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Downtown Nashville Sealed Off After "Intentional" Explosion; White House: Trump Briefed on Nashville Explosion; December Break Records for Deaths, Cases, Hospitalizations. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired December 25, 2020 - 16:30   ET

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

[16:30:02]

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: I mean, obviously, look, Nashville has had a really tough year. It's been through a lot, I mean, right now, there's this horrific pandemic, which is just devastating in Tennessee.

I know you've been in touch with federal authorities. Have they told you anything?

REP. JIM COOPER (D-TN) (via telephone): We're still investigating right now, but the picture of the RV is up online, and that will produce results.

There are other resources law enforcement has and the main thing now is to be a careful sifting of the evidence just with the cadaver dogs and bomb sniffing dogs and a detailed description of the debris, and the FBI is the best in the world at that, but local law enforcement is awesome, too. I heard your previous speaker talked about the abilities of the local ATF office, and a local fire department, local police. They're awesome.

It's a terrible way to spend a Christmas Day, but they're giving it their best.

A. COOPER: You represent the area. We know the RV exploded around 6:20 something this morning, Central Time. There obviously were not a lot of people in this area.

Do you make anything of where this RV was parked? Is there any significance you glean from just the location?

REP. COOPER: I'm on that street every Monday for our Rotary Club meeting which meets at the Wild Horse Saloon, which is one block down and not hurt, but so many other businesses were hurt. You know, bars, restaurants, and their condos and the upper stories.

The big building where the RV was parked is right in front of the AT&T switch building, which is a nondescript looking building that was 15 stories tall. But it seems to have serious structural damage. The exterior damage was worse in that building. And it's really a pretty devastating blow to that building.

As a result, I know I have no Wi-Fi in my house. Countless people in middle Tennessee, southern Kentucky, and northern Alabama don't have phone, internet, or TV service. And even the Nashville airport was shut down for a while this morning.

So, AT&T is a vital carrier. We need them back online. But even their backup generators were crippled by the accident.

A. COOPER: Do you think it's a coincidence this was outside that building?

REP. COOPER: I don't. You know, I'm suspicious of terrorism in general, including domestic terrorism, and there's a lot of crazy conspiracy theories out there, but this was not just a harmless building. It's a vital building if you want to communicate in our modern society.

AT&T is a wonderful company, and as are all our careers, and we need to keep them all strong. So, I consider this a serious and intentional attack on American infrastructure, and I don't know anybody who would do that except a terrorist.

A. COOPER: Congressman Cooper, appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us.

REP. COOPER: Thank you, Anderson.

A. COOPER: The White House says President Trump has been briefed on the explosion that police are calling an intentional act in downtown Nashville.

CNN's Jeremy Diamond is in West Palm Beach where the president is spending the holiday.

Jeremy, we have also now learned that President-elect Biden has also been briefed. Have we heard from President Trump today?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: We haven't heard from President Trump on this explosion directly, but we do know from the deputy White House press secretary, Judd Deere, that the president was indeed briefed today. The president was spending about five hours at his golf course this morning but at some point, perhaps between rounds of golf, it appears the president was briefed on this incident.

Judd Deere says in a statement, President Trump has been briefed on the explosion in Nashville, Tennessee, and will continue to receive regular updates. He then said the president is grateful for the incredible first responders and praying for those who were injured.

Now, Anderson, we were expecting we might see the president on camera later today. The president is delivering an address to the troops, Christmas Day message at some point today, but the president taking to Twitter to say that news media would not be invited to that. Despite the fact that in recent years, he's actually invited cameras and reporters in to witness that and he tends to actually make news at those events.

But today, we're not expecting to see the president anymore. We have a lid from the White House, which means we're not expecting to see the president on camera at all today.

COOPER: All right, Jeremy Diamond, thanks very much.

Up next, we take you to California where the L.A. County Health Department is sharing a heartbreaking new statistic. Deaths spiking so acutely in the county from coronavirus that now someone is dying every ten minutes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:38:04]

COOPER: Christmas Day in the U.S. pandemic is breaking all the wrong records. More hospitalizations than ever before, 120,000 people fighting COVID. December has just become the deadliest month so far in the entire pandemic, as it also records the most infections of any month during the crisis.

