[John Berman, Cnn New Day:] Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is New Day. And this morning, the United States moves ever closer to 100,000 confirmed deaths from coronavirus. That's in just a few months. That toll is truly staggering. This morning, the vast majority of Americans believe that masks should be required to help slow the spread of the virus. And that's also the guidance from doctors. The official guidance from the U.S. government is that we should all wear masks in public. Yet the president has mocked the notion at times and mocked journalists and leaders who wear masks. Now, the former vice president, Joe Biden, is responding in an exclusive interview with CNN.
[Joe Biden, Democratic Presidential Candidate:] He's a fool, an absolute fool to talk that way. I mean, every leading doc in the world is saying we should wear a mask when you're in a crowd.
[Berman:] More on that interview with Dana Bash in just moments.
[Alisyn Camerota, Cnn New Day:] Also, breaking overnight, hundreds of protesters clashing with police in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd. Video shows Floyd pleading with police, telling them that he cannot breathe. But a police officer keeps him pinned down on the ground with a knee on his neck for several minutes. George Floyd died. The four officers now have been fired. This morning, we have new video of the interaction between George Floyd and police that led to this deadly encounter. We will get to that in a moment. But, first, continued steps towards reopening in parts of the country, what does the country look like right now? Well, joining us now is CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and CNN Chief Political Dana Bash, who will give us a preview of her great interview with Joe Biden. Okay, Sanjay, let's just take a status report of where we are right now. In 14 states, cases are trending upwards. I'll pull up the map for everyone to see at home. In 19 states, cases of coronavirus are trending down. In 17 states, they are holding steady. Is this what you would have expected? Is the virus proceeding along predictable lines now as we reopen?
[Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Cnn Chief Medical Correspondent:] Yes, to some extent, Alisyn. It's tough to get an exact trajectory here because I still feel like we're very early on trying sort of to guess the score of a game after only looking at the first couple of innings. But I think that there's a couple of things that come out when you look at that map. One of the states where you had some of these earliest cases, like Washington State, for example, things sort of holding steady over there. And you're getting an idea of why that might be. And also, this idea that it's not truly bifurcated between open and shut. You know, there are states where things have been opening up and yet, aside from some of the terrible images that we've shown where people are really congregating, it does seem like most people are actually doing a fairly good job of maintaining physical distance, of wearing masks and things like that. And we have increasing evidence that that goes a long way. I mean, this is a virus. It's not a particularly hearty virus. If it's not in the environment, not spreading from human to human, it really can't do much. So just keeping that distance wearing a mask seems to make a big difference. It's hard to know, Alisyn, where this goes because the virus is still out there. If people start to become a little less diligent about this, I think the numbers are going to go up. Nothing about the virus has changed. And I always remind, we put this pause in place when we had fewer than 80 people had died and 4,500 people who had been infected. And now you look at the right side of the screen, the numbers have obviously changed a lot, and that's sort of loosening things up. It's going to be contingent on people more than policies at this point in terms of where that trajectory goes.
[Camerota:] Sanjay, I want to ask you also about the antibody tests. The CDC now says that they're only right half the time. I thought that these were going to be the key for us to reopen, to figure out who could go safely back to work. I mean, are the antibody tests worthless?
[Gupta:] I think, ultimately, they may have a role, Alisyn. I think that there's a couple of issues here. One is that there were a lot of tests. And these were the tests to see if you had been exposed in the past, if you've developed antibodies. That's different than the diagnostic tests, which looks for evidence of the virus itself. Now, with the antibody tests, because there were so many tests that got out there early on that weren't validated, there are just some bad tests and they're starting to go back and validate some of these tests. That's part of the issue. There's another more nuanced part of the issue, and that is that the how good these tests are. It very much depends on the prevalence of antibodies in the population. So let's say if there's 5 percent of the population have antibodies, your tests even if it's a fairly sensitive, fairly specific test, it's probably going to still have a pretty high false positive rate because there's just not enough people out there with antibodies. It's called the positive predictive value. So in an area where there's 5 percent, it's not going to seem like a good test. If you look at just healthcare workers where you are, Alisyn, in New York, all of a sudden, you may have a better positive predictive value of the test. Hopefully, that will make sense. But as we get more and more people who are exposed to this, and that's inevitably going to happen, the majority of whom may not even know it or have just mild symptoms, then I think the antibody tests will become more useful. So, yes, ultimately, I think they're going to have a role, but maybe not now, maybe in kids more so than adults because of this post- inflammatory syndrome that we're talking about, but this will change, I think, over the next couple of months.
[Camerota:] Okay, really helpful. Thank you. Okay. Dana, let's talk politics. Somehow, masks have become a political issue. Though the surgeon general says that wearing masks protects other people and helps the numbers come down, though the White House's own coronavirus task force says that we should be wearing masks, somehow the president, I guess, thinks wearing a mask makes him look weak or like a failure or something. I mean, it's unclear. But you sat down with former Vice President Joe Biden about this issue, particularly because President Trump has mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public. So you got right into that with him, and let's just play a moment.
[Dana Bash, Cnn Chief Political Correspondent:] You mentioned the mask, that you wore a mask yesterday. President Trump went to a Memorial Day service. He did not wear a mask. It's not just some people making fun of you. He did. He did on Twitter. He re-tweeted a photo of you wearing it. He's trying to belittle you for wearing a mask, making it seem like it's a sign of weakness. Is it?
[Biden:] He's a fool, an absolute fool to talk that way. I mean, every leading doc in the world is saying we should wear a mask when you're in a crowd. And especially when you know you're going to be in a position where you're going to inadvertently get closer than 12 feet to somebody. I know we're 12 feet apart. I get that. It's just absolutely this macho stuff. For a guy I shouldn't get going. But it just is, it's cost people's lives. It's costing people's lives. And like I said, we're almost 100,000 dead today, 100,000 people. Columbia study is showing that we could have if this started a week earlier, it would have saved thousands of lives. I mean, these this is a tragedy.
[Bash:] But wearing a mask has become a cultural and political flash point and the president is involved in that, even stoking that.
[Biden:] Sure he is. And he's stoking deaths. That's not going to increase the likelihood people are going to be better off.
[Bash:] Do you think wearing a mask projects strength or weakness?
[Biden:] Leadership. What it presents and projects is leadership. Presidents are supposed to lead, not engage in folly and be falsely it reminds me of the guys that I grew up with playing ball. They walk around with a ball in their hand but didn't like to hit very much.
[Camerota:] Tell us more about what the vice president shared.
[Bash:] Well, you know, it was very interesting, Alisyn, because he obviously has been sitting in his house, he has done some remote interviews, but this is the first in-person interview he has done since the pandemic hit, so in more than two months. So much has changed in the world, not just with the pandemic, but more importantly for him in this context in the 2020 race when everything shut down. It was right after CNN's debate where he was still debating Bernie Sanders. And now his opponent is Donald Trump. And he hasn't had a chance to have even close to a normal kind of mano-y-mano campaign style situation with him. And so this is the first time he really has shown what he is going to do. And you heard the language there, that the president is being macho, that he's a fool. At other times, he said that he is basically saying he's emotionally unstable. He's being tougher than I have heard him in the past. And the question is, how far out is he going to go given the fact that he's also campaigning as the antidote to that kind of language.
[Camerota:] Well, at the same time that you hear all of that, I also hear him pulling his punches, Dana. He says, I shouldn't get going. When is the moment to get going? I mean, we're a few months from the election. Is he going to stop pulling those punches or is that just not the former V.P.'s style?
[Bash:] I think he wants to. If we were not if he were not in a political fight where he is trying to run as somebody who is kind of the chicken soup for the country as the way somebody described it to me, somebody who can return to a more normal rhetorical situation and that if it wasn't that, if it was just Joe Biden, the guy who is getting challenged, in his words, a macho way by the president, he would probably be more aggressive, but it's a fine line. And, in fact, one of the things I asked him about more broadly, you remember, of course, last week, the former vice president made what he admits is a stupid remark, saying that to African-Americans, if you are thinking about voting for Trump, you ain't black. He said it was a mistake. And I asked him about the fact that he's running against the guy who never admits a mistake and whether or not he can compete in that realm. And he said, if I do something dumb, if I say something that I shouldn't have, I am going to admit that. And it might seem small but it really does encapsulate the very different worlds that we're dealing with while they're still on the same very real political battlefield.
[Camerota:] Sanjay, as you watch all of this play out, the fact that masks have become political, as a doctor, it must just light your hair on fire.
[Gupta:] Yes. I mean, I've been wearing a mask for close to 25, 30 years as a doctor. So it is strange to sort of see this sort of flash point over something that is so common among healthcare professionals. I understand that, culturally, it is something that in the United States we're not used to. And I remember having these conversations with Dr. Fauci early on saying, what is the reluctance here, this idea that does it make America appear weak or sick in some way. But at this point, it's very clear that they have evidence that they work. I mean, again, when we showed these numbers and what is happening, obviously, it is tragic, the number of people who have died, people who are still getting infected. But the masks do have evidence that they work. And you wear them to protect other people. So this is really about this notion that we're really in it together and it's a sign of respect and all those things and a sign that you're taking this seriously. So I think that there as we go through this, the virus has not changed. Our reaction to it has and masks are a big part of it.
[Bash:] Can I just add one quick thing from a political point of view?
[Camerota:] Yes, go ahead, Dana.
[Bash:] One of the Republican strategists who has worked on a ton of campaigns who I rely on to kind of get a sense of what this all means said something really interesting to me yesterday. He said, the mask has become equivalent to putting an NRA sticker on your car for a lot of people in this country. That, yes, the president is very much stoking that cultural flash point and he is giving a voice to it. But it's the same notion as people who are not in cities like we are in the northeast, Alisyn, who this is the perspective and perception of some people who are very much anti-mask, like these people have the luxury of wearing a maskstaying homehaving a 401 [k] and I'm somebody who has to go to work, I'm somebody who doesn't have a nest egg. I'm somebody who can't deal with that. And they don't understand me. The fact that they can't go to work and wear a mask, that's logic that is kind of hard to wrap your mind around. But just in terms of the raw politics of this, that is what the mask has become already in terms of the political symbolism.
[Camerota:] That's really helpful context. Dana Bash, thank you very much. Sanjay, thank you as always. So, overnight, we saw these huge protests in Minneapolis over the deadly police encounter that killed George Floyd. We have new video of the moment that led to that deadly confrontation, next.