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tv   MSNBC Live With Craig Melvin  MSNBC  May 13, 2020 8:00am-9:00am PDT

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a good wednesday morning to you. craig melvin here let's start the hour by getting you caught up on the latest facts. right now we're closing in on 1.4 million known cases of coronavirus in our country. so far we've lost more than 83,000 americans. 30 minutes from now new york governor andrew cuomo will give his daily briefing. also this morning we're learning that the nation's top health experts in the white house have not exactly been on the same page when it comes to reopening the country. we're going to dig into some new nbc news reporting, all the
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warning signs that president trump has reportedly been ignoring. we have dr. lipi roy with us. we'll come to you in just a second. we have our reporters spread out all over the nation as states continue to push awhed the phased reopenings. we start this morning in california. that is where beaches in los angeles county are reopening today with restrictions. but los angeles county's public health director is signaling that the stay-at-home order there will be extended for the next three months, ultimately reopening and preventing outbreaks will come down to testing and tracing. so in pasadena, just outside los angeles health officials have put contact tracing into action. they've done it with some positive results as well. nbc's steve patterson is outside the pasadena health department. steve in pasadena we're seeing one of the first examples of how
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this contact tracing we've been talking about can be effective. so far can we tell whether it's working? >> reporter: craig, we got a really good look at the mechanics of how contract tracing works here at the city of pasadena health department. inside here there's probably about 20 people that have come to work that will be on the phone for about eight hours a day, seven days a week. they're identifying people covid positive, contacting anybody that may have come in contact with that person so they can lock the potential outbreaks down where it starts. that was put into practice. here in pasadena there was a party, unsanctioned, in close space, about 30 or 40 people at this birthday party. there authorities got wind that one woman was coughing, joking about the coronavirus. it turns out they identified that she did have it. they were able to contact people who came in contact with her,
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and they were able to find that there were at least half a dozen more cases of the coronavirus stemming from that one incident. that is the example of the power of contact tracing, why it's so effective, why we're hearing so much about it. we spoke to the lead doctor here and got a little more insight on the mechanics of how exactly it works. listen to this. >> we started before this pandemic with about three tracers, and we expanded to 25. this is a boots on the ground, old school case investigation, contact tracing operation, seven days a week. we have dozens of people working to get a list of individuals, call them, interview them, and then we do it again until we can track down where they were in contact with somebody who is symptomatic. >> reporter: that also led to a city-wide message of, we cannot have this, any hint of
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reopenings. reopenings are why contact tracers are so important. they're scaling this up to the state level. the governor wants some 20,000 tracers by the end of this thing to continue the phases of reopening and to ensure that they're able to do that smoothly. it's all going to depend on the clarity of the data and those phased reopenings will take a lot of data and a lot of people willing to put the work in, craig. >> steve patterson, thank you for that. across the state border from california in nevada, dine-in restauran restaurants, hair salons, they reopened. casinos are still closesed. but that could soon change. i recently talked to mgm resorts international acting ceo. he told me his company has a plan for reopening their properties. >> safety for our employees, for our customers is paramount. as relates to the employees, we will test them coming in. it's not mandatory, it's
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discretionary. we'll test all employees coming back to work and do daily screening tests. it's not perfect, but look, we've taken a lot of guidance from medical experts both from the cdc on through. >> there's larger uncertainty about what's next, though. that uncertainty brought quite the caravan of cars filled with members of the culinary union to the vegas strip, calling for more trance spare see from all casinos about how they plan to keep workers and visitors safe. nbc's gadi schwartz is in vegas. he talked to some of those workers. gadi is there on the strip. i recognize that location well. what are the main concerns that you're hearing from those workers, gadi? what are we learning about how casinos plan to keep themself? >> reporter: craig, some of those workers saw the seven-point plan laid out by mgm and heard the interview you did with the ceo.
