[Rosemary Church, Cnn Anchor:] America's markets soar on that news as well, undaunted by the latest grim GDP figures. More on that in just a moment. Then for weeks, Russia insisted it had the pandemic under control but as the country nears 100,000 cases, the strain on the country's health care system is becoming extreme. Good to have you with us. Well, finally, some good news in the coronavirus fight, and it's centering around a single drug. Remdesivir, the antiviral seems to be the best thing we've come across so far. It's not a miracle cure, nor is it a vaccine, but a study shows patients with severe coronavirus infections who took Remdesivir could recover faster than patients who did not take it. From 15 days down to 11. Now, it also results in a slightly low mortality rate, and what's exciting to doctors, is this is the first thing that seems to have an in impact on the coronavirus.
[Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute Of Allergy And Infectious Diseases:] It is a very important proof of concept, because what has proven, is that a drug can block this virus. We think it is really opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating. And I can guarantee you as more people, more companies, more investigators get involved, it is going to get better and better.
[Church:] Now, the maker of Remdesivir says it has enough supply for at least 140,000 treatment courses for patients, and there are reports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration may announce the drug can be used on an emergency basis. So, the data is preliminary but hopeful, and you heard there from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease doctor in the United States, a key researcher in the studies spoke earlier with my colleague, Chris Cuomo. Take a listen.
[Andre Kalil, Principal Investigator, Remdesivir Trial:] There are two things that are very important for me, and I am seeing that as not only as researcher as a clinician that somebody takes care of patients every day. So, there was so the two findings that we know today that Dr. Fauci mentioned was one, is that the time to recovery is reduced by four days. This is not a small deal, this is a big deal because it's four days out of 15, 14 days. About a third of the time that the patients are going to require oxygen and are going to require respiratory, you know, respiratory support and are required to be in a hospital, it was reduced by a third. So why this is important? Because if you ask me if I would stay, you know, if I would stay two weeks in a hospital and two weeks minus four days I would I mean, there is nobody that would tell that they would prefer to stay four more days because every day that you stay in the hospital you increase the chance of complication, increase the risk of complications.
[Chris Cuomo, Cnn:] Understood.
[Kalil:] So that's from the patient perspective. This is this is definitely something very important because you are going to really have a third reduction on your time to recovery. The second thing that is as important as well, is that there was a trend, even though not statistically significant because the trial was not powered for mortality, but there was a trend for improving mortality from 11.6 to 8 percent with Remdesivir. So, if you put together
[Cuomo:] People dying. Three percent reduction in deaths?
[Kalil:] Exactly. If you put together almost 4 percent reduction in deaths with four, you know, four days reduction on the need for hospitalization and respiratory support, this is not something to take lightly, especially when it comes from a trial that is that robust. Now this is not a cure, as I said in the beginning, this is not a cure.
[Church:] And that only goes to highlight the importance of testing for the coronavirus as pointed out by experts time and again. But the U.S. President appears to be downplaying that.
[Donald Trump, President Of The United States Of America:] If we do two million tests, they said how come you don't do three? Well, we do three and they said how come you didn't four? That's like a that's like a dream for the media, but we have done incredible with the testing, and you'll see over the next coming weeks. Mike, you may want to speak about that a little bit, but over the next coming weeks, you'll see some astonishing numbers. I don't know that all of that is even necessary.
[Church:] Well, actually, it is necessary. But critics say the president is contradicting his own administration's guidance and the advice of experts because he wants to paint a picture of an America that's over the virus and roaring back. This is not the first time he has done an about-face on testing, it's not even the first time this week.
[Unidentified Male:] Mr. President, on testing yesterday you said that we will very soon be testing five million people?
[Trump:] Well, I don't know where it came from.
[Unidentified Male:] You said that.
[Trump:] I'd like to refer to these two people because I don't know where it came up. Everyone kept saying you said there would be five. That was a study that came out. Somebody came out with a study of five million people. Do I think we will? I think we will, but I never said it. We're testing millions of people. We're testing more people than anyone any country in the world by far. By double. By much more than double. More than everybody else combined we're testing, but somebody started throwing around five million. I didn't say five million. Somebody said five million. I think it might have been the Harvard report. There was a report from Harvard.
[Unidentified Male:] You were asked about it
[Trump:] And they said five million. Well, we will be there, but I didn't say it.
[Unidentified Female:] You argue saying you're confident you can surpass five million tests per day, is that
[Trump:] Well, we're going to be there very soon. If you look at the numbers, it could be that we're getting very close. I mean, I don't have the exact numbers. We would have had them if you asked me the same question a little while ago because people with these statistics were there. We're going to be there very soon.
[Church:] But that actually seems unlikely. The top administration official in charge of testing told Time magazine Tuesday that there is no way this country could conduct five million tests per day, and I'm quoting. "There is absolutely no way on earth on this planet or any other planet that we can do 20 million tests a day or even five million tests a day." But the U.S. president has made it clear he wants the country up and running. He's planning a trip to Arizona next week, and want sports to return.