More than 60,000 lives lost this month with more than 4.8 million new cases.

CNN's Alexandra Field has more on the incredible challenges facing hospitals today.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALEXANDRA FIELD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This Christmas, the one we never imagined.

DR. PETER HOTEZ, CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR VACCINE DEVELOPMENT, TEXAS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL: It was January 1st of this year when most of us heard about the COVID-19 pandemic starting out of Hubei province in China. I just never believed that we would get to 330,000 American lives lost by Christmas Day, and still accelerating at 3,000 deaths a day.

FIELD: Almost 1 in every 1,000 Americans killed by COVID this year. In L.A. County, a person died from COVID every ten minutes. There are no ICU beds left in Southern California or the San Joaquin Valley.

HOTEZ: When our ICUs get overwhelmed, we saw this in March and April in southern Europe and New York City, that's how the mortality numbers skyrocket. So, this is happening now all across the country. We're reproducing that Manhattan and New York City epidemic from March and April now times dozens of times.

FIELD: Despite a clear warning from the CDC that travel can increase your chance of getting and spreading COVID-19, more than 7 million people passed through America's airports in the last week.

DR. CHRIS PERNELL, PUBLIC HEALTH PHYSICIAN WHO LOST FATHER TO COVID- 19: I think people don't think coronavirus will happen to them. They think coronavirus will happen to another family. But there is no safety other than those public health measures that we have been preaching from the mountain tops. FIELD: New travel restrictions go into effect on Monday. Passengers

coming from the U.K. will need a negative COVID test within 72 hours of boarding a flight and documentation of the results. That as concerns grow that a variant of the virus discovered there could be more transmissible.

[16:40:02]

ALBERT BOURLA, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, PFIZER: We're investigating to see if this new strain is equally sensitive to our vaccine and also would be neutralized by our vaccine.

FIELD: Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla says he's cautiously optimistic the vaccine will prove as effective against the variant.

Dr. Anthony Fauci now estimates 70 percent to 85 percent of the country will need the vaccine to get to herd immunity.

DR. LEANA WEN, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: It will take maybe half a year or more for us to get to herd immunity in this country. So that everybody is able to be protected from coronavirus. And in that meantime, we still have to really double down and do the masking, physical distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings.

FIELD: The suffering this holiday season, unprecedented. For most Americans, even the first dose of the vaccine is still months away, but another surge may be just days out.

ERIN BROMAGE, PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS DARTMOUTH: We're just seeing daily cases just amplify and amplify and amplify. So, Christmas, today, is going to do a similar thing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COOPER: It's Alexandra Field reporting.

Now for some expert analysis, Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency medicine physician, once was health commissioner of Baltimore.

Dr. Wen, good to see you.

First, what's happening in California? The state is the first in the nation to surpass 2 million cases. The L.A. County health director said a person is dying there every ten minutes from COVID. As a public health official, what do you prioritize when the spread and deaths have reached these levels?

WEN: It's really hard, Anderson, because at that point, you know you cannot just do testing and contact tracing alone. That you really need to rely on mitigation measures, and even masking is not going to be sufficient at that point. People really need to be staying home and not gathering.

And I so worry not only about Los Angeles but also all over the country because we have viral hot spots basically everywhere. We have a surge upon a surge. So many of our hospitals are filled now with the gatherings as a consequence of the gatherings that occurred over Thanksgiving. And I'm afraid that the Christmas surge is going to be even worse.

COOPER: Doctor Anthony Fauci says it may take vaccinating at much as 85 percent of the country to reach some sort of herd immunity. Do you think that's possible?

WEN: That's a lot of people that we need to be vaccinating and I think what Dr. Fauci is saying is we don't really know. We initially were estimating maybe we need about 70 percent of the population to be vaccinated. But now we're seeing this virus is so widespread that people are so susceptible to it, now there are these variants that are spreading even faster than COVID-19 that we already knew to be highly contagious, so that's getting revised upward.

So, we know we need to get the vaccine into the arms of as many people as possible and we need to do public outreach, because the vaccine isn't going to do good if it's sitting on shelves. We need to get them into the arms of people.

