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Hospitals Struggle Under Weight of Unvaccinated COVID-19 Patients; FBI Report Shows Murder Rate in U.S. Jumped Nearly 30 Percent in 2020; United Airlines Delays Parts of Vaccine Mandate as Lawsuit Proceeds. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired September 27, 2021 - 10:30   ET

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

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: advisers will be looking at that as well.

[10:30:02]

Jim, Erica?

ERICA HILL: Lots to look out, lots of parents waiting for any update that we can get. Elizabeth, good to see you, thank you.

Well, over the past several months, it's clearly become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, as we have heard and, frankly, seen in the numbers. The most recent surge putting hospitals under pressure once again, causing to go on what is known as a diversion. That's where ambulances might be diverted away from hospitals that are at capacity.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the trickle-down effect that beds full of unvaccinated COVID patients has on everyone from other patients to the staff at his very own hospital, Grady Memorial.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: How unusual is what we're experiencing right now?

DR. ROBERT JANSEN, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, GRADY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL: So this is very unusual.

GUPTA (voice over): Grady Memorial Hospital, this is the hospital where I work, where I've been a neurosurgeon now for more than 20 years. It's a level-one trauma center, and I can tell you there's almost nothing a hospital like this can't handle.

JANSEN: There was one Sunday evening, there were 27 gunshot victims brought to Grady within the span of a couple of hours, 27. We didn't go on diversion then.

GUPTA: But take a pandemic and a bunch of unvaccinated people.

JANSEN: Right, we can't do it now.

GUPTA: Diversion is just what it sounds like. You have to divert patients away. It's something Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Jansen never wants to happen. But the thing is COVID-19 has changed everything here.

JANSEN: It's a 20-bed unit. This morning, we had 14 COVID patients just on this unit alone.

GUPTA: Up in the intensive care unit, it's almost eerily quiet. There's no indication of the tremendous suffering that's happening behind closed doors. These yellow bags are full of PPE, and everyone knows those are the rooms with COVID patients.

How much of what you're seeing is truly due to the unvaccinated?

JANSEN: 95 percent of our patients are unvaccinated.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's more challenging than the first COVID wave we had because it seems like this variant is quick.

JANSEN: This is the board we use in the GCC to help coordinate ambulances.

GUPTA: We're now in the Georgia Coordinating Center. This is where they work moment to moment trying to decide where ambulances can actually take patients.

JANSEN: If it's red, that means they're full, basically. And so there are occasions when they're made to wait without taking the patient inside. It's called on the wall, where they're actually kept outside of the emergency room with the patient in the back of the ambulance waiting to be able to go inside. We don't allow that here.

GUPTA: Even if you're vaccinated and you've done all the right things, because of this pandemic now and the unvaccinated, it affects you.

JANSEN: Well, it is. We talked delaying surgery because we don't have a place to put you after the operation. That is a consequence of this pandemic and related directly to the lack of vaccination.

GUPTA: And it's when hospitals are on diversion that the toughest decisions of all need to be made, who gets treated, who doesn't.

What's the practical impact on me, as I was driving here, if I got in a car accident?

JANSEN: We do still take care of anybody who comes. So, what we've had to do is cancel patients that would require hospitalization following surgery. And even now, we've canceled other patients who would require hospitalization. The downstream effect that has on the patients is devastating at times.

Every morning, I come in and go through every COVID patient, determine who's on ventilators, I have to report the deaths.

GUPTA: Even as we're talking, we learned that someone passed away around the corner. JANSEN: Yes. Unfortunately, it's a daily event.

GUPTA: How frustrating is all this for you?

JANSEN: Well, personally it's frustrating, but what I worry about is our staff.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just the natural humanistic part of you that says how much more can you take. But when it's in your heart to care, you keep coming. You keep coming.

GUPTA: Keep coming, because that's exactly what the virus will do.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, Atlanta.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HILL: Such an important perspective. Our thanks to Sanjay for that reporting.

Up next, homicide rates jumping nearly 30 percent in one year. What we're learning from FBI data just released in the last hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:35:00]

HILL: Four students in Pennsylvania have been charged with plotting an attack on their high school on the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre. That anniversary is in 2024. Two of the students have been charged as adults. Court documents show police found Molotov cocktails, drawings of pipe bombs and a list of guns in the home of one. Residents of the community are shocked.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LORI ALBANO, GRANDPARENT OF DUNMORE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: When I saw it on the news flash on the phone, I was like, no, this can't be real. It's terrible for 15-year-olds to be planning to actually murder people. It's just beyond belief.

