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[Connect The World. Paula Newton, Cnn:] This hour, airlines in crisis, markets plunging and thousands of new infections. The coronavirus tearing across the world. Hello and welcome to CONNECT THE WORLD. I'm Paula Newton filling in for Becky Anderson. The more pain and restrictions for Europe, the current epicenter of the pandemic. Italy remains the region's worst hit country but cases are also climbing in places like Spain and France. The World's Health Organization now says at least 4,800 people are now infected in Germany. And its imposing border controls with several countries to halt the spread of the virus. We will have live reports from Rome and the PolishGerman border in a moment. But first to the shutdown across Europe that is accelerating with France closing its cafes and Ireland saying it's to go dark even for St. Paddy's day in its pubs. All roads right now lead to the global economy and that is looking more bumpy by the minute. Right now the Dow is plunging joining the epic global sell-off really. You see it there now down more than 10 percent. The U.S. market is trading again, after it was halted for 15 minutes right after the open. This comes after the Federal Reserve the powerful central bank you do need to be reminded about that. Because what they did was throw all their fire power at this. They slashed its benchmark interest rate to near zero. But that rattled the global economy and stirred the Fed into action to try and calm the wave of market volatility. ObviouslyGerman border. But first we want to go straight to Rome and CNN's Melissa Bell. And, Melissa, I have to tell you the eyes of the world are on Italy. I am sure you can feel it. Everyone is wondering, are we next? And getting some insight into what Italy did right and what Italy did wrong. In terms of the situation on the ground today, is there any glimmer of hope as the death toll has continued to rise.
[Melissa Bell, Cnn Paris Correspondent:] Well, we're hearing right now, Paula, from the Italian Prime Minister who is spelling out the details of that stimulus package, 25 billion euros he had announced last week. Things like tax relief for ordinary families, mortgage relief help to businesses, help to this country's extremely stretched health care system, which has really been holding in extraordinary circumstances. This of course as the country looks on to look at the figures and for the time being and Giuseppe Conte warned about this this morning in the Italian press. We have not reached the peak. And yet, Paula, this is almost a week after this extraordinary lockdown began. The streets of Rome and other Italian cities completely deserted. The economy ground to a halt. And we still have not seen that translate into, not even a stabilization of the national figures. But you asked a question about that glimmer of hope. There is one from the very north of the country in those ten towns and villages that were locked down three weeks ago before the rest of the country, where the first cases were, the area of Lodi in which the town of Codogno where patient one was identified. We are seeing there a stabilization of figures. So what that tells us, Paula, is first of all that these measures do work but that it takes time for them to work. We were speaking to a virologist earlier on who said that it would take probably another week for us to see the figures taper down nationally. For the time being the figures remain extremely high, record figures again yesterday, both in terms of the number of new cases and in terms of the number of new deaths. And of course, what that means is it takes patience, it takes resilience and for the countries looking on because you're right, Italy is just a few weeks ahead of what is likely to happen in other countries. This is an important lesson about what you're likely to have to go through in order to get to the end of this epidemic.
[Newton:] Yes, and a real warning obviously that if you are in some kind of lockdown right now, really no one knows how long it will last. Our Melissa Bell continues to report for us from Rome, appreciate you. And now to Julia Chatterley who's been following quite a ride there at the New York Stock Exchange. I do not envy you, Julia. Listen, I have to say though in 30 years of covering markets. Tis is actually the most rational reaction I've seen. I know trading was halted but as you heard Melissa say, you are dealing with one of the largest economies in the world and they have no idea when it will be coming out of that. So as you see it now, losses continue. What I want to talk to you about is a systemic risk, right. Is there any hint of that right now or do things seem to have calmed down? Even though it doesn't look calm from the numbers.
[Julia Chatterley, Cnn Business Anchor First Move:] Yes, you ask some really important questions. I'll come to the systemic. I think your point, though, about just trying to grapple with what we're dealing with here. We have no model for this. We have no basis to understand what containment looks like. How long businesses that are struggling at this moment have to deal with the economic sudden stops that they're facing. And we heard from the airlines once again that really are at the forefront and the first domino to fall here saying, you know, this is an existential crisis. That I think ties back to the reaction that we've seen from what the Federal Reserve did over the weekend. It was a bazooka of sorts but many people are looking at it saying it's a pea shooter in the face of the broader challenges that we're facing and that it has to far more targeted. Then let's talk about the banks. Because what they have done, the Federal Reserve has tried to tackle specific points to prevent the freezing of credit to the real economy, lending to the real economy that we saw during the financial crisis. So that's the first thing. They're not there to try and support stocks or equity markets. That's just a reflection. And to your point, Paula, an accurate I think shake-down, fear, reaction to the uncertainty that we're dealing with at this moment. I think the big question about systemic risk is an important one. And what you saw was the largest eight U.S. banks over the weekend saying look, we're not going to buy the billions of dollars' worth of stock in our own banks. We're simply going to use that money and put it to better use, i.e., making sure that we can lend to the real economy, we can lend to businesses. We need to assess what kind of situation they're in. Banks are far better capitalized. They have far better levels of money, the system works better. So I don't think at this stage when you look at the banking sector, we're in a situation that we were in where the banks were so weak during the financial crisis, and that created a catalogue of other issues. But to go back to the point I began with, Paula, and I'll end there, we don't have a model for what we're dealing with at this stage. And everything, be it gold under pressure today, oil under pressure, stocks under pressure, everything, all assets are reacting to that uncertainty, and that makes sense at this stage. We can't quantify what we're dealing with.
