CHUCK TODD:
This Sunday: reopening America.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
Americans are looking forward to the safe and rapid reopening of our country.
CHUCK TODD:
President Trump ending the social distancing guidelines.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
They'll be fading out because now the governors are doing it.
CHUCK TODD:
Americans desperate to get back to work.
KATHY HACKSHAW:
Nobody's made any money for two months, so they need to get in here and make money.
CHUCK TODD:
But many are urging caution:
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI:
Hopefully everybody does it according to the guidelines for opening up America again.
GOV. CHARLIE BAKER:
When we take a step forward we don't want to take two steps back.
CHUCK TODD:
My guests this morning: Dr. Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and health directors from two states taking different approaches to reopening. Plus new hope for a Covid-19 treatment.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI:
That data shows that Remdesivir has a clear-cut significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.
CHUCK TODD:
How long until we have a treatment or a vaccine? I'll talk to Sir John Bell from Oxford University, where a promising vaccine study is well underway. Also, declaring victory.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I think when you ask how did we do. I think we did a spectacular job.
CHUCK TODD:
With more than 60-thousand dead and 30-million out of work, is the Trump administration risking its own "Mission Accomplished" moment? And poll vault. Joe Biden takes the lead in battleground states. But now, calls are growing for a fuller investigation of charges by his accuser, Tara Reade. Joining me for insight and analysis are: NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent Kasie Hunt, former Congressional budget director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, infectious disease physician Dr. Nahid Bhadelia and Amy Walter, national editor for the Cook Political Report. Welcome to Sunday. It's Meet the Press and our continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
ANNOUNCER:
From NBC News in Washington, the longest-running show in television history. This is Meet the Press with Chuck Todd.
CHUCK TODD:
Good Sunday morning. It was on January 6th that the CDC first issued a travel notice for Wuhan, China. Consider what has happened in less than four month's time: More than one-point-one million confirmed cases of Covid-19 have been diagnosed in the U-S and more than 66,000 Americans have died. The American economy shrunk by nearly five percent in the first quarter - with the worst yet to come and some 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits just in the past six weeks alone. Those are the sobering numbers. But this has not been like other crises -- think 9/11, Oklahoma City, even the Challenger accident. Instead of being united in grief, much of America is divided by politics. We see it in the anti-social distancing protests in states extending stay-at-home guidelines. We see it in a Gallup poll that finds 44 percent of Republicans would be willing to return to normal activities right now if there were no restrictions, while only four percent of Democrats say the same thing. We see it in Vice President Pence not wearing a face mask at the Mayo Clinic, where it's the rule. And we can even see it in the Wall Street Journal report that the Trump campaign has ordered red Trump-branded facemasks for supporters. It all prompted this statement yesterday from former President George W. Bush: "In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants, we are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God." Of course, there have been countless acts of kindness, generosity and heroism -- especially from our health care workers. But much of that good news is obscured by the intensifying and often partisan debate over when and how to re-open this country.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
They're going to open safely and quickly I hope because we have to get our country back.
CHUCK TODD:
The president is pressing states to end stay-at-home orders and, by tomorrow, 33 states will have begun the process of at least partial reopening, after federal social distancing guidelines expired on Thursday.
GOV. HENRY MCMASTER:
Mother’s Day is coming up. Your mama told you to wash your hands, and cover your nose and mouth if you cough. As long as we do those simple things and use common sense we ought to be just fine.
GOV. RON DESANTIS:
They did misleading pictures, acting like it was Lollapalooza on the beach or something. Has there been some type of major outbreak? No.
CHUCK TODD:
But in Michigan - where armed demonstrators stormed the capitol this week.
GOV. GRETCHEN WHITMER:
Swastikas and Confederate flags, nooses and automatic rifles do not represent who we are as Michiganders. There’s nothing that I want more than to flip the switch and return to normal. But that’s not how it’s going to work, unfortunately.
CHUCK TODD:
On Tuesday, the president promised to meet the testing benchmark set by a Harvard study.
KRISTEN WELKER:
So are you saying you're confident you can surpass five million tests per day? Is that --
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
Oh well, we're gonna be there very soon.
CHUCK TODD:
On Wednesday, he walked that back.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I didn't say it, but somebody came out with a report saying 5 million. I think that was from the Harvard report. But we are going to be there at a certain point.
CHUCK TODD:
Even so, the president and his political aides are trying to recast the federal response to the pandemic as a success story.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
We did all the right moves. I think we did a spectacular job. We have saved thousands and thousands of lives. I can even make that, if you want, hundreds of thousands of lives.
JARED KUSHNER:
The federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story.