[10:40:00]

And she's very upset about it. And I'm sure all the moms are going to need to talk to somebody about it. It doesn't happen right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: The teens constructed their plans over a group chat, which was named Natural Born Killers.

SCIUTTO: Wow. Well, This hour, the FBI has released new statistics on the country's crime rates. The collected data show that in 2020, the murder rate jumped almost 30 percent from the previous year, 2019. That a record increase since reporting began in 1960. While the numbers are on a downward trend from the highs of the 1990s, the increase in violent crime over the last couple of years is still extremely concerning.

Joining me now with a closer look at the data, CNN's Jessica Schneider.

So, what did you find?

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Jim. So, this is from the Uniform Crime report. This is put out by the FBI. It's the most official and standardized crime data collection in the country. And what it shows is the startling stat you mentioned, the murder rate way up in 2020. It details a 29.4 percent rise from 2019. Now, specifically, there were more than 21,000 murders nationwide last year and the numbers really spiked last summer, peaking in June and July 2020.

Now, this report, it also shows a 5 percent increase in violent crime between 2019 and 2020. But, of course, when you look at 2020, it was a very volatile year. We were at the height of the pandemic and, of course, there was social unrest that was unfolding across the country, specifically that summer.

And what we're seeing is that increase in homicides, it actually appears to be rooted in a spike of gun violence. 77 percent of the reported murders in 2020 were committed with a gun. That was up three points from the year before and actually up from 67 percent a decade ago.

But there is good news to report here. The overall crimes reported by the FBI, it actually decreased about 6 percent between 2019 and 2020. And what's important to note here is that law enforcement agencies actually are not required to submit their data. The stats in that sense are somewhat incomplete. And this report saw a participation rate of 85 percent.

Notably, the way the FBI collects data is changing this year. It's a new system that's expected to give more detail about a wider array of crimes. But, Jim, there might actually be already be hiccups because in gathering new data, the FBI hasn't actually gotten enough agencies to participate this year. They haven't been able to release the quarterly reports so far in 2021. So we'll see if agencies actually participate in a wider fashion here, even though they have to give more detailed stats about these crimes.

SCIUTTO: No question. We'll be watching closely. Jessica Schneider, thanks very much.

HILL: Joining me now to dig a little deeper, Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, he's a Professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis, and conducted a study examining crime in 34 cities for the National Commission on COVID-19 and criminal justice. Good to have you with us.

So, these statistics we saw in this report from the FBI, as Jessica noted, this is really the most official accounting of what we have but it is not fully complete because not all agencies have to participate, about 85 percent as we know. What's your take in your first look here? It seems to line up pretty closely with what you found.

RICHARD ROSENFELD, CRIMINOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI- ST. LOUIS: Yes. It does. There are two stories that emerge from the recent release of the FBI crime data. One is, as has been noted, a record increase in homicide, close to 30 percent in a single year. No year has recorded an increase of that magnitude since we've been counting, aggravated assaults, which are serious assaults that can produce serious bodily injury or committed with a deadly weapon, up 12 percent.

But not all violent crimes went up. Robbery rates, for example, were down 10 percent. And property crime rates, burglaries, larcenies, they were down 8 percent. So, it's a mixed bag. Quite obviously, homicide is the most serious crime. Fortunately, it's also the rarest crime. That's one takeaway.

A second takeaway not included in the FBI data is that it appears by my own studies and studies by others that the homicide increase has been subsiding this year. January through June in my own work, we see a 16 percent increase in homicide over the same period previous year. That's obviously very troubling, but it's not as high as the increase we saw in 2020.

HILL: So, in your research -- can I stop you there?

ROSENFELD: Sure.

HILL: In your research, as you note, it's still an increase but not as much as you've seen in the past. So, what do you attribute that to? If it's, I don't know that better is the right word, 16 percent is still a lot to see in terms of an increase.

[10:45:00]

ROSENFELD: It is.

HILL: But not as bad as you point out. Why?