COOPER: And now, I mean, people are traveling for the holidays. We know at least 7 million people have been doing -- have been going through airports. That's not counting people driving. I mean, obviously, that's a huge concern.

WEN: That's right. I worry about people gathering in airports, on planes, but more so, I worry about what people are doing once they get to the destination, because almost certainly, people are traveling to see someone. They're going to see family and friends. They're probably going to have dinner indoors without wearing masks for prolonged periods of time.

And so, I just would urge everyone at this point, consider moving things outdoors as much as you can. Limit your indoor time. If you have to be indoors, wear a mask the entire time, try not to eat and drink indoors. I know this is really hard because people have made so many different sacrifices in 2020. But we don't have that much more to go, and we just have to get through this very difficult holiday ahead.

COOPER: What about the new restriction on travelers from the U.K. due to the more infectious variant? Is requiring a negative test three days before boarding a flight effective?

WEN: So I think it's a step in the right direction because we are going to find some people who are asymptomatic and just don't know it, and testing positive means we can take them out of circulation. They will know they're positive. They're not going to be making that trip, but I also think we need to go a lot further.

We should also be mandating quarantine at the time that people arrive, and then doing a test to make sure that they're still negative after that quarantine period, and frankly, it should not just be people coming from the U.K. There's a new variant in South Africa as well and we know there is so much virus that's all across the U.S.

So, ideally, you have testing, quarantining, and contact tracing, isolation, all these measures for all kinds of travel happening within the U.S. as well.

COOPER: Yeah. Dr. Leana Wen, I appreciate it. Thanks.

WEN: Thank you.

COOPER: Up next, we return to the breaking news out of Nashville this Christmas Day. We speak with a reporter in Nashville who is all too familiar with the area impacted in today's explosion.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:48:45]

COOPER: Shattered glass, burnt sidewalks, massive debris, that is the scene right now in Nashville after a bomb exploded in what authorities are calling an intentional incident. Still no clarity on who or exactly an individual or individuals were behind the massive explosion.

Yihyun Jeong is a political reporter for "The Tennessean". She joins us now from Nashville.

What have you seen where you are?

YIHYUN JEONG, POLITICAL REPORTER, THE TENNESSEAN: Yeah, I mean, like you said, we're seeing a lot of shattered glass, damaged buildings, all on the sidewalk, we're seeing bricks and debris from the buildings. You know, for a while, there was some water in the streets with the water coming down into the buildings. Because fire alarms are going off, and you know, it's a historic, you know, district there along this path on lower Broadway part of Nashville for people who visit here. And right now, it's completely different from what we know.

COOPER: Is it clear at this point? You know, the police have talked about there were reports about shots fired, which is what drew officers to that location, when they then discovered this RV with this recording.

Are you aware at this point of exactly how they were told there were shots fired? Was it a 911 call? Is it believed it could have been from the person involved or persons involved in this?

[16:50:01]

Or was it from civilians who heard, you know, just live nearby? Do you know?

JEONG: Yeah, you know, along this district, there's a lot of apartment buildings and lofts on top of the businesses and a few people called 911, you know, reporting shots fired. And so it's still unclear, you know, where that sound came from. You know, I think the idea is that, you know, it might have either been part of the recording as part of this warning that came from the RV or there could have been shots fired in the area. At this point, police say there have been no evidence of that. And so,

when police arrived to the scene, they're responding to the shots fired, they didn't see that, but instead they saw this RV and it started playing this recording saying this is a bomb. You need to evacuate now.

So at that point, they started going door to door, trying to get people out of the area, including one gentleman who had a dog walking down the street, and so that 15-minute countdown to this explosion going off really gave authorities the time to clear the area and potentially save lives here.

COOPER: And this area of the city where the bomb went off, it's the historic district, downtown. A lot of people have already said this, but obviously, Christmas morning at 6:32 a.m., which is when the device is reported to have gone off, not a lot of people around.

JEONG: Yeah. I think a lot of people are coming to that idea that had this not been Christmas morning, it would have been a lot worse. I mean, even on any given early morning, that area could be busy. Again, it's right alongside lower Broadway, which is a huge tourist attraction. And there are times where people are still hanging out early into the early mornings, you know?