[Newton:] Absolutely it makes total sense when there is no data point. I want to point out for anyone who's in stocks or anyone who has a pension, who's got skin in this game, everything you talked about, Julia, right, has to do with the recovery and the fact that if this is in place, a recovery will look much better.
[Chatterley:] Absolutely. We just can't time it yet.
[Newton:] Gotcha, Julia, thanks so much. And you'll continue to stay on top of the markets. We now want to go to Fred Pleitgen. He rushed out to the GermanPolish border. Fred, when you figured out, that they were closing it. There's some important news there out of Germany. I want to get first though to the situation on the border. What exactly is going on? Because you showed a long line of trucks there, just a few hours ago.
[Frederik Pleitgen, Cnn Senior International Correspondent:] You're absolutely right, Paula. And this is really where you can feel the European economy or a lot of the European economy almost screech to a halt. I want to take you around and show you some of the issues the folks have. First of all, you have the guys in the hazmat suits who are taking everyone's temperature whose coming through. Essentially what the border folks here are trying to do you have the Polish army and Polish border police. They are only letting Polish citizens through and people who have business inside Poland or who are traveling through Poland and then of course cargo. You can see the trucks coming through here. There's a gigantic long line of trucks coming all the way from Germany. We drove past this earlier this morning, and it went on for miles. I don't know how many miles, maybe six or eight miles but we kept driving past this. You can see there's a driver coming from Germany, not clear whether he's going to be allowed to go past this checkpoint. One of the things though that happened, Paula, over the past I would say about half an hour or so, is that some people have become really angry and for a while, there were some drivers who just stopped there and blockaded the actual highway and didn't allow traffic to go through, because they were so angry about the fact they had to wait and they were so angry about the fact that many of them were being turned back, drivers from Eastern Europe, drivers from Germany also quite angry as well. So you can feel that there are issues with these new travel restrictions that so many European countries are putting in place. These specific ones at the PolishGerman border that was actually done by the Poles. They closer border with Germany because obviously, they don't want the coronavirus to continue to spread around their country. But as you've mentioned, the Germans closed their northern, their western and their southern border as well. So a lot of the scenes we're seeing here and if we turn around you can see it again. Those guys in hazmat suits, there's traffic that's being held up. There're cars that are barely trickling through. Those are the kind of scenes that you're going to be seeing in a lot of European countries, possibly for quite a while to come. Because right now, no one really knows how long these travel restrictions are still going to be in place Paula.
[Newton:] Understood, Fred, and again, perspective, right. These are not border crossings that Europeans have been used to at least for decades now. Fred Pleitgen remains on the border and will continue to update us, thank you. OK, we were telling you of course that Italy is the hardest-hit country in Europe. It remains near total lockdown. The latest update sent about the death toll is not good. There are 1,800, with an increase of 368 deaths in the last day alone. Maurizio Cecconi is the head of anesthesia and intensive care at Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan. One of the many facilities that has been acutely affected of course by this crisis. And I really want to thank you for speaking to us. And I want to tell you first off, so many people around the world looking at your efforts, applauding the efforts of frontline health care workers. What is the situation today, and has anything changed over the weekend?
[Maurizio Cecconi, Head Of Anesthesia And Intensive Care, Humanitas Research Hospital:] Well, the situation is very difficult, of course, but it has been difficult for some weeks now. So we are still seeing a steady flow of sick patients coming to our hospitals, and that's in line with the response that we've been trying to mount for the last three weeks here in Lombardy.
[Newton:] I want to ask you, though, about the facilities that you have on hand. I mean, how much decision-making is there when people come in for triage? Are your ICU beds full? Do you have the equipment that you need?
[Cecconi:] Well, the only decisions we made so far was to increase the capacity of ICUs so that we give an ICU bed to whoever needs an ICU bed, and that's a relentless effort for the last three weeks. If you come to our hospitals in the region, will you see people working from different parts of the hospitals to basically build up new intensive care where we didn't have intensive care units and we are doing this effort basically now continuously. So you will see that we even have workers inside the hospital to try to convert normal wards to areas where we can give intensive care to whoever needs intensive care.
[Newton:] And just so I can understand this, are you having people arrive to your hospital who already are very ill or is this virus so that they come to you, and then they dramatically deteriorate in terms of their condition?