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they said that is a good start but want to see detailed plans from every casino before reopening las vegas. they gathered together about 1,000 cars, totally overwhelming at their small parking lot at the union headquarters, and then they headed down here to the strip. that's where all of a sudden those thousand cars looked very, very small. it didn't even make a dent in the 'em itiness you feel on the strip. they were honking their horns and hoping for that transparency. they want to know how the casinos are going to keep them safe and keep their customers safe when all this returns back to normal. here is some of what they had to say. >> yeah, i'm nervous, but i don't want to gamble with my safety by going back to a casino that i may lose my life at or get sick or pass it on to a guest. >> what are you hoping happens? >> i hope -- as a worker,
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working 21 years at the paris, they treat us the right way when we go back, give us masks, gloves and what we deserve. >> reporter: craig, i just want to show you something that is very eerie out here. this is the paris. there is no one here. every time you're down here, you take a look and realize this was a city with every single detail built to try to attract people to come down to las vegas, and yet the people are not here. in fact, just a little while ago, we've seen people come out to the middle of the strip. they'll be driving a car -- you can see traffic is extremely light. here comes a car. just a little while ago, we had a car stop right about here. they got out of their car in the middle of the day and started taking pictures of all of these empty casinos because there was no one around. craig, a very eerie feeling out here. still no solid timeline on when
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the majority of these casinos will reopen. back to you. >> yeah, and you also have to wonder when folks will feel completely comfortable going back to those casinos. we're also going to spend some time talking about the choice that these workers are being forced to make, between their health and their paychecks. we'll do that in just a moment. gadi, thank you, by the way. before that, as some communities across the country continue to see the number of cases rise, president trump apparently is ignoring new guidance from the nation's top disease control experts about reopening. nbc's jonathan allen has been sifting through these documents, these new documents from the white house task force. mr. allen, walk us through what exactly officials are warning should happen. >> what we're hearing and seeing in these documents, craig, is that there are people on the task force -- in fact, the task forces broadly are saying there are still hot spots all over the country.
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it's not just new york and new jersey or coastal areas, but they're starting to see essentially brush fires, the president has called them embers all through out the midwest and in the south. at the same time, while they have completed, according to their own assessment, their rollout of handing off to the states, the task force basically still judges as a work in progress its ability to get personal protective equipment to the right places, its ability to get testing to the right places, to get diagnostics and laboratories for those tests. of course, there's no vaccine or known effective treatment. >> jonathan, maybe you can also clear up some confusion here with regards to some comments the president has made on twitter about whether the previous administration had left behind some sort of a blueprint. officials from the obama administration insist there had been a blueprint to deal with the pandemic.
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trump administration officials say no, there wasn't. do we know where the truth is? >> the truth is that there was, in fact, a pandemic plan left out for the trump administration at the end of the obama administration. in addition to that there have been long in place plans for national incident response, and all of them have metaphorically have been locked in a drawer for the last few years. i heard senate majority leader mitch mcconnell say that obama did nothing and left the stockpile bare. the senate majority leader is in charge of a body of congress that can direct money to buy things for the stockpile. there's a lot of finger-pointing going on right now from people in charge at the people who used to be in charge. a lot of it doesn't match up to the truth. >> jonathan allen, senior political analyst, thank you so much. businesses across this country, as we've been
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reporting, are, in fact, reopening. it leaves a lot of folks with a really tough choice. stay at home or go to work and earn a paycheck. many of the people facing that choice are already disproportionately affected by the crisis. reopening america doesn't come without risks. dr. anthony fauci giving congress this blunt assessment tuesday. >> there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery. >> restaurants, retail stores and salons all struggling with social distancing. inga bailey who owns a salon in dunwoody, georgia, says clients were eager for her to reopen. >> when the governor went on the news to make the announcement, within about 15 minutes i had about ten text messages. >> reporter: bailey is seeing
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one client at a time and disinfecting everything between appointments. for each appointment, staying six feet apart is nearly impossible. a recent study found that workers whose jobs don't allow for distancing are more likely to be lower paid, less likely to have a college degree and more likely to be non-white. >> as parts of the country start to reopen, why is it that certain communities are more at risk than others? >> some communities, black and brown in particular, are more susceptible to having preconditions. we also know those same communities lack public health infrastructure, places where people can actually go and receive treatment. >> reporter: a salon in atlanta -- >> 80% of the people hospitalized in the state of georgia were african-americans, and it's very difficult being a black business owner worrying about the age of our clients, the middle age -- >> reporter: they're spacing out clients, even taking appointments on the front porch.
