures, more than 22,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, 442 deaths according to official figures. But as we've seen, the real figure could be much higher than that -- Jim, Poppy, back to you.

HARLOW: My goodness, Matthew Chance, thank you for bringing us that --

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: -- tragic reporting.

And thanks to all of you for being with us today, we'll see you tomorrow morning. I'm Poppy Harlow.

SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto. NEWSROOM with Kate Bolduan starts right after a short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:00:00]