CHUCK TODD:
The language is nothing new. For months - as the death toll has risen - the president has declared in some form or another: Mission Accomplished.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done. As we near the end of our historic battle with the invisible enemy. We can begin the next front in our war, which we’re calling, ‘Opening Up America Again.’
REPORTER:
Back in late February, you predicted that the number of cases would go down to zero. How did we get from your prediction of zero to 1 million?
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
Well, it will go down to zero ultimately.
CHUCK TODD:
The president's own public health experts warn against reopening too quickly.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI:
You can't just leap over things and get into a situation where you're really tempting a rebound.
CHUCK TODD:
But - motivated by the political calendar - the White House is presenting a rosy timeline.
VICE PRES. MIKE PENCE:
By early summer, we could be in a much better place as a nation.
LARRY KUDLOW:
May is the transition month, May and June probably.
JARED KUSHNER:
By June a lot the country should be back to normal.
CHUCK TODD:
And joining me now is Dr. Tom Inglesby. He's the director at the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Inglesby, welcome to Meet the Press. And let me just start with a simple question. Thirty-three states are doing this. We had -- we noted that 18 states have hit their one-day case total high of those 33 in the last two weeks. So technically not meeting those phase one metrics. Are we ready to be doing this as a country?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
I think we need to be going forward very cautiously. I think if you look at the overall country numbers, we're about 200,000 new cases a week at this point. And in the last month we've had something on the order of 60,000 deaths. So most of the illness and death has occurred over the last 30 days. So overall as a country, we still have a long way to go. But the states are in very different places. And some states, a small minority of states, are beginning to get closer to the White House metrics of two-weeks decline. And so in those places if they have other capabilities in place, if they're able to really rapidly isolate and trace the contacts of patients with COVID, if they're able to diagnose very widely everybody who's got symptoms of COVID, not just the sick people but everybody, then those states would be the places where it would be least risky to go ahead and begin to reopen.
CHUCK TODD:
Are we -- do we not have the testing capacity right now to give the states the -- the security they have of making these decisions? How much is this somewhat guess work because of our test -- our lack of surveillance capabilities when it comes to where the virus is in many of these places?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
Yeah, I think there still is a lot of uncertainty. But there is a range of diagnostic testing capability across the country. And you can tell that in the percent of persons who are positive. In some states, they're testing so many people that the percent of people who are positive is very low. And that's a good number. In other places, the percent of people testing is very high. And that's worrisome. So it depends on where you are in the country in terms of access to testing, the operations around testing. It's like a patchwork across the country.
CHUCK TODD:
Is there a way -- when are you going to know whether this is a mistake or not? Is it basically waiting the next two to four weeks in these incubation periods?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
Yeah. For this disease, it's going to take about two weeks, two to three weeks for us to begin to see trends that come out of the changes in social distancing. So a measure taken this morning, you probably won't see a change in hospitalization rates or ICU capacity until two or three weeks from now. So that's the nature of the disease. It's going to take a little time for things to get into the system.
CHUCK TODD:
What is something that the state health officials don't have access to data-wise that you wish they did before making these decisions?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
I think we should -- in the coming weeks and months we need to get a much better handle on the number of mild and moderate cases of disease that we have. The good news is that many, many people do not get seriously ill with this disease. But the bad news is that we're not capturing those people in terms of numbers for the country. And if we don't know who they are then we can't break their chains of transmission. We can't isolate them. We can't quarantine their contacts. So we need to know much more about the mild and moderate illnesses around the country. And that will come with more diagnostic testing.
CHUCK TODD:
I want to ask you something that somebody wrote about the CDC. It was, I think, a colleague of yours at Johns Hopkins. Or no, excuse me, Dr. Jha at Harvard. But it was sort of the odd lacking of missing data that the CDC normally tracks. He said, "If you wanted to find out how many people had tuberculosis in this country in the last year, ask the CDC. Want to know about health care associated infections, ask the CDC. But ask how many COVID-19 tests have been done and the CDC doesn't have an answer. Want a daily update on how many people are getting hospitalized for COVID-19? The CDC isn't tracking it. Want to know if social distancing is making a difference? The CDC doesn't know." What is going on here? Are we missing a huge component of our public health response?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
I think we do need more data. Clearly, I certainly agree with the need for the data that Dr. Jha outlined there. I think that we're tracking this epidemic in a different way than we've tracked others. We haven't had this urgent need to understand hospitalizations on a day to day, week to week basis as we've had for some of the other things we've confronted before. And we need to get better as a country. We need to get our -- if you look at state health department data right now, some states are not reporting their hospitalization data. We live in a federal system. If they're not reporting at the state level, it's hard for CDC to get that data in real time. So I think we all need to collectively get better. Some states have more data available than others. But we should all be rising.
CHUCK TODD:
Let's get a realistic timeline. Next three months, next six months. A lot of people are concerned about the fall. How concerned are you? And is there any way of avoiding a bad fall outcome at this point without either advancements in a treatment or a vaccine?
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
Well, before we even get to the fall, I am worried that we will have small waves in various places around the country for the coming months. Hopefully we won't. But as we begin to ease social distancing in various places in the country this virus is highly transmissible. Nothing has changed in the underlying dynamics of this virus. If we stop social distancing all together tomorrow, we would recreate the conditions that existed in the country in February and March. So what we need to do is continue, to our best possible effort, all the individual efforts we're making around social distancing. Staying six feet apart, wearing masks when in public, avoiding large gatherings. But to the extent to which we're able to do that over the next couple of months will dictate how we do as states and as a country. Ultimately, in the fall we have an additional challenge. We have influenza that will reappear. The flu season will start. And at that point, COVID will be mixed with flu and will both be contributing to hospitalizations and ICU beds. And so we're going to have two concurrent large public health challenges at the same time. So I am worried about the uptake in hospitalization rate and the more people needing intensive care in the fall. But I’m still, I am -- I don't think people should think that there will be a lull. That just because the summer's coming we're going to have a lull before the fall. It'd be wonderful if that happens. But I don't think we should at all assume that at this point given the nature of this virus.
CHUCK TODD:
And I'm going to leave it there because I think that's the single most important takeaway viewers need to have. Don't call it a lull. It is unlikely we are going to have a lull in the summer. Anyway, Dr. Inglesby from Johns Hopkins University, thanks for starting us off with your expertise on this. Much appreciated.
DR. TOM INGLESBY:
Thanks for having me, Chuck.
CHUCK TODD:
And joining me now are two state officials essential to making decisions about whether, when and how their states should reopen. I have Dr. Scott Harris, he's the state health officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health and Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief deputy director for health for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Thank you both for joining. And so I want to start with you, Dr. Harris, since Alabama's doing a little more opening right now than Michigan. Although you're -- compared to some of your southern neighbors, I would argue you guys are being a bit more cautious than others. But tell me the metrics you used that gave you the confidence to advise the governor at beginning some phased-in reopenings?
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Sure. So we have followed a number of metrics like, I think most states have, including the White House plan for reopening. The gating criteria that I'm sure you talked about many times on this show were certainly part of the things that we considered. We have not fully satisfied all of those gating criteria in terms of cases per day. But we felt very good about our syndromic surveillance numbers. We felt very good about our hospital capacity. And so what our governor chose to do was to make a very measured step, a very gradual reopening of certain types of businesses. We did not proceed to a full phase-one reopening like was in the White House plan. Things like entertainment venues --
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
-- and gyms and in-person dining. We have not chosen to do that so far. But we think this is just a gradual first step.
CHUCK TODD:
What data are you missing, Dr. Harris, that you wish you had but you just -- whether it's capacity or other reasons you don't have?
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Yeah, there are a number of things. I think, clearly, we would like to make sure we're testing to the level that we would like. We probably have a total amount of laboratory bench capacity to do the number of tests that we would like to do. But those tests are really unevenly distributed throughout the state. If you're in a bigger, more urbanized part of our state like Jefferson County where Birmingham is located or Madison County where Huntsville is located you can probably have really good access to testing whenever you like. But in some of our more rural parts of the state, we are able to get testing done, but there are definitely barriers there for people to obtain that, particularly if they have to find transportation or they don't have ready access to a health care provider. And we've also been surprised to find that --
CHUCK TODD
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
-- we have not necessarily gotten negative test results reported to us. It's hard to come up with a good denominator so that we know the percent positive of tests we have. And so we have reached out to all the labs who report to us. But many of them are out of state. And it's just difficult to get all that information.
CHUCK TODD:
Dr. Khaldun, let me ask the question -- sort of slightly different. What are you seeing in your state that makes you uncomfortable advising the governor to begin even a partial phase one reopening?
DR. JONEIGH KHALDUN:
Yeah. So here in the state of Michigan we have over 43,000 cases. And over 4,000 deaths. And so we are actually third in the country when it comes to states and the number of deaths. While we've seen certainly significant improvements over the past several weeks, our hospitals were over capacity, particularly in the southeast area of the state several weeks ago. We are still having parts of the state that are seeing an increase in the rates of lives of cases. And we know that their hospital capacity is not what it should be. We have to get our testing up as I know people across the country are working on. So while we are cautiously optimistic we still think we need to be very careful.
CHUCK TODD:
All right. But Dr. Khaldun, what do you say to those in the state who are going, "You know what, yeah, southeast Michigan is being hit hard." Are you not comfortable having sort of a “let's isolate parts of the state, tougher stay-at-home measures for southeast Michigan. Let's loosen things up in more rural parts of the state.” Why are you not there yet?
DR. JONEIGH KHALDUN:
So we actually look at this data on a daily basis regionally. And so again, we are still seeing, for example, on the western side of the state that there are actually increases in the rate of rise of cases. We have several outbreaks there. We also know, again, in some of our rural areas, the number of hospital beds is actually not what it should be. And many of our hospitals in our rural areas are actually at capacity. So every part of the state is different. Even in southeast, quite frankly, even though we're seeing a decrease in the rate of lives we're still seeing many, many cases and many deaths every day. So we're going to be working on loosening or dialing up as far as how we're reopening the economy. The governor has actually already started that. But we really have to do it in an incremental data-driven approach.
CHUCK TODD:
I imagine both of you are feeling pressure, whether it's pressure from friends and family tired of the quarantine, pressure from friends of yours who maybe run businesses. Or full-on political pressure. Dr. Khaldun, let me start with you, how have you handled it? And have you been getting -- how have you handled the public blow-back? And how do you strike that balance in your own head where you feel like you're giving full-on medical advice versus let me give you the best medical advice I can for the policy you want to implement?
DR. JONEIGH KHALDUN:
Well, this is certainly not personal. People hire me to give medical and public health advice and that is what I do. I talk to the governor and other folks in the governor's office on a regular basis to tell them the facts. “These are the number of tests that we are currently doing. This is where we want to be. This is what's going on with our hospitals. And, again, if we don't do well with these social distancing measures more people will die.” And that is just the facts.
CHUCK TODD:
Dr. Harris, how have you -- how much have you felt that pressure?
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Obviously it's significant, as you know. There are, you know, many Alabamians that just don't have the option of making a living, you know, under certain health orders. We have to find a way to strike the right balance there. I think our governor, Governor Ivey, has done a great job of trying to balance the health of the economy with the health of average Alabamians. My job in public health is to give her the best health information I can. We present the data on, just as Dr. Khaldun said, on how many cases we have and what our deaths look like. I think Alabama has been a little bit different. Every state's different. And there's 51 different plans for reopening, I guess --
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
-- because we're all trying to look at the data and make our own decisions, you now, with the best information that we have about how to proceed. But there are people who certainly want to maintain their livelihoods, they want to maintain their businesses. And we have to balance that with keeping everyone safe and healthy as much as possible.
CHUCK TODD:
Dr. Harris, are you concerned that Georgia has been more aggressive and, you know, for instance, Senator Doug Jones in Alabama has encouraged Alabamians to be careful traveling to Georgia.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Well, obviously we look at that very closely. You know, there's certainly some good aspects about having, you know, every state having its own plan because every state is a little bit different. But clearly all states affect the others. And so we're watching that very carefully. What we've done in Alabama, I think is, again, have this sort of measured approach. And I think what I've heard many states say, and what our governor has certainly said, is that these aren't steps forward that are just going to ratchet forward and can never come back. These are gradual steps.
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
And we certainly will consider dialing things back if we see an increase in cases. And so I think that's the approach --
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
-- that probably all states would want to take. We see where we are after changes are made.
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
And then make changes if necessary.
CHUCK TODD:
Dr. Khaldun in Michigan, Dr. Harris in Alabama, thank you both for sharing your expertise in sort of the regional observations that you both can share with the country. Good luck and stay healthy out there.
DR. JONEIGH KHALDUN:
Thank you.
DR. SCOTT HARRIS:
Thank you.
CHUCK TODD:
When we come back, the race for a coronavirus vaccine. I'll talk to a professor of medicine at Oxford University in the U.K., where they've gotten a head start in testing a vaccine that they believe is showing real promise. That is next.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back. The race for a coronavirus vaccine is on. And nowhere is there more optimism, or perhaps progress, than at Oxford University. They're testing a vaccine that has shown success in rhesus monkeys. What's more, they're ahead of competitors because earlier testing of the vaccine for other viruses has shown it to be safe in people, so human testing can begin much sooner. And joining me now is Sir John Bell. He's the Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, and he's going to tell us more about this. Welcome to Meet the Press, Sir Bell. Let me just start with this question. One of your colleagues used the percentage of 80% chance that this vaccine is at least somewhat successful in, in the next year. Are you that optimistic, and are you at all concerned our optimism around the world for what you guys are doing has gotten a bit over exuberant?
SIR JOHN BELL:
Yeah, so I, I, I -- obviously people who have dedicated their careers to this kind of a problem have a tendency to get excited about the prospects because the prospects are pretty good. I certainly wouldn't put the possibility at 80%. That's a pretty big number. But we're gradually reeling it in bit by bit. And as every day goes by, the likelihood of success goes up.
CHUCK TODD:
You’re in the midst of -- you want to start some human trials. One of your potential hurdles is the lack of outbreaks, right? In order to do this you need to try your next set of trials. Where do you – do you know when you’re going to be able to do this and where are you looking? Are you looking at places like India? Where are you looking to do these trials?
SIR JOHN BELL:
So, so we've still got lots of disease in the U.K. We, we probably have something on the order of 15,000 or 20,000 transmissions a day in the U.K. So there's no shortage of disease here. And we'll push. We've already started clinical trials. So we've already given the vaccine to about 1,000 people. And we're going to grow that pretty rapidly. We've consolidated a phase one and two programs because we are pretty confident that the vector itself is safe because it's been used in about 5,000 people already up to now. So that's allowed us to really accelerate the phase one program, and we hope that there would be enough disease that we would get evidence that the vaccine has efficacy by the beginning of June.
CHUCK TODD:
What's the likelihood that if this fails as a vaccine, there will be something that is usable as a therapeutic? And I'm just wondering, and in the reverse, as we hear good news about, for instance, remdesivir on its ability as a therapeutic, how helpful is that in the development of the vaccine?
SIR JOHN BELL:
So probably, it's helpful for sure. It's probably not helpful in the development of the vaccine. I don’t think it really -- it works by a completely different mechanism. It works on --
CHUCK TODD:
Gotcha.
SIR JOHN BELL:
-- the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is a completely different replication mechanism of the virus. So we're, we’re stimulating the immune response to the virus, which is at the other end of the therapeutic options that we've got. So the two are probably not connected, but both could be helpful steps to try to get the virus under control.
CHUCK TODD:
There's been some concern that you guys are going too fast, that -- and it's not just you, it's all of the labs that are attempting to get a vaccine -- that there's such pressure coming from national governments that some safety protocols will be overlooked. I'm sure you, like others, are claiming you're meeting all those protocols. But there has to be some concern that the pressure is going to create gaps on this. What are you doing to try to prevent that?
SIR JOHN BELL:
Yeah. So, so you're absolutely right. It's a big issue for us, is trying to be sure that we do this quickly, but we don't miss out on any of the key safety steps. I think we've got reason to believe that the efficacy, the efficacy of the vaccine in terms of generating strong antibody responses, is probably going to be okay. The real question is whether the safety profile's going to be fine. So that's actually the main focus of the clinical studies. We did all the preclinical work you would expect anybody to do. And in fact, although some companies have left out, for example, primate studies, they haven't done as many preclinical studies as we have, we did all of them. We did mouse, ferret, primate. We wanted to get a good read on what's going on. And now, we're being very careful in the clinic to try and monitor exactly what's happening. But, you know, that doesn't mean there won't be safety signals, because there may well be. And we'll be on the alert to see if we can see them.
CHUCK TODD:
When is the next time you will find out if, if this is not going to work? You know, there's these different moments where you'll find out, "Oh, we can go to a next step." When will you know if this isn't going to be a successful vaccine effort?
SIR JOHN BELL:
Yeah. So, I think there'll be primate data released this week. That'll be an important milestone. And then we'll have to wait until there's enough incident disease in the phase two cohort which has been vaccinated now to see whether we have largely eliminated the disease in those vaccinated with this vaccine as opposed to the placebo. And that's really the test. And that’s what -- we'll probably get a signal based on current levels of the disease. We'll probably get a signal in early June. We're ready to move trials overseas if the disease peters out in the U.K. So we've got sites already in play in other bits of the world where it's active. So we're pretty sure we'll get a signal by June about whether this works or not.
CHUCK TODD:
And finally, do you have a sense if this will be a one-time vaccine or something closer to the flu where perhaps we have to have a different vaccine due to a mutation every year?
SIR JOHN BELL:
Yeah, so, so coronavirus doesn't mutate at the pace of flu as far as we can see. But it, it's also quite a tricky virus in terms of generating longstanding immune responses to it. And as a result, I suspect we may need to have relatively regular vaccinations against coronaviruses going into the future. That, that, of course remains to be seen, but that's my bet at the moment, is that this is likely to be a seasonal coronavirus vaccine.
CHUCK TODD:
Sir John Bell at Oxford, the whole world's rooting for you. Thanks for coming on--
SIR JOHN BELL:
Thanks so much.
CHUCK TODD:
--and sharing your views with us.
SIR JOHN BELL:
Thank you very much.
CHUCK TODD:
You got it.
SIR JOHN BELL:
Take care.
CHUCK TODD:
When we come back, finding a vaccine is one thing. Fixing our economy is another gargantuan challenge. The panel is next. And as we go to break, look up in the sky. It's the Navy's Blue Angels and the Air Force's Thunderbirds, flying around the country in honor of the nation's health care workers.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back, the panel is with us from their remote locations. NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Kasie Hunt, former Congressional budget director and current president of the American Action Forum Douglas Holtz-Eakin and infectious disease physician Dr. Nahid Bhadelia from Boston University. Doug, I want to start with you because we've done a lot on the vaccine. We've done a lot on the reopening, on the health aspect of things. But let's talk about the economy. Just give us your big picture sense. You hear about 2008, you hear about the Great Depression. How would you describe where we're at right now and where you think we're realistically headed.
DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN:
Well, Chuck, we've had some horrific economic data. We saw the largest one-month decline in consumer confidence, the largest one-month decline in consumer spending. We've had 30 million people apply for unemployment insurance in the past six weeks. I think it's fair to expect that over the months of April, May and June we'll see national income decline by 10%. The worst year in the Great Depression was 12%. We're going to experience that this spring.
CHUCK TODD:
Do you think -- Doug, I want to stick with you a minute, do you think that the ideas that have been percolating in Congress left and right in general have been meeting the moment? Or do you feel as if, in some ways, members of Congress haven't fully grasped how big and how gargantuan this is?
DOUGLAS HOLTZ-EAKIN:
I think Congress deserves credit for moving quickly, moving dramatically. If you think about what's going on, we're losing 10% of national income. The so-called CARES Act borrowed 10% of national income and is trying to distribute it to Americans in the form of unemployment insurance, loans to businesses, grants to businesses, checks. That's, however, just a band-aid. The real work has to be to get the economy to stop falling. We cannot do that continuously. So we're going to have to get the economy moving again. And there you're at this tough intersection of the public health mission which has got to be the primary objective is also the most important economic policy.
CHUCK TODD:
Right. And Dr. Bhadelia, I think this is the challenge that I feel like you in the public health community and health officials in general, there is life and livelihood. And that balance. And what do you fear from -- that the pressure public health officials are going to be feeling about reopening the economy? What do you fear that's going to lead to?
DR. NAHID BHADELIA:
Well, Chuck, you heard Tom Inglesby talk about the fact that the conditions haven't changed from when we put the lock-down into place which means reopening is this balance of, you know, restarting economy against acceptance of the risk that we will get more infections. And a portion of those infections will result in hospitalizations and death. When you look at the preparedness of the states, it's kind of a patch work, right? So the core capacities in terms of testing. Dr. Inglesby mentioned the fact about this idea of how many people you test. And WHO says that if you are testing to a point where more than 10% of the people you are testing are still coming back positive you're not testing enough. And up to 33 states, 12 of them have raised above 10%. When you look at ICU capacity, of those 33 states, eight of them have already hit their headroom for ICU capacity. And when you talk about contact tracing, there's a Hopkins study that says that we need 100,000 contact tracers. And then NPR did a study of all the states, 41 states responded and said, "We have about 7,600 contact tracers and we're looking to hire 36,000 more.” So we're not there in terms of capacity. It's a patchwork where some states are potentially doing it better than others. And so my fear as it is with a lot of public health folks is ensuring that states meet those capacities before they take the risk of putting, particularly the vulnerable, amongst our communities at risk. So nursing homes, prisons, minority communities.
CHUCK TODD:
Let me ask you the question this way, over the last two months, in the medical community, have we learned enough -- and with the new Remdesivir, how much now -- how much capacity has that bought us? How much of an ability that we know there is some best practices that can lessen the time in the hospital or lessen the mortality rate? How comfortable are you getting that we're there where that can allow us to have some more reopenings?
DR. NAHID BHADELIA:
We’re definitely in a better place than we were, you know, in some ways. So one part is our testing capacity is better. If you look at the numbers, about a month ago we were testing ten people, eight people to ten people per 1,000. And we're now testing about 18 to 19. So that's better. Remdesivir is promising. And the fact that it provides you with the proof of concept, as Dr. Fauci has said that drugs like it or in itself could help reduce mortality. But we still need a whole other range of drugs such as -- we need medications that if you're exposed potentially it keeps you from getting sick. So something called post-exposure prophylactic. And then from what we know about this disease, you know, we're learning that it's basically making the body attack -- it uses the body's immune system to basically attack itself. The virus wreaks havoc. And then the rest of the stuff that happens to the body is the attack that you're doing onto itself. And a lot of drugs that are still in the works are starting to show some promise. But we don't have a slam dunk in helping with that aspect of the disease yet.