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she's trying to take every precaution. >> i'm giving my employees a little leeway to let them come when they're ready. i'm not demanding anything. >> reporter: her employees say they're happy to be working again but still have concerns. >> if you have the means to not work until we have a vaccine, by all means do that. but there's some people that absolutely need to make money to provide for their families. >> if your employer says it's time to come back and you don't feel safe enough to do that, you really don't have an option, because depending on where you live, you risk losing unemployment benefits. without those, how are you going to support your family. >> reporter: mitchell love lays is piecing together money by selling masks. they used the last bit of money to buy a sewing machine after the restaurant they worked at as
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servers shut its doors. >> i don't want this to continue. i want to get back to work. i think most of america does as well. >> reporter: beale street usually packed with people this time of year, mitchell is hopeful they will return in time. >> if my wife didn't know how to sew, i don't know what we would have done, to be honest rsh a patchwork of solutions with and economy in tatters. >> reporter: in the time since we talked to mitchell, restaurants have been allowed to reopen in limited capacity allowing him and his wife to work a few hours in addition to selling the masks. let's turn to our doctor on duty this hour, dr. lipi roy, internal medicine physician and also an nbc news medical contributor. dr. roy, we've talked about this you and i, how this virus has disproportionately affected minority communities. now the reopening of the country is as well. as a medical professional, what can be done about it? >> good morning, craig.
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it's a problem building upon another problem, isn't it? you're absolutely right. we talked about how certain kmuntsz, particularly african-american communities and people of color, they are disproportionately impacted by chronic diseases. we know that mortality is higher amongst african-americans because of heart disease, stroke, cancer, pneumonia. and now many of these men and women, as your previous reporting just showed, are the ones that are these essential workers or people who cannot physically distance because of the nature of their job. so i want to make sure that people understand that these aren't too diametrically opposed concepts, the economy opening up and public safety. the two can happen, but it has to happen in a way that's safe for employees. what i would think would be the ideal situation would be that for every community to follow the guidance of their local and state public hlgt departments and those public health departments follow the
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guidelines of the federal bodies such as the cdc. you need widespread funding and education for that to happen. i'm optimistic, you put those plans in place, those public health measure, preventive measures, people can go back safely. >> one of my concerns continues to be that people who live paycheck to paycheck, and that's the majority of folks in this country, when, given the opportunity, even if they don't feel great but they're asymptomatic, they're going to go to work and they're going to infect either that customer or that co-worker next to them n, and we're going to be back to where all this started. i don't know what the solution is to that. but i do know there are a number of folks who were infected by people who should not have been at work but went to work because they couldn't afford to stay at home. something else out there is this perception -- this continued
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perception that the virus as a disease attacks your respiratory system. there's new reporting that shows it really does go after the entire body. how else does it affect people? what do we know about that? >> you're absolutely right, craig. as i've said to you before, we are quite literally learning something new every day about this novel coronavirus, and emphasize novel. unlike, say, influenza which we've known about for serntryes now, we are literally realtime learning about this virus. so, right, it's not even accurate to say it's -- maybe it's primarily a respiratory virus, but i assure you it is really attacking multiple organ systems in the body. i've written several articles now about how it has neurological manifestations, clotting. it's causing pulmonary emboli, strokes, causing clots in your legs. it's associated with myocarditis or inflammation of the heart. we are learning something every
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day. as you've already reported, this viral illness, inflammatory syndrome that's impacting children. to your previous point, craig, you're absolutely right that the transmission is also happening asymptomatically, so people like you and me could be feeling totally fine, be unaware that we're infected because of the lack of testing as well, and we can inadvertently being infecting other people. another reason to double down, cover your face and maintain that physical distance. that's the key. >> tuesday dr. fauci, as you know, he testified before the senate health committee. dr. fauci warned that reopening our country too soon could trigger another outbreak and the country doesn't have enough testing. explain for our viewers and our listeners on sirius satellite radio, dr. roy, why testing still has to increase even if the rate of new cases is decreasing.
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>> excellent question. dr. fauci is absolutely right. right now this idea that the total number of cases is decreasing, it depends on where you're talking about, right? it's very geographically dependent. we're going to see ebbs and flows in terms of where we're seeing outbreaks. a lot of that -- in fact, primarily it's going to be affected or determined by our behavior. again, there's an incubation period of two to 14 days. in areas where we're seeing people congregate where it be protests, beaches or parks, you need to wait a couple weeks before we see a rise in cases. the testing is important, craig. that's going to give us a baseline, give us a sense of the scope of the problem. i'd love if the testing showed we were mostly negative, but it may not show that. the testing, that's just one
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part of it. it's going to have to go hand in hand with contact tracing and isolating those cases from people and identifying their contacts. these are tried and true, longtime evidence-based measures that we've been using for decades, if not sentries in most of the world. americans just aren't as familiar with it. >> dr. lipi roy, our doctor on duty. do stand by, please. we have been talking a lot about funeral homes specifically and the struggles that last responders are seeing during this pandemic. not a career for everyone, but one miami funeral home director found it as his second calling. i'm talking about baseball hall of famer andre dawson, the hawk. his 49-homer season with the chicago cubs in 1987 helped earn him a spot in the hall of fame. andre dawson will join me next
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to talk about how this pandemic is affecting his business and the people he's trying to comfort in his grief. first, virologist and msnbc contributor joe safe fair shared he's in the hospital now as a patient fighting coronavirus. he tweeted this morning, quote, i'm on the other end of it but not out of the woods yet. please continue to social distance. i used max precautions but still managed to contract it. back as soon as i'm able, friends. we're with you, brother. we wish you a speedy recovery. i don't keep track of regrets and i don't add up the years,
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this has been a very hard time for anyone who has lost a loved one in this crisis. it's never easy, but the circumstances around this pandemic have made it even more difficult. people who work in a funeral home have to explain to grieving families that they may not be able to have that traditional funeral or burial. one of those people is andre dawson. if that name sounds familiar, it's because he also happens to be a baseball hall of famer. he played most of his career for the expos and the cubs. for the last 12 years he's owned the paradise memorial funeral home in miami, florida. he and his entire staff have seen a whole different side of
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this crisis. andre dawson joins me now. andre, first of all, thanks so much for your time. i know you're very busy. how are people coping now compared to what you're used to seeing? >> it's been very tough because peop people, they grieve and they mourn differently. by not being allowed to have the proper sendoff, it's very sad to sit and witness it. everybody is starting to adhere to what the policy is going forward. it's challenging in a sense because you look at it as you want to be as comforting and
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helpful to the process as you possibly can. but the protocol now going forward is you've got to place safety as a priority on both people and consider the staff at the funeral home and the mourners themselves. >> how has all of this chajsd how y changed how you and your staff provide comfort to family and friends who have died? >> well, the business is what it is. you always have a situation where you want to help them through the grieving process. that's what is first and foremost for us as a business. we want to make sure we alleviate going forward for them as much discomfort as possible. but the times are very trying and very challenging.
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as tough as it is for the families, it's very, very tough indeed for the business itself. wet continue to hold our own. situations and things change on a daily basis. this is what we signed up for. we've got to continue to put our best foot forward. our main focus and concern is to make sure that at the end of the day, the families know that we know that, we've given them our best effort. >> we've heard reports that a lot of funeral homes have been overwhelmed right now, especially there in florida. what are you experiencing? >> well, the good thing -- of
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which four have been cremations. we have one that's going to be a service in a couple of weeks. we just treat -- people passing in their homes. we don't know whether they've been tested or not, whether they have the disease or not. you've got to use extra precaution, magnify the precaution and treat that as if it was a covid case even though it may not be a covid case. we take very, very, very strong precaution from this point going forward because, again, we have to stress as much safety as we possibly can. >> hall of fame baseball player andre dawson for us there in florida, owns a funeral home there now. good to see you, hawk. thanks so much for your time. we do appreciate you. good luck to you, best of luck.
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it's also good to know that hall of famers have wi-fi issues, just like me and you. we are waiting for new york governor andrew cuomo to start the daily update. he's been a focus of some of the president's harshest criticism during this pandemic. the governor is out with a new op-ed in "the washington post" saying d.c. is stuck on repeat and putting big corporations ahead of american workers. expect to hear more about that when governor cuomo gets started in just a moment. first, it is a plan to help people hurting in this pandemic that could make history. house democrats are pushing for another $3 trillion in relief aid, but will struggling americans ever see a second round of checks? >> i think everybody is affected by this, but when you're the little guy and you might think -- we thought we would be okay for a couple of months, and
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it's scary to see how your bank account dwindles so quickly. >> i filed for unemployment but filed through new jersey, and they have a big backlog. i still haven't had my claim processed. there's job postings going up and i've been applying. i haven't had any callbacks yet. it's been about a month. how about no no uh uh, no way come on, no no n-n-n-no-no only discover has no annual fee on any card.
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>> the national experts are talking about when they say you could have an outbreak that you couldn't recover from. the increase, the incline is very fast. the virus travels very quickly, and then getting control of the outbreak is much slower and here in new york, we see how fast and how many days of super effort by new yorkers it took to get that spread under control and to reduce the rate of new cases. the number of lives lost still painfully and tragically high. these are not numbers. these are families. these are lost individuals. they're fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, 166
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families are in pain today, and they are in our thoughts and prayers. when you look at where we are tod today, talk about where we were when we started this terrible situation. we have hopefully come through worse. we paid a heck of a price for it. but we've come through the worse. one of the things we've been very diligent in doing is taking care of our essential workers. we owe them. there's still a right thing in life and a wrong thing. there's still obligation and gratitude and the essential workers we owe. we closed down everything, we communicated how important it was to do that, how deadly this virus was, and then we told the essential workers, but you have to show up tomorrow, even though this is a deadly virus. we need you to show up, nurses, doctors, transit workers, police
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officers. we need you to go to work while everybody else can stay home and try to be safe. they made a tremendous sacrifice, and i asked them to do it myself, day after day. i told them we would do everything we needed to do to protect them. we've been doing testing of the essential workers to see if we have a problem anywhere. and good news has been the front line workers are testing at lower rates than the general populati population. so downstate new york, the transit workers tested about 14% of the overall number, tested positive. that's compared to new york city where about 19.9% of the general population. the health care workers, 12%.
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think about that, nurses, doctors, in emergency rooms, 12%. you know what that means? that means ppe works. masks work, glove work, hand sanitizing works. how do health care workers have a lower percentage of infection than the general population? because people don't wear these at home and they don't take the same precautions. nypd, 10%, we then sampled the new york state police who have been doing extraordinary work. we sampled 2,700 which is a large sample of the state police. only 3% tested positive. that's the population in upstate new york of about 12%. that's also very good news. then we tested the people who work at docs, department of corrections services.
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prisons, we've been very careful. prisons you have a congregate population. wherever you have those gatherings, that's where we see the virus spread. so we did a test of those people who work at the department of corrections, primarily corrections officials. we sampled over 3,000, 7.5%, again, below the general population rate. so that should give us all some peace of mind that the essential workers were out there, they're doing fantastic work for us and we've made sure they were protected in doing the work that they're doing. all the front line workers, public service, front line workers, tested below the general population. so we should feel good about that. also i want people to know that's elective surgeries are going to start in 12 more counties. that's important. we stopped elective surgeries so we had additional hospital
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capacity for covid patients. but as the number of covid cases has come down, we can restart elective surgeries, also ambulatory services, so that is good news. a lot of attention on reopening now. we're doing something in this state that no other state is doing. we are doing the most transparent discussion and reopening operation of any state. why? because it only works if people understand it and if people are part of it. this is not a government exercise that we're doing here. this is a social exercise. the 19 million people of new york state are doing this. the best i can do is give them the information.
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i believe in them and i believe the people, and i believe when they have the right information and they trust the information and they know the information is factual as opposed to some kind of political jargon, they will do the right thing and they have. that's how we bnd that curve and flatten that curve. same thing on reopening. you will know exactly what is happening in your region, in your county. you'll know the facts. you'll know the numbers on a daily basis, and you'll know what we're doing. we heard testimony yesterday from the national experts, dr. fauci, who warns of suffering in death if the u.s. reopens too soon. if you reopen the economy too soon, people are not taking the precautions. you have gatherings, the virus will transfer and you'll see a spike in hospitalizations and you'll see a spike in deaths.
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okay. what's the key in that expression? the key is too soon. if you open too soon. all right. what does that mean, "too soon?" too soon means you're increasing activity at a rate that the hospital system cannot handle, and people are not taking the right precautions. that's what too soon means. okay. how do we calibrate too soon? you can measure exactly what you are doing. the red valve is the reopening valve. you start the reopening valve. activity increases. you're doing diagnostic testing. are you positive? are you negative? you watch that rate. you're doing antibody testing which tells you home people were infected, and you watch that rate. you know on a day-to-day basis
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now how many people are walking into the hospital with covid. we have those numbers. never had them before. we have them now. you watch that rate every day, and if you watch those rates, you know how fast the virus is spreading, what they call the rate of transmission, the rt. so too soon, watch the numbers, watch the measures. there is a science to this. that has to be watched in every county in every region and it has to be monitored, and you see those numbers starting to move. you'll know if you're reopening too soon and people aren't taking precautions and you see the virus spreading .
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so give the information to the people. that's what i've been trying to do from day one. government can't do any of this. this is a function of the actions of every individual and every family. we'll have a regional control group for every region in the state. watch those numbers every day. make sure those businesses are complying. make sure people are complying and watch it day to day and you'll know if the activity is increasing to a level that is increasing the rate of transmission. act accordingly. that has to be done on a region-by-region basis. also, with this virus we must stay alert because we're still learning. what we thought we knew doesn't always turn out to be true. this virus has been ahead of us
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every step of the way in this country. when we first started with this virus we were told it was coming from china, wuhan province, it came from china and it's going to come from china now to the united states. it turns out it didn't come from china to the united states. it did in some parts of the country, but the east coast, it turns out it came from europe. i talk to everyone all day long, the beginning of this, nobody ever said it's coming from europe. we had 2 million europeans come to new york, new jersey, the big airports, international airport, jfk, and no one knew it was coming from europe because it had gone from china to europe and it gets here from europe. no one knew. when this started -- once you have the virus, you have antibodies and then you're immune from further infection.
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that was stated as a fact. now it turns out maybe you're not immune even if you had it. maybe you have some immunity, but not total immunity. we're not sure. okay. then we were told children are not affected by the covid virus. great. sigh of relief. less than 1% of new yorkers hospitalized are under 20 years old. now we're finding out that may not be 100% accurate either because now we're seeing cases -- the department of health is investigating, and new york is in many ways the tip of the arrow here, looking at 102 cases where children who may have been infected with the
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covid virus show symptoms of an inflammatory disease like kawasaki disease or toxic shock-like syndrome. we have lost three children in new york because of this. 5-year-old boy, 7-year-old boy and an 18-year-old girl. these cases are all across the state, predominantly where the population is. 60% of these children tested positive for the covid virus. 40% tested positive for the antibodies of the covid virus. that means children either currently had the virus or could have had it several weeks ago and now have the antibodies saying that they had the virus and they recovered from the virus. 70% of the cases went into icu
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which means they're serious. when you go into intensive care, that means it's serious. 19% resulted in intubation which means very serious. 43% of the cases are still hospitalized. on the age, when they say children, it's across the boards. it can be under 1 year old, it can be up to 20, 21 years old. majority 5 years old to 14 years old. it affects children of all races. and it's not just in new york. the department of health sent an alert to 49 other states. dr. zucker has been leading this conversation nationwide. 14 other states are now investigating cases in their state for possible inflammatory disease for children related to
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covid. five european countries are now looking at this. because it happened after the fact and does not present as a normal covid case, it may not have been initially diagnosed as a covid case. covid cases are normally respirato respiratory. this is not predominantly respiratory. it's an inflammation of the blood vessels which could affect the hearted. it's more of a cardiac case than a respiratory case which is a new manifestation of the covid virus. department of health is very aggressive in doing the investigation and talking to other states, countries about what they may have learned, partnering with rockefeller university and the new york genome center to see if there's anything in the dna of these cases, but parents have to be aware of this.
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the predominant signs, fever, abdominal pain, skin rash. other symptoms, change in skin color, difficulty feeding, trouble breathing, racing heart, health gentlem health /* lethargy, irritability. harder for a parent to know exactly what they've been dealing with. if your child has been exposed to someone who had covid, even if it was several weeks ago, that is a special alert in this situation. the department of health has told the hospitals in the state to prioritize covid testing for children who come in with any of these situations. if you want more information, this is the health site to go to. as a parent, i can tell you this
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is a parent's worse nightmare, right? to have a child, we thought that children would not -- were not especially affected by the virus and now to find out they might be and it might be several weeks later, this is truly disturbing. we raise it because it's something that parents should be aware of. we're still finding out more about it. we're working very aggressively. the more we know, the more we will communicate. for now everything we know is on that website. parents say, should i be concerned? you should be aware. you should be aware. first job is to protect our children. my baby is 22. not really a baby anymore she likes to tell me. this is theoretically 21 and below. she's 22. maybe i have nothing to worry
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about. but i still worry. because that's what you do as a parent, you worry. i tried to get her up to come with me today. you think you have any power in life, try to get a 22-year-old out of bed at 7:30 in the morning, and you will quickly come down to earth about any expectation of anything. but go to the website in the meantime. new york state, i'm proud of what our people have done. and we're proceeding with caution and with intelligence. we also need help from washington. i understand the federal government has said it's up to the states, it's up to the governors, great. but we need help to make this happen. and we need help from washington. i think the decision or realization that it should be done state by state makes sense. but it doesn't mean the states are on their own either. and we need federal legislation. we need what's called state and
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local aid. our state budget, our state economy has suffered. we have a significant funding gap and states need assistance. new york has about a $61 billion funding gap, which is a very, very serious funding gap. who does the state fund? if we don't have funds in our budgets, what does it mean? states fund local governments. we fund police, firefighters and schools. if our budget doesn't work, who gets cut? police, firefighters, schools, local governments. the very people who we need to fight this virus and the very people who we all call the essential workers and heroes who have been doing a great job. how do we not give them support for what they need. everybody says the key is testing. the key is testing.
