U.S. Averaging Over 1,000 Coronavirus Deaths Every Day
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: And if you would like more information those stories, please visit CNNHeroes.com. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you for being with me. "THE LEAD" starts right now.</s>PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Pamela Brown, in for Jake Tapper today. And we begin with the health lead. The CDC is now projecting the U.S. could see up to 200,000 total deaths in a matter of weeks. The U.S. has continued to average over 1,000 deaths every day for 18 days in a row now. Take that in. California just became the first state to mark 600,000 cases. And Florida and Georgia lead the nation in the number of new infections per capita. In fact, the White House Coronavirus Task Force has even urged Georgia to adopt a mask mandate, according to "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution." As CNN's Kyung Lah reports, it comes to schools and families grapple with the realities of reopening.</s>HILARY PORTERFIELD, PARENT: It was terrifying. It was, my worst fears had come true.</s>KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That's how this Georgia parent ends a traumatic back-to-school week, her child quarantined, like more than 2,000 students, teachers and staffers across five states, at least 230 positive COVID cases now reported from schools. The head of the CDC says reopening schools can't be done quickly.</s>DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, CDC DIRECTOR: Yes, we don't want to pressure anybody. Our guidance is there to help them begin to open, as I said, safely and sensibly. The timing of that is going to have to be decided one school at a time.</s>LAH: Given what he's seen, this Arizona teacher says he's quitting.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We weren't given the option to teach from home, no. It's a small room. There's one exit. There's -- the ventilation isn't all that great for schools. And so it's just -- it's not a good situation.</s>LAH: But the Trump administration continues to assist schools reopen. The radiologist tasked to back up the president's own theories driven by this belief:</s>DR. SCOTT ATLAS, WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: We know that the risk of the disease is extremely low for children, even less than that of seasonal flu. We know that the harms of locking out the children from school are enormous.</s>LAH: While COVID does rarely kill children, they can infect their homes and community. One state pushing schools to open while resisting a statewide mass mandate is Georgia. "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" obtained White House Coronavirus Task Force recommendations stating: "There is widespread and expanding community viral spread," and it would strongly recommend a statewide mask mandate. The spread of COVID in California is slowing. But the state reported a grim marker, more than 600,000 cases, the most of any U.S. state.</s>REP. RAUL RUIZ (D-CA): The numbers are very high, and they're actually much higher in underserved and disproportionately affecting people of color and Latinos here in California.</s>LAH: Nationwide, cases are trending down in most states, seen here in green. But in the last week, the U.S. reported more than 360,000 cases, enough to fill Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium more than five times, and the death toll continues to stand at more than 1,000 lives lost every single day. In three weeks, predicts the CDC, between 180,000 and 200,000 Americans will have died from</s>COVID. DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NIAID DIRECTOR: I'm old enough to have been a baby during World War II, but I remember how the country absolutely pulled together. We put together after 9/11. This is equivalent to that, Matt. And we have got both together.</s>LAH: And we're learning this guidance from the CDC, updated guidance, that if you get COVID and you recover, the CDC guidance now says that you do not have to quarantine or get tested for three months. Pam, it is only, though, if you're not showing symptoms -- Pam.</s>BROWN: All right. Kyung Lah, thank you so much for bringing us the latest there. And I want to turn now to Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Michael, great to see you.</s>DR. MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA CENTER FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH: Good to see you again.</s>BROWN: I want to start with what we just heard from Dr. Scott Atlas, who we know is an adviser to President Trump on coronavirus. He was talking about young people. Let's listen.</s>ATLAS: Young people are not at risk for serious disease from this. If you look at New York City, of the night 19,000, roughly, 700 deaths in New York City, people under 18, that's 13 of them. And there's only one child, which is very tragic, of course -- I'm a father myself -- but there's only one child that was otherwise healthy out of all of those deaths. It's really very low risk here.</s>BROWN: According to the CDC, it is true that people under 18 have a lower risk of getting hospitalized or dying from the virus. But there has been a 90 percent increase in the number of COVID-19 cases among children in the U.S. and at least 90 children have died from the virus. How do you describe the risk for young people and their role in spreading this virus?</s>OSTERHOLM: Well, thank you. First of all, we have to understand that we're calling children everyone basically under 20 years of age. And for this disease, that's not really helpful. Right now, we know that kids under age 8 or 9 do act very differently than do their older siblings who are in junior high or high school. And we do see fewer cases. For example, here in the state of Minnesota, we have actually had our child day care centers open all through the summer, and we have not seen any problems whatsoever in that area that would be of major public health concern. So I understand that, while we surely can handle the younger kids, and potentially bring them back to school when communities are not themselves on fire, the older kids, i.e., the adolescents and the young adults, are very different. Their situation is, they do have a higher risk of some severe disease, although still low. But what their real risk is, is bringing the virus to the rest of the community. I worry very much about what's going to happen post-Labor Day, as our high schools, our colleges and our universities come back together. We're already seeing evidence of widespread transmission. Even the earliest activities, I think they pose a great risk to our communities.</s>BROWN: Yes, I mean, there's two aspects of this, how sick kids can get and how they transmit. I know, as a mother of two children, how often my toddler son would bring home germs and I would get sick. All last year, I was sick constantly. And you heard Dr. Atlas talk about the flu, saying that fewer kids have died from COVID than the flu, which is true as of now. Is that a fair comparison, though?</s>OSTERHOLM: Well, I guess any comparison, you can say, is fair or unfair. All I would say is, I don't think it's helpful. I think the challenge we have is getting information to parents and to educators about what we might expect. I think that it's fair to say, with what we know now, younger kids, kids under age 8 or 9, will in fact transmit less, they will not see as many -- nearly as many problems as those older. Where I concentrate my big concern right now for our communities is in adolescents and senior high school kids, young adults. At this point, that's where we're going to see a lot of the transmission that could pose then a risk to teachers. It could pose a risk to other members of the community. That's what we need to really work on right now.</s>BROWN: Right. And there was that study out of South Korea showing that young adults, like you pointed out, are just as likely as adults, or nearly as likely as adults, to transmit. You wrote this op-ed in "The New York Times" I read, and this is what it said. You said, in order to save lives and save the economy, we need another lockdown. Do you really think Americans can tolerate another lockdown? Because, as you know, Dr. Fauci has said it could be something in the middle. It doesn't have to be binary.</s>OSTERHOLM: Well, I am not sure that that's the case. Let me just say that, right now, the best evidence we have is, until we keep people separated enough, so that we can really slow down transmission, at best, we have a lukewarm response, and we kind of do it, just like we did last March, April and May. We kind of did it, a slowdown, not a lockdown. If you look at the other countries of the world that really kept people apart until they drove the virus level down to less than one case per 100,000 population per day, they are the ones that basically have largely been able to reopen, even though they're still seeing cases, and they're still dealing with it. They have a very different situation. So my responses to those that say, can we do this or not, you're right. I understand completely. But in that same op-ed piece, we laid out the economic issues, and talked about how we have to hold America whole, all the workers, all the small businesses, city and state governments, and we can do that. We can afford to do that. I think the most important message is, If we don't do that, we are going to be talking about potentially over 100,000 cases a day. We're going to see those cases country bleed slowly to an economic death. And that's what we have to understand. So we have a choice. You can pay me now or pay me later. And doing it now is going to save many, many lives and, actually, in the long run, has a much, much more positive view on the economy outcome.</s>BROWN: So you don't think that the mitigation efforts, social distancing, wearing a mask, you don't think that that's enough right now? You think that the country needs to go into total lockdown to get this pandemic under control?</s>OSTERHOLM: Well, let me just ask you. I mean, you have been watching all of this, as has every other American for the last months, and you saw what happened just within within recent weeks of these large, large case numbers around the country. We still are seeing cases increasing. And I think that the challenge is, is that, right now, we're not even getting close to driving it down. I think what we're going to do is probably level off at the high 40s, low 50,000 cases per day, and then post-Labor Day, we're going to have an explosion of cases. It's going to go much higher than the 65,000 cases a day. That sure doesn't look to me like we're doing much, even though we have been preaching, distancing, we have been preaching masking, we have been preaching responsibility.</s>BROWN: Right.</s>OSTERHOLM: Have you seen what that's done yet?</s>BROWN: So, I want to look at the other countries, because you did mention that other countries implemented the lockdown, their cases went down. But now we're seeing a resurgence in several countries, particularly when you look at Europe. So what do you think then? Would a lockdown then be necessary until a vaccine is created? Is that the only solution here?</s>OSTERHOLM: Well, see, this is a an example of using the brake appropriately. What I mean by that is, you got to tap it a little bit, you got to let it up a little bit. There's actually a wonderful op-ed in today's "New York Times" from a leading researcher in Great Britain, who basically pointed out the fact that what Europe did is, they did lockdown, they got it down, they had it down. And then they said, well, just like America, hey, we will just let it go. And what happened is, they loosened up very, very quickly. And so now, in the last three weeks, we have seen increasing cases. They're already having the same discussion in Europe we're having here. The difference is, they are order of magnitude lower in case numbers. It's much easier to deal with 6,000 cases than it is to deal with 60,000 cases. And so I think that you're going to see them actually tightening up issues in Europe, again, as you said, to get us through to a vaccine.</s>BROWN: All right, Michael Osterholm, thank you so much for that. Really interesting discussion.</s>OSTERHOLM: Thank you.</s>BROWN: Well, up next, the Trump administration testing czar joins me live to discuss why he says the U.S. does not need to be conducting millions of tests a day. Plus: multiple states receiving new warning letters from the Postal Service about the election -- what it could mean for your votes.