Trump Resists Criticism; New Models Estimate 60,000 U.S. Deaths; Millions More Expected to File Jobless Claims in U.S.
ROBYN CURNOW, CNN ANCHOR: Hello and welcome to our viewers joining us here in the United States and all around the world. Good to have you this hour. You're watching CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Robyn Curnow. So, just ahead on the show, the U.S. president plays a defense after another huge single-day rise in the death toll. Donald Trump deflects blame from his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. We'll have that as well. New polling shows us how Americans feel about the state of their economy. And Bernie Sanders drops out of the Democratic race for 2020, why he gave up and the legacy he leaves behind.</s>CURNOW: So there are encouraging signs here in the U.S. that social distancing is helping in the battle against the coronavirus. So, according to new modeling put out by the White House, the measure is helping lower projections for the number of deaths. However, the nation has reported the largest number of deaths in a single day. Nearly 2,000 people died on Wednesday, that's according to Johns Hopkins University. The total has passed 14,000 people. So, during a briefing on Wednesday the U.S. president, Donald Trump, says he learned about the seriousness of the coronavirus just prior to enacting travel restrictions on China back in early February. But a former military official tells CNN, American intelligence agency were tracking the rise of the virus as early as November, weeks before the information was included in the president's daily briefing. Some say the administration hasn't done enough. Here's Mr. Trump's reaction to our Jim Acosta. Take a listen to this.</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Why is it we don't have enough masks? Why is it we don't have enough --</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They gave us very little ammunition for the military and very little -- let me gist tell you. You know it. You know the answer. The previous administration, the shelves were empty. The shelves were empty. So what you should do is speak to the people from the previous administration, Jim, and ask them that question.</s>CURNOW: And as a number of hospitals continue to deal with the supply shortages, there's certainly a concern over which areas could become the next hot spots. So take a look at this map. Officials are keeping an eye on Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Meantime, in Chicago where the death toll continues to mount, the city is preparing refrigerated warehouse space that could potentially store more than 1,500 bodies by the weekend. CNN's Nick Watt has more on the day's developments -- Nick.</s>NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A glimmer of hope, a model used by the White House now predicts the nationwide death toll is down about 20,000 largely due to social distancing, but --</s>GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D), NEW YORK: Today is a day in the state of New York with very mixed emotions.</s>WATT: Because day after day, the state is still seeing a rise in reported deaths, and --</s>CUOMO: The number of deaths will continue to rise as those hospitalized for a longer period of time pass away.</s>DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY & INFECTIOUS DISEASES: It's very sobering to see the increase in deaths. It's going to be a bad week for deaths.</s>WATT: And about 60,000 Americans are still projected to die by early August. Right now, we're not even a quarter of the way to that grim total. And every number is a person, a story. Zenobia Shepherd's daughter Leilani just died, age 27.</s>ZENOBIA SHEPHERD, MOTHER OF COVID-19 VICTIM, LEILANI MARQURITE JORDAN: My husband and I were both in the room, and it was -- I want to hold my baby's hands for the last time, and I wasn't able to hold her feet. It's my baby.</s>WATT: The new modeling also highlights some regional disparities of projected deaths in New Jersey, more than doubled to over 5,200. Projected deaths in California down from about 6,100 to about 1,600.</s>DR. DEBORAH BIRX, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE COORDINATOR: We're looking very carefully at California and Washington to really understand how they've been able as a community of Americans to mitigate so well.</s>WATT: A new CNN poll shows the majority of Americans now think the federal government has done a poor job in preventing coronavirus spread. It's 55 percent, up 8 points in about a week. The administration also still watching hot spots popping up around the country.</s>BIRX: We are concerned about the metro area of Washington and Baltimore, and we're concerned right now about the Philadelphia area.</s>WATT: Some states now stockpiling a malaria drug to treat COVID-19. That's not proven to work, potentially dangerous. Florida expecting a million doses today. Georgia already given 200,000.</s>TRUMP: I really think it's a great thing to try, just based on what I know. Again, I'm not a doctor.</s>WATT: Adam Jarrett is.</s>DR. ADAM JARRETT, HOLY NAME MEDICAL CENTER: So, we are using hydrochloroquine but we really don't know whether it works.</s>WATT: And still, we're told, there's not enough testing going on.</s>BIRX: A lot of lab directors can look in their laboratories, if they have an Abbott m2000, if they can get that up and running, we could double the number of tests that we're doing per day. Right now, about 80 percent of them are idled, over a million test kits sitting ready to be run.</s>DR. ROB DAVIDSON, ER DOCTOR: Well, I hope that the federal government is doing more than, you know, speaking this at a press conference. This is a key to opening us back up again, getting these tests online.</s>WATT: So are antibody tests. The White House says they'll be ready inside two weeks.</s>CUOMO: That is going to be the bridge from where we are today to the new economy, people who have been exposed and now are better, those are the people who can go to work.</s>WATT: But for now, still this must be our normal.</s>MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: We have to recognize the progress because people are doing the right thing.</s>GOV. PHIL MURPHY (D), NEW JERSEY: If you're watching from Jersey, please stay home.</s>WATT (on camera): A quick note on those models. Models can change. They can go up or down. And also, the model projecting a drop in the deaths is based on social distancing continuing through the end of May. That's another seven weeks or so. Nick Watt, CNN, Los Angeles.</s>CURNOW: Great, Nick. Thanks for that update. So, the U.S. President Donald Trump has been criticized for his initial response to the outbreak in the U.S. But now, he's slamming the World Health Organization for its handling of the crisis, and drawing a strong reaction from the WHO's director general. Take a listen.</s>TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS, DIRECTOR GENERAL, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION: The focus of all political parties should be to save their people. Please don't politicize this virus. It exploits the differences you have at the national level. If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don't want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.</s>TRUMP: And he would have been much better serving the people that he's supposed to serve if they gave a correct analysis. I mean, everything was, I said, China-centric. Everything was going to be fine. No human to human. Keep the borders open. He wanted me to keep the borders open. I closed the borders despite him and that was a hard decision to make at the time. We were altogether. We made a decision against the World Health Organization. So, when he says politicizing, he's politicizing. That shouldn't be.</s>CURNOW: Well, Keith Neal is a professor emeritus in epidemiology at Nottingham University. He joins me now live from Derby in England. Sir, good to speak to you. Thank you. Before we get to the virus, I do want to talk about that spat we just heard between the White House and the WHO. Yes, it is political. But does the U.S. president have a point? Should the WHO have declared a pandemic sooner, for example?</s>KEITH NEAL, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, EPIDEMOLOGY OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES: I think -- I think one of the issues is after what swine flu pandemic, the term pandemic was dropped as a term that -- in use anyway. I think they declared it as an incident of major concern or some other technical term that they use. I think we look at it as a pandemic but really these are a series of epidemics across the world because each country's somewhat different. And in the United Kingdom, where I am we're seeing different patterns of spread and speed in different parts of the country but like you saw in the States, you've got hot spots started around the country, most of them being in larger cities.</s>CURNOW: OK. So when we talk about the way this is -- the patterns and the models here, I know at least here in the U.S. there's been a pull back in terms of the modeling from the initial high death tolerates, but that should not make folks complacent, should it? Whether you're in the U.S. or the U.K., or whether you're even in Italy?</s>NEAL: I think the issue is in England, we've been on some form of lockdown for 2-1/2 weeks, and in addition to that we had a week before that where people were asked to work from home and more importantly, for those people with a fever or a cough to self-isolate, even -- even if they had a -- somebody in the household with those symptoms. This got around the point of not being able to test everybody. So those people we would have wanted to test we've had in isolation. It has taken us until about probably from the beginning of the month to begin to see a reduction in the rate of increase in the number of cases we're seeing. Quite clearly, social distancing or in the sense that you don't meet as many people must reduce the speed of spread of a disease like this, which is spread by contact between people. I mean, people don't need a complicated model to know the less people you meet, the less people you can infect, which is the basic message here.</s>CURNOW: You've obviously followed and studied viruses and epidemiology. What is the one big question you would still like to know about this virus?</s>NEAL: If I had a magic wand --</s>CURNOW: OK.</s>NEAL: -- and could get information, the information I would want to know is what is the prevalence of people who have the infection in the population, which is information we don't have. We know that there are people with very mild symptoms and probably met a number of people with asymptomatic symptoms who never really got ill enough to notice. The importance of this is that we can work out how far it has spread through the population. And also, if we could identify those individuals, they would definitely be safe to return to work in high- risk areas.</s>CURNOW: Yes. So that would be about whether they have the antibodies. Any other questions that you would like to know in terms of the way this is transmitted?</s>NEAL: We know that it -- we know how it's transmitted. It's spread essentially by respiratory droplets and aerosols, which so an infectious person breathes in and out, and the viruses come out when you breathe out. When you cough and splatter, they come out in droplets. They fall to the floor quite quickly, which is why you need to be in close contact with somebody and quite a prolonged contact. I think people -- we got people who are worried that you can catch these walking past somebody on the street, and this is incredibly highly unlikely. I understand -- some of the figures I've seen from China suggest only 30 percent of household contacts became infected with the virus. Whether some extra ones were asymptomatic, no one is really quite sure. But we do know if you're in the household with somebody, and in Wuhan they were with them 24/7, only less than half got infected.</s>CURNOW: Oh, that's interesting. But that's also probably an indication of why bus drivers or nurses and doctors seem to be getting infected even more often, it's because they are in constant contact as well with many of these patients?</s>NEAL: Yes. I think it's slightly different with the two groups. You have doctors and patients saying people who we know are very ill who are putting out large amounts of virus because the ill you are, probably the high your viral load, because your immune system hasn't got on top of it. Bus drivers, just the sheer number of contacts.</s>CURNOW: OK.</s>NEAL: That's why we come back to the social distancing as many people as can.</s>CURNOW: OK. Professor Neal, I really appreciate you joining us. Thanks for your expertise. Have a lovely day.</s>NEAL: Thank you. Good bye.</s>CURNOW: Bye-bye. So, be sure to join us a little bit later today. There are still some questions we have, don't we? So, you really want to ask Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. They will bring you the latest facts and on some of your questions about the coronavirus. So, do join us for this town hall, 8:00 in the evening New York, 8:00 on Friday morning in Hong Kong, only on CNN, of course. So, still to come this hour, Americans are quickly losing confidence in their struggling economy after a U.S. report with the record number of job losses. But now, a new unemployment report could make matters even worse. We'll have that, next.</s>TRUMP: It would be nice to open with a big bang, open up our country, certainly most of our country. And I think we're going to do that soon. You look at what's happening. I would say we're ahead of schedule. Now, you hate to say it too loudly because all of a sudden things don't happen.