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by the way, this is a tremendous operation to put in place. this will be millions of tests in new york. tracing, never been done before this to extent. it will be thousands of people who have to do tracing. we need funding for that. the washington bill should finally provide an economic stimulus that helps your nation rebuild. every president has talked about roads with structures, airports, the bridges have fallen, the rea roads are crumbling, our country doesn't build airports anymore, which it doesn't. we're building a new airport downstate, laguardia airport, first new airport in this country in 25 years. how can that be? we fly around the world and everybody's airport looks amazing. it's like a shopping mall, hotel, entertainment complex and
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you come to an airport in this country, you need to stimulus the economy. you need to create jobs. do what every president has said but none has done. the bill that was introduced yesterday has something very important to many states. it repeals what is called s.a.l.t., state and local tax did he deduction. this was a tax change made two years ago, three years ago in washington. it increases the taxes of homeowners in certain states. new york is one of them. it cost new york state about $28 billion per year. state of massachusetts, $11.8 billion per year. it also affects new jersey, connecticut, maryland. that is repealed in this bill that the house put in. that's the single best piece of
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action for the state of new york. and we have representatives who know this very well and representatives lowey and neale, i applaud them for putting in. but the only thing that matters is what's in the final billing. but national good news for this bill. the need for state and local aid, this is not a democratic/republican issue. you have democratic governors. republican governors. all governors will say they need assistance from the federal government. the governors work together in an organization called national governors association, nga. the chairman is a republican, republic hogan from maryland. i'm the vice chairman. governor hogan and i did a joint
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statement on behalf of all of the governors saying we understand what we have to do, we are prepared to do it but we need help from washington and we need that state and local funding. so this is not a partisan issue. something else that washington has to do, which is very important. special interests always rear their ugly head. and these bills are coming out of washington, they have a lot of funding to get the economy running. a lot of money for big businesses and a lot of money for millionaires and a lot of money for large corporations. i fear what is going to happen is that corporations are going to use this pandemic as an excuse to lay off workers. they're already telling analysts that their profits are going to go up because they're going to reduce their payroll. so you'll have americans who are
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now out of work, would think they're going to get their job back. but the corporation is going to announce -- by the way, we don't need all of those employees back. we're going to reduce our number of employees. and you'll see layoffs for americans. we went through this before. 2008, we had the mortgage fraud economic catastrophe, right? and we bailed out the banks. i was attorney general at the time. so many banks took the bailout from taxpayers and then gave themselves bonuses. or gave their employees bonuses with taxpayer dollars. and as attorney general, i had to bring actions against these corporations to get the money back. how absurd they create a financial catastrophe in 2008
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because of these mortgage scams and mortgage frauds, taxpayers bail out the corporation, they turn around and use the money to give themselves a fat paycheck. when they're the ones who caused the problem in the first place. so we made this mistake before. we can't make this mistake again. i did an op-ed today in "the washington post" that speaks just to this, you want to provide subsidies to corporations, i understand that. make sure the subsidies are tied to worker protections. very simple, if a corporation gets a check from the government, that corporation must not lay off any workers. have the same number of workers after the pandemic that you had before the pandemic. and don't think taxpayers are going to subsidize you, mr. corporation, so you can then lay off workers. and the taxpayers can then pay for that.
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i call it the americans first law. no corporate bailout if you're going to lay off workers, and it's going to be introduced by members of the new york congressional delegation. and i'm very proud of them for their leadership. if we get that washington bill passed, then it's going to make a significant difference because it's going to give states the ability to do what they need to do to reopen. we can take it from there, because we are new york tough, which is new york tough and smart and united and disciplined and tough enough to love. thank you. questions? >> governor, good afternoon. jeff wolf from channel 7. hoping to be able to ask you a couple questions. first of all, welcome to watertown and welcome back to the region. it's good to have you here. first question, what is the future of state prisons? the budget gives you the authority to close as many as you see f

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