CHUCK TODD:
Let me move to the politics here. Kasie Hunt, we are going to get, sort of, right in front of -- the split screen. The Senate is coming back. The House isn't. The Senate is saying, "Well, look, we've got to tough it out,” essentially. The House is saying, "It's not safe." It's the divide we're seeing in America, in some ways, between left and right.
KASIE HUNT:
And Chuck, you're even seeing it in who is deciding to wear masks when they come up to Capitol Hill and who isn't. And, you know, this is emerging as the kind of partisan divide that I think if you listen to the experts like those that we've just been talking to, you know, if Americans are not all on the same page about engaging in the public health protection measures it gets a lot harder to get to the point where you can feel confident in reopening, that everybody will remain healthy. And the longer that this goes on and the sharper those divisions become, the harder the overall mission is. And, you know, don't forget, every month that goes by we're a month closer to a presidential election. And that's going to influence so much of this conversation as well.
CHUCK TODD:
I'm curious, Kasie, the whole testing weirdness of the Senate. The president said, "Oh use this quick testing feature that we've been using at the White House." And then McConnell and Pelosi decided not to accept it. What is going on there?
KASIE HUNT:
They don't think that they should be seen having access to things that regular every day Americans don't have access to. And in that way, the imperative is a little different. My question is, if they do bring the House back, it's different from the Senate in that it's 435 people. They’re scattered across all corners of this country, all coming back. The risk is very high. Will those rank and file numbers say this is something that we need in order to be able to function? Pelosi and McConnell are relatively old-school in their thinking about things like this. There was a lot of reluctance in the beginning to even close tours at the Capitol. And Nancy Pelosi was saying, "We are the captains of the ship. We are the last to leave." At the end of the day, concerns among her members pushed her to change course on that.
CHUCK TODD:
All right, Douglas Holtz-Eakin with the economy, Nahid Bhadelia on health and Kasie Hunt there on politics. Thank you all. Kasie, you're going to stick around for a little more political talk. When we come back how attitudes about the pandemic have changed over the last seven weeks.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back, data download time. As some states begin to reopen, many Americans are trying to adapt to this new normal. A survey by Dynata, a leading survey insights company, has been asking if Americans feel that the worst of the pandemic is behind us or is yet to come. In week one, which was the week starting on March 15th, only 7% of registered voters said the worst of this was behind us. By week four, beginning April 5th, that number only rose to just 11% who felt that way. And by week seven beginning on April 26th, 29%, four times the original number, did believe the worst of this virus is behind us. Now in week one, more than 1/3 of Americans said they were very concerned about their family’s financial stability. But by week four that had actually slipped slightly down. And is now down to 27% as states begin to reopen some businesses. But while Americans are feeling slightly better about their physical and financial health, they're also increasingly resigned to the fact that this is not ending anytime soon. On week one, only a quarter said they expected the pandemic to last six months or more. That ticked up 11 points by week four. And now a majority, 56%, believe the pandemic will last six months or more. Which is probably why when asked about a return to some pre-COVID-19 activities, many say they'll move slowly. In some cases very slowly. More than 60% of Americans who fly regularly said this week that they would wait at least four months before flying again. And 42% of regular air travelers said they would wait even longer, seven months or more. Nearly half of those surveyed remained concerned about their health. Overall most Americans seem to agree that Coronavirus is difficult to manage, is causing pain and it's not going away anytime soon. When we come back we're going to turn to politics. Joe Biden has denied the allegations made by Tara Reade. Has he said enough? That's next.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back, Kasie Hunt is still with us. And joining us is Amy Walter, National Editor of The Cook Political Report. All righty, let me play one of the bites from Joe Biden's interview on Morning Joe from Friday. Here it is.
(BEGIN TAPE)
MIKA BRZEZINSKI:
Would you please go on the record with the American people? Did you sexually assault Tara Reade?
JOE BIDEN:
No. it is not true. I'm saying unequivocally, it never, never happened. And it didn't. It never happened.
(END TAPE)
CHUCK TODD:
Amy Walter, The New York Times is not satisfied with the vice president's answer. In fact, they write, " … Mr. Biden's word is insufficient to dispel the cloud. And the inventory should be strictly limited to information about Miss Reade and conducted by an unbiased apolitical panel put together by the DNC and chosen to foster as much trust in its finding as possible." So Amy Walter, how much appetite is there in the Democratic Party to do something as extensive as The New York Times is outlining?