[Trump:] You're not going to have a stadium that's 30 percent the size of what it was three months ago. If I watch Alabama play LSU, I don't want to see 20,000 people instead of 120,000 people. We want it to be the way it was. Now, we're going to wait until it's gone, and it will be gone, and we've done a lot to get rid of it, but we we want to open our country. The people want this country open.
[Church:] Everybody wants their country open. That sentiment is shared all over the world, and not just in the United States. So, could a treatment like Remdesivir mean that economies can reopen? That social distancing and wearing masks is no longer necessary? Well, let's hear again from that researcher.
[Kalil:] I can tell you with a 100 percent certainty Remdesivir is, should not change even even, you know, even with the data we have today, with the positive data that we can shorten the time of disease, we can potentially save lives. Remdesivir. Remdesivir will not do anything to, in terms of public health. Remdesivir is strictly is going to benefit people with moderate to severe disease that are right in the hospital. So, just having the Remdesivir available let's say with the approval, it's great, it's going to be great benefit patients that are sick, very sick from COVID in the hospital, but when it comes to public health, Remdesivir is going to have absolutely no impact because Remdesivir is not a drug to be used to prevent an infection. It's not a drug to be used with somebody on a mild infection or in a home to really improve or cure without any medications. Remdesivir is for a very specific small portion of patients that get really sick that have a higher risk of death and this is the patient population that will benefit from Remdesivir. So Remdesivir should not have any significant impact in terms of public health policy, in terms of opening or closing. This is a whole different subject that will not be influenced by the availability of Remdesivir.
[Church:] All right, we are getting some news just into CNN for the first time in 72 days. South Korea is reporting that it had no new local coronavirus cases in the country on Wednesday. Four new imported cases were reported, though, that's according to the country's Center for Disease Control. There are now almost 11,000 cases in the country with 247 deaths. And for more, I am joined now by Muhammad Munir. He is a virologist at Lancaster University in the U.K., and he joins me from Lancaster. Thank you so much for talking with us.
[Muhammad Munir, Virologist, Lancaster University:] Good morning.
[Church:] I do want to talk first about the good news because we received this in the course of the day, certainly this is great news for COVID-19 patients experiencing severe symptoms in hospital. We haven't yet seen all the data on Remdesivir, but Dr. Fauci says a preliminary trial shows recovery time went from 15 to 11 days. How significant is this considering, I mean, it's really mainly these people who are experiencing severe symptoms in the hospital.
[Munir:] Yes. Well, I think this is really good news, especially if we look on to how many remedies have been tried and many of them really fall down. So, 31 percent recovery is really good news for people who are already sadly have gotten sick and that means that they will leave the hospital four days earlier. And if we look on to the other established remedies, for example, Tamiflu is treating flu, that is not also very different than the reserves that we are seeing now with Remdesivir. So, overall, it's good news. Of course, we don't yet know if this will have any impact onto reducing the mortality, or onto the overall severity in terms of different age groups, but this is certainly good news and we hope to turn all.
[Church:] Right. There was some suggestion that it did decrease mortality somewhat.
[Munir:] Yes, certainly, it did decrease but the study has of course, this is probably the best study conducted so far for looking on to the efficacy of drugs on thousand patients on across different countries. So, overall, the randomized model that was applied was pretty convincing, but yet, these are preliminary research and a lot more need to be seen. But this is certainly once again I want to emphasize that this is really good news, and in many days, we have seen it so far.
[Church:] Yes. And that is exactly what everybody wants. So, Remdesivir will help those COVID-19 patients in the hospital, but for everyone else, we will still need to continue social distancing, wearing masks, and hopefully getting better access to testing while we all wait for the elusive vaccine. So, how worried are you that if the U.S. and other nations open up too quickly and we are seeing that happen now without sufficient testing in place, that we will see another deadly wave of this pandemic and perhaps a race everything that we've gain so far?
[Munir:] Absolutely. I think this is a really difficult time and we do understand that everyone is touching its patience when it comes to the lockdown, because it's certainly a social disruption and no man will like we have that. But we have achieved so far. If we look on to the data on to the new number of cases and mortality they are plateauing or decreasing. So, this is certainly a good time to reemphasize that we have to carry on practicing social distancing and so on. But the matter of the fact is that vast majority of people not only in the United Kingdom and the United States but across the world are still uninfected and these will certainly be, you know, bear [Inaudible] onto the floor and [Inaudible] we are not going to keep burning it until it ran out of fuel. So, we have to really emphasize that we don't provide enough fuel to the virus and we have to carry on with the social distancing and the control we are following.
[Church:] Yes, that is critical. And sometimes that message gets lost. But I did want to ask you this because there are a lot of questions surround the number of infections being recorded in various countries, as well as the death tolls. Some being viewed as more reliable than others. And we have also seen the U.K. revise their numbers now counting all COVID-19 deaths even if they occur outside of the hospital which seems logical and perhaps should have been done and should be done throughout the world. So how reliable or any of these numbers in getting a true picture of what we are dealing with here?
[Munir:] Yes. So, Rosemary, I think this is really critical question and we have been emphasizing right from the beginning of this crisis that the number of cases that are documented are certainly not the true representation of actual disease severity. And probably this is the major reasons for unpreparedness in the countries because until you don't really know the severity and the scale of the disease in the country you can't estimate what are the demands for PPEs, what are the demand for overall preparedness in the hospitals. But one of the contributing factors has been the asymptomatic carriers. So, until someone is not showing clinical sign overall, they stay healthy and like, 25 percent of people who contract the infection they stay healthy, therefore it is really difficult to catch them until you apply testing. And testing has been a problem right from the beginning in terms of scaling it up and so on.
[Church:] Yes.
[Munir:] In the U.K. situation, it has been like that for a while, and we have been stressing that we need to calculate all of those people dying inside the hospitals to be in the part of calculation but the people who have been dying outside the hospital, for example, care homes or in the community hasn't been a part of the calculation. So that was the reason. For the last two, three days we were seeing that there was a decline in the mortality which was good news, but once they started calculating the patient, people who have been dying outside the hospital it seems like we are not getting down. We are now more leveling and flattening. So that is certainly something of concern in the near future as well.
[Church:] Still so much to learn, so much to do. We are really struggling all across the globe. Muhammad Munir, thank you so much for talking with us. I appreciate it.
[Munir:] Good to be here.
[Church:] And if you are looking for some positive economic news, Wall Street was about the only bright spot on Wednesday. The Dow soared more than 500 points on hopes the drug Remdesivir might prove to be a promising treatment for the coronavirus. But that is where the good news ended. The U.S. economy shrunk by 4.8 percent in the first quarter, its worst performance in almost 12 years. Analysts predict the second quarter will be much worse. And yet, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner considers the U.S. response to the pandemic a success. His remarks came less than a day after the U.S. topped one million cases of the virus. Now despite the continued lack of testing happening in the country, here is what Kushner had to say.
[Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor To The President Of The United States:] We've achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So, the government, the federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story.
[Church:] And for weeks, Russia also had insisted it had the pandemic under control, now it's nearing 100,000 cases and 1,000 deaths. Russia's prime minister says predicting an end date for the countries restrictions is impossible. A startling new image showing the dramatic strain on Russia's healthcare system are emerging. Senior international correspondent Matthew Chance has more for us on this. Matthew, the numbers don't add up given what we know about the mortality rate for this virus, and now new images suggest Russia is struggling to keep up with the infection like some many other countries around the world. But what are you learning on this?
[Matthew Chance, Cnn Senior International Correspondent:] Yes. I mean, a lot of very disturbing figures that have come out in the past 24 hours and the likelihood is those figures are going to increase substantially. But there is a whole raft of, sort of, reports emerging, for instance, about particular hospitals in Russia that are being locked down with both the patients and the staff inside, all displaying symptoms of COVID-19. And I think this is important. There are actual in a country where criticism and descent to the official line is quite rare, we are seeing healthcare workers post desperate messages on line, sort of showing how the difficulties are that they are facing in everyday life. For weeks, Russia insisted the pandemic there was under control. But these startling images from a hospital in the south of the country show just how overstretched its health service has become. This cold, tiny room was a laundry storage cover according to the narrator. Now it's a makeshift ward for five coughing women. No room for social distancing here. And these aren't even the hospital's patients. They're medical staff, the narrator says, who have fallen ill with symptoms of the virus and with nowhere else to be treated. We can't confirm they have COVID-19, but a local government official says the women were later moved to a fully equipped ward and several hospital employees were disciplined. Still, it's a grim picture with a toll this coronavirus is taking on Russia's health workers. This Russian doctor says she believes a large proportion of medical workers are already sick, and in current working conditions, she says more infections for just a matter of time. Across Russia, the plight of essential medical staff has become a major concern. Moscow's main coronavirus hospital is reported to have suffered mass resignations of key workers. Like Natalia Lyubimaya, who complaints on social media of excessively long shifts, lasting days on end, lack of equipment, as well as food and salary shortfalls. The hospital denies it's using staff, but even the Kremlin is now acknowledging acute shortages of personal protection equipment or PPE despite ramping up production.
[Vladimir Putin, Russian President:] In March, 3,000 protective suits for doctors were produced per day. By mid-May, it would be over 150,000. Yes, in comparison with what it was just recently, it is a lot. But in comparison with what is needed now, it is still not enough.
[Chance:] It's been just a few weeks since Russia was exporting assistance overseas to the U.S. and especially Italy, where Russian doctors were shown working side by side with a European comrade. But at this hospital at home in St. Petersburg, Russia's second biggest city, ambulance drivers said they were waiting up to 10 hours outside just to deliver a single patient. The numbers, it seems, are already overwhelming, and Russia's peak, according to the Kremlin, is yet to come. But we are expecting an update shortly on the latest casualty figures inside Russia. But in the meantime, President Putin has been preparing the ground in the country for the potential of more bad news. Telling Russians, they are about to face a new and grueling phase of this pandemic. Rosemary.
[Church:] Matthew Chance with that shocking report on what's happening in Russia. Many thanks. And coming up here on CNN Newsroom.
[Unidentified Female:] I'm so sorry. Yes. It hurts when I say his name.
[Church:] As Sweden continues life without a lockdown, critics say it's taking too much of a toll on human life. We'll have that when we return.