[Cecconi:] Oh, no, you need to look at the data that is out there, and you can even have a look the at the data from our superior health institute, Istituto Superiore di Sanita the name. They publish every day an info graphic and then you can see the total number of infected people and so you would also see how the case fatality rate is actually spread across different age groups. And that shows that we are in front of a disease that presents with a different variety of disease. So probably we still see 80 percent of the population will get what may seem like a flu. However, the message that we give to everyone this is not a normal flu because we see a significant percentage of people coming to our hospital with some need of support. And that could be just some oxygen and some basic support or we see a high percentage compared to what we were expecting from data before the outbreak here in Europe. Which we've quantified in the range of about 12 percent or what concern intensive care admissions.
[Newton:] Why has the mortality rate been so high though in Italy? Obviously, it's been alarming and the death rate continues to rise.
[Cecconi:] It's difficult to give you an answer until we don't see more data over the next few weeks. But again, if you see how this mortality is actually distributed across different age groups, you will see that Italy is a country with a very high in age compared to other countries in the world and so therefore the majority of that seems to of course, failing older people with comorbidities and that are frail. It doesn't mean we don't see young people coming to our hospital and there is a big stress on our care system because we're trying to care for everyone independent of age and that means that we see really a huge number of patients and the effort we're putting in place to care for everyone is really enormous at the moment.
[Newton:] I really again applause to all of you as we continue to see you guys try and fight your way through this virus, as this virus spreads west though. What is your advice right now to other continents, other European countries perhaps that do not have the virus within community spreads the way you guys have had it to this extent? What would you tell them to do now?
[Cecconi:] Well, what everyone is to do now is to get ready. There is no need to panic. We have a robust health care system in the majority of the countries. We need to work to get ready for a significant surge in patients that will come to your hospitals, to our hospitals, if you have an outbreak. But no one can predict where the next breakout is going to be. So the only thing that I suggest you do is to get ready and to work with public health authorities and your governments, because I don't think there is a fixed recipe. But certainly I would say the two principles that we have tried to put in place in Lombardy, in Italy and I think the government took a very responsible decision to lock down the region and the country. Are really the principles that are try to increase as much as you can your search capacity to deal with a large number of sick patients that will come to your hospitals. And at the same time work with your public health authorities to see which one is the best strategy in your country to slow down the virus transmission. Maybe in some countries it's full containment, maybe in some countries it's mitigation or slowing down the virus. What is important is to try to control the virus transmission so that it doesn't overwhelm and doesn't overload completely your capacity with massive peaks.
[Newton:] But you would say from the time that Italy imposed a larger lockdown, you have seen some relief. You believe it has worked.
[Cecconi:] We believe it was the right thing to do. We have to be pragmatic. We've seen this working in smaller areas that were contained at the very beginning, so we hope that this will work also in the larger areas and the whole of the country. We have to remember that incubation period of the virus can be up to 14 days. So we are bracing for a significant surge even in the next days, despite the maneuvers probably being effective. And we hope that it will be effective, but we cannot give up all the other things we are doing to try to care for everyone where we hope that the containment will work. And we hope to have some good news about this over the next few days.
[Newton:] And of course, we do as well. Before I let you, go, though, I want to ask you, what has it been like? I mean, everyone around the world has been dealing with their own particular stress with this virus. But as frontline health care workers, in your wards, in your hospitals, what has it been like, what kind of a toll has it taken on the frontline to health care workers?
[Cecconi:] It has been an enormous effort. I would have never thought I would face this in my career. I can tell you personally, it is probably the biggest challenge I had in my career so far. We really tried to do our best, but I would also say it is an incredible moment for the clinical scientific community. Probably the moment in which I've seen the more unified group I've ever led in my life and I can tell you, this is the report of everyone else in the region, and everyone else in the health care system. I'm not talking just about doctors, nurses, health care assistants, managers. Everyone is really trying to work more than what is being asked of them from their normal job to try to face this. So it is tough. It is a big battle, but we want to win it.
[Newton:] And it seems like you are definitely on the other side of it, as you said in those containment zones when you first started the cases and the death rate is down again. We are all learning right now from the frontline staff there, and I thank you for taking the time to really explain to us what's going on. Appreciate it.
[Cecconi:] Thank you. We think it's important to share with the rest of the world what we learn here.
[Newton:] Thank you. And if you want to listen to CNN's very own chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta's coronavirus podcast to help you separate the facts from the fiction. Dr. Gupta talks mass confusion, risks of flying, and much more. You'll find it on Apple podcast, Stitcher or Spotify or link it, link to it at CNN.com. Annual want to join Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper for a third CNN global town hall, "CORONAVIRUS FACTS AND FEARS" live on Thursday at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, 10:00 a.m. Friday in Hong Kong. Plus, you can find all the latest developments on the coronavirus pandemic online. Visit us at CNN.com for live updates and everything you need to know. I am telling you, if you want or need to know it, you go to CNN.com, you will find it. You are watching CONNECT THE WORLD coming to you from CNN center in Atlanta. Still ahead, the new reality of course, living with a pandemic in full force today, in the United States as well. We'll see the drastic measures being taken to try and stop the spread of the virus. And South Africa announces urgent and drastic measures to confront coronavirus, while the South African President says there can be no half measures.