AMY WALTER:
Yeah, not much, Chuck. And I think for a lot of Republicans and conservatives, the idea that the DNC is going to put together an unbiased panel to look through the, the documents of Joe Biden is kind of stretching it. Look, Chuck, we’re, we are in the place where we've been for so much of these last couple of years, especially in the light of this Me Too movement about the fight not just over who to believe, but the fight over hypocrisy. And that's where a lot of this debate is being centered on. Democrats, including Joe Biden, but a lot of Democrats and liberals who held one standard for folks like Brett Kavanaugh, and seem to be holding a different standard for Joe Biden. But this, Chuck, reminds me a little bit of the battle we saw in 2016 and, quite frankly, we still see today with evangelicals and their support for Donald Trump, right? How can you support this person who's going against the standards you set for somebody else? And at the end of the day, this is what voters are left with. Not so much who they believe or don't believe. But how they battle this cognitive dissonance. And usually partisanship is what breaks the tie.
CHUCK TODD:
No, and Kasie, on social media basically it's the hypocrisy of the defenders of the party of Bill Clinton and the defenders of the party of Donald Trump, right? That, that’s what every social media debate devolves into is some sort of whataboutism on those two gentlemen.
KASIE HUNT:
Well, Chuck, I think also, to Amy's point, Republicans are focusing on how Brett Kavanaugh was handled and how the media handled Brett Kavanaugh, how Democrats talked about Brett Kavanaugh. They're not talking about Donald Trump because the reality is that they can’t because the list of accusers that this president has is very long. And, you know, each individual accusation has a different set of facts, a different set of claims. In the case of Joe Biden, there, there is one and that claim is now being explored. And they are having to grapple with it. But you’re right that, you know, this debate has become very muddled and devolved into, you know, lobbing charges back and forth. At the end of the day, I think Americans who care deeply about this issue and who care about women and harassment and changing that culture, at the end of the day, this is going to be a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And there are two separate sets of facts there. And, you know, voters are obviously going to be able to make up their own minds about that.
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah, I mean, Kasie, I think without, without the piece of paper showing up, but I am curious, how many Democrats on Capitol Hill are empathetic, do you think, quietly -- are quietly empathetic with the call by The New York Times for some formal investigation?
KASIE HUNT:
Chuck, I don’t know that there's a huge appetite for that. I think, you know, when you talk about --
CHUCK TODD:
Okay.
CHUCK TODD:
-- shifting the debate into a different sphere, the email question around Hillary Clinton, that’s kind of the first memory that Democrats have. And, you know, I think behind the scenes, the Biden campaign is very much trying to focus on insisting they are not going to get into a situation where it’s, "But her emails." But I do think, you know, Democrats want this campaign to be as clean and straightforward as possible. And to the extent that there are questions about transparency, that's going to be a problem for every Democrat, and particularly women Democrats. They have been the ones who have had to answer questions about this accusation -- Nancy Pelosi has defended Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand as well. So the easier that the Biden campaign can make them in terms of answering our questions in hallways, I think the happier Democrats are going to be.
CHUCK TODD:
So as difficult as perhaps Friday and the weekend has been for Joe Biden, Amy Walter, if you just looked at the polls, the last two weeks in particular, I mean -- whether it’s a battleground state or a quasi-battleground state, it seems as if it doesn’t matter if it's a national poll, state poll, Biden is ahead or on the move everywhere. How much of it do you attribute to just the pandemic and Donald Trump? And how much of this is Democratic rallying around, Democrats rallying a bit around Biden?
AMY WALTER:
Yeah, it seems more like the former, Chuck, that this is as much about Donald Trump as anything else. I mean, what you noticed over this last couple of weeks is that voters are expecting their political leaders to meet the moment. A lot of governors have. And you’re seeing their approval ratings up in the seventies in some cases, close to 80%. Donald Trump's are back where they’ve always been because he met this moment in the same way he meets every moment. It is polarizing, it's divisive and it's putting people back into their political camps. The one thing I will note though, Chuck, is for as strong as Joe Biden is looking in those states and in national polls, what you also see is that President Trump hasn’t cratered. And his overall vote share, if you look at the match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump doesn’t match his approval rating in a lot of these states. In other words, he still has room to grow in these states. There's a group of people who are saying, "I like the job that the president's doing. I'm not yet quite ready to say I'm going to vote for them." It's easy -- for him -- it’s easier for Trump to get those people back. They haven't defected, at least not yet, to Joe Biden.
CHUCK TODD:
Well, it's a reminder, Amy, and it was something John Reiss, the EP, and I talked about yesterday, he's still in his range, his trading range. He may be at the low end of his trading range, but he's still sitting in his range, and we know what that means. Anyway, Kasie Hunt, Amy Walter, thank you. That’s all we have for today. Thank you for watching. Thank you for trusting us here at NBC. Stay safe, be well. Practice social distancing. We'll be back next week because if it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press.