ROSENFELD: Right. Well, it's already been pointed out that the increase, the record increase we saw last summer coincided with widespread social unrest about police violence after the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis, and it coincided quite obviously with the pandemic. The pandemic with fits and starts may be subsiding, and the social unrest we saw last summer has also subsided, at least for now. And for those reasons, it seems to me we're seeing some slowdown in the homicide increase.

HILL: You noted in some of your findings that urgent action was required in terms of the rates of homicide, saying, enacting needed police reforms will be essential. Specifically, what type of reforms do you think are essential here?

ROSENFELD: I think two types are essential. One is to increase the account accountability of police officers who've been shown to engage in serious misconduct, accountability before their own agencies and the law.

Secondly is to move from police departments' activities that are better handled by other agencies, being the frontline responder to drug overdose, for example, in most cases that's not, it seems to me, what we want our police departments to be addressing right now. Other agencies trained in medical emergency services are better able to handle those calls. Responding to the day-to-day problems of the homeless is better done it seems to me in most cases by agencies whose personnel are trained in crisis intervention.

So, moving from the police department activities better handled by others enables police departments to focus on the immediate and important issue of the increase in violence we've seen.

HILL: Really quickly, for the first time in decades, the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, telling CNN exclusively about a month ago, when talking about gun violence specifically, that this is a serious public health threat. We know the CDC is restarting some of that funding, some of this research. Will looking at the root causes of gun violence, do you think now, make a difference moving forward?

ROSENFELD: Absolutely. We have to look at the underlying causes of violence generally and firearm violence in particular. One clear problem in that regard is the sheer quantity of firearms available for misuse in our society. There's good evidence that firearm carrying in our major cities went up last year. And as more people carry firearms, more people will be shot and more will die.

The other root causes though are just as important, and that's persistent poverty and joblessness in our most vulnerable communities and in particular those communities that have been hit hard by the COVID pandemic. So, we have to (INAUDIBLE) along those lines.

HILL: A lot to address. It has been politicized in many ways but tough to ignore when in 2016, the American Medical Association gun violence is caused a public health crisis. Richard Rosenfeld, I appreciate you joining us today. Thank you.

ROSENFELD: Thank you.

HILL: Well, United Airlines told its employees to get vaccinated or risk losing your job. Now, the company is being sued in federal court by six workers who don't want the shot. We've got details and next steps coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:00]

SCIUTTO: Well, United Airlines is now delaying fully implementing its vaccine mandate after it reached a temporary deal with several employees how are suing over that mandate.

HILL: CNN Aviation Correspondent Pete Muntean following these developments for us. So, what are the terms of this deal, this agreement, Pete? PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Well, Erica, it's a small but vocal minority pushing back against United Airlines' vaccine mandate. Remember, today is the day that United Airlines employees have to get at least one shot of the coronavirus vaccine or face getting fired. United says the separation process would begin tomorrow.

But now because of this case in federal court in Texas, employees who have requested a religious exemption by August 31st have an extra ten days before they begin to get fired. That is because of this case, Mark Paoletta is the attorney representing these six plaintiffs, and he says, we are pleased under the threat of a temporary restraining order that United has postponed its heartless and unlawful vaccine mandate. But just to clarify, nothing has changed company-wide and United says it will continue to vigorously defend its vaccine mandate.

97 percent of United Airlines employees have uploaded to United's health database at least one shot of the coronavirus vaccine, 67,000 employees in the United States right now under this mandate. United says it is proof that these vaccine mandates work. But the bottom line here is it's just a small group who have at least a little extra time to get vaccinated and push back against this because of this case in federal court.

[10:55:00]

SCIUTTO: No question. Do we know, Pete, how long this is delayed or put on the shelf?

MUNTEAN: October 8th is when the next hearing on this is scheduled. So, we will see then what happens after this next hearing. This could get pushed back further. There could be a temporary restraining order, or nothing could happen and these employees ultimately have to get vaccinated or face getting fired by United.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Well, 97 percent, pretty high as well. Pete Muntean, thank so much.

And thanks so much to all of you for joining us on this Monday. It's going to be a busy week. We'll be there for it. I'm Jim Sciutto.

HILL: That it will be. I'm Erica Hill.

At This Hour with Kate Bolduan starts after this break. Stay with us.

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[11:00:00]

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN AT THIS HOUR: Hello, everyone, I'm Kate Bolduan.