So, had it not been Christmas, there could have been more potential for injuries here.

COOPER: Yihyun Jeong, I appreciate your time. Thank you.

JEONG: Thank you.

COOPER: I want to bring back CNN security correspondent Josh Campbell.

Josh, what are the questions outstanding for you, you think, in this investigation at this stage?

JOSH CAMPBELL, CNN SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, first question is the location of the person that was responsible for this. The last we heard from police in talking with our sources is they don't know if this individual perished in the explosion, if there was someone inside that RV, or if this was detonated remotely and the person is now out there on the run.

We're being told they're treating it as both variants there. They're obviously processing the scene, but then also, they have this massive manhunt under way checking with witnesses, checking with CCTV, in and around that area, just in case. They're trying to identify that person.

Of course, these investigations go hand in hand. Once they're able to process this vehicle and try to get any type of identifying information off that vehicle, that may then lead them to that person as well. So a big question there, and then obviously, the largest question, you know, that we have is the motivation. This is one source has called so bizarre and baffling because you obviously have an explosion. A very violent act, but it was telegraphed. You had police arriving and hearing this recording going off, telling

people, warning them there was a bomb that was about to explode. Which is not something that you would typically do if your goal is to cause mass loss of life, so a huge question there on the motivation.

COOPER: You said individual. Is it clear that -- at this point, there could be multiple people involved in this, no?

CAMPBELL: Yeah, that's right. And authorities aren't going to rule that out. They're not going to just look at one person. This is just like any terrorism investigation. It could be a network. It could be one person. They're very much in the early stages, but again, processing the scene.

And once they answer the question about whether they find some type of human remains or something there and try to process that, that's also a key component. Just right now, there's so many questions for them.

And they're not leaving anything to chance. We have seen incidents in the past where someone will commit a violent act and then flee. That's why you have the FBI with this massive network where they can look in the state of Tennessee, but in and around that area. The law enforcement in and around that region is part of this and will be called in as needed in order to try to provide any tips they can.

COOPER: You know, the vice mayor we talked to earlier was saying it was a female voice on the recording coming from the RV. Saying evacuate now, evacuate the area, saying there was an explosive device. Interesting that it would be a female voice, I don't know what to make of it. Whether that person is involved in this in some way or if it was some sort of automated -- I mean, I'm not really sure what to make of it.

CAMPBELL: Yeah, I can tell you having listened to some of the videos that are out there on social media that we have not cleared ourselves, this is not something that we are independently confirming, but one of the voices that was heard on one video that appears to be from the scene sounds like an automated female voice. Now, we don't know if that's connected with that, we're still trying to clear that.

But we did hear from authorities there was this recording, and as you mentioned, the mayor said that was a female, so that could be one and the same. But trying to get into the mindset of someone who would conduct an attack like this.

[16:55:00]

Let's call it what it is, a violent explosion going off in a downtown city street -- trying to get in that mind set of why you would warn people, what the motivation is, and maybe if it is automated, the person didn't want his or her voice to be used. Many more questions there.

I will say, Anderson, that I think, and I'm saying this all day since we've been reporting on this, I think it's only a matter of time. We'll probably learn soon the identity of this person, because unlike, I know you have covered war zones and bombings as well. This isn't a bomb left on the side of the street or in a bag somewhere. They are tying this device to a vehicle which is so simple these days for law enforcement to track. The providence of that vehicle, whether it's a rental or whether it's owned by someone, by the unique identifying numbers that are on a vehicle, so I think it's just a matter of time.

And unless you have investigators doing this full court press to try to identify this person and bring them into custody.

COOPER: Yeah, definitely sounds that way.

Josh Campbell, I appreciate it. We'll continue to check in with you.

Still ahead, we go live to Nashville where officials have released an image of the RV that Josh was talking about. There it is. It is obviously now at the center of the massive explosion investigation.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

COOPER: Good afternoon. I'm Anderson Cooper with more breaking developments on the Christmas Day explosion in downtown Nashville, an intentional act, according to local law enforcement.

Authorities have not identified a suspect or suspects yet or indicated a motive. We're awaiting the next update from officials.