U.S Marks Deadliest Day of summer in Pandemic; Over 2,000 Students and Teachers Quarantined amid Outbreaks.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: All right. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. Alisyn is off. Erica Hill with me here this morning, good morning to you.</s>ERICA HILL, CNN NEW DAY: Good morning.</s>BERMAN: All right. Breaking this morning, the most new reported deaths from coronavirus that we have seen since May, the most since May, the death toll moving in the wrong direction, just under 1,500 new deaths in a single day. That is double, double the rate from early June. We had 56,000 new cases in a single day. That's a bad number. Again, particularly notable because over the few days and weeks, you can see the amount of new cases has been going steadily down. We'll have to see if we're really to go back up again. A blunt warning from the CDC director, if Americans don't adhere to public health measures, the U.S. could see the worst fall in its history. Overnight, the White House issued vague new safety tips for schools while still not requiring masks. By our count, more than 2,000 students and teachers are now quarantined across the country after returning to reopen schools.</s>HILL: And that reality, front and center as the newly minted Democratic ticket vows to lead Americans out of this pandemic, laying the blame squarely on President Trump's failed leadership and offering a sharply different view of the country's future. Mr. Trump and Republicans, meantime, launching a hodgepodge of attacks on Kamala Harris with 82 days remaining in the race for the White House.</s>BERMAN: All right. Joining us now is CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, she is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General hospital. Sanjay, I want to start with you with just top line number, the number of new deaths yesterday nearly 1,500. We're up to nearly 166,000 at this point. The number is twice what we were seeing at the beginning of June. I know that deaths are a lagging indicator, but our daily case count hasn't dropped so much that I think that we can expect to see the daily deaths drop that much over the next week or two or month.</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I mean, that is the problem, John. I mean, we have seen this pattern happen over and over again, overall confirmed infections go up, a few weeks later, hospitalizations go up, and a few weeks after that, deaths go up. And so we're seeing the ramifications of those significant spikes that we saw several weeks ago, you know, in several places around the country. I think there's a couple of concerns here, John. First of all, if you look at some of the models that look out to the end of the year, we're sort of predicting that there may be a thousand or more people dying every day for the entire year, basically saying the situation is not going to get better. And even if you look at the case counts, you know, the numbers of new infections every day, frankly, you know, we've really been digging into these numbers. I have a hard time trusting those numbers. Why? Because at the same time in some places, many places, you see positivity rates going up, which means that they're still not doing enough testing in those places. So that's a problem. You know, the numbers you can count on more so are the hospitalizations. You can be pretty certain that someone comes in the hospitalized with COVID, that's a true number. Someone dies with COVID, you can be fairly certain that's a true number. The overall testing is still in so much shambles, I think, in this country that we really don't have a clear idea just how many people are infected, which is a huge problem seven, eight months into this.</s>HILL: That may be an understatement at this point to your point about the data that we have and what we can actually extrapolate from it. We have the hospitalization data in Texas. That's actually trending down a little bit, which is, you know, hopefully a good sign. But you pair that with a skyrocketing positivity rate, it's 24.5 percent as of yesterday, and it's been climbing the last couple of days. And this decline in testing that we see in that state, Dr. Walensky, how do we put all of those things together. Do we only look at the positivity rate and the hospitalizations or only look at the hospitalizations?</s>DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: Good morning, Erica. You know, I think we have to look at all of this together and also realize that today is just a single snapshot in time. So, a positivity rate of 24 percent today means we'll probably have more hospitalizations in a week or two ahead. When we start thinking about trends that are improving at numbers around 50,000, that's just shameful. I mean, we should be happy about improving trends. 50,000 is no number to be proud of. And when you see that still in Texas, Florida, also with positivity rates over 20 percent, you know, Mississippi. I think we really have to understand that we're going to be in these hot spots for a very long time if we don't sort of listen to the science, rather than the politics, if people do not take more responsibility for others rather than what they'd simply like to do and to really just take care of our vulnerable populations.</s>BERMAN: The data is noisy right now. There's no question about it, the data is noisy, maybe intentionally noisy. Remember, the administration has changed the way it's reported. We also have the national positivity rate and you can see what I mean by noisy here. I think that we had a one-day spike right there, you can see, in the daily positivity rate. And it's just hard to know what that means. Is it because the number of tests dropped in a single day? We just don't know. Sanjay, to the science though, and something that I think is important as we talk about whether and how and if kids should go back to school, where are we in how young people transmit this to potentially older people?</s>GUPTA: Well, you know, I've looked at, you know, several of these studies and I spent part of the day yesterday talking to a few pediatric infectious disease doctors, trying to get a better idea about this. Look, I think that, as a general rule, respiratory viruses, you know, I mean, we've all had kids, you know, kids get sick with these little viruses. And, generally, they spread it pretty well. I know one of our little kids got sick with it when they were particularly young. You could predict that the entire house would eventually get hit with this. I think that that's still the case. I mean, there was this Journal of the American Medical Association study which showed that kids carried 10 to 100 times as much virus in their nose as do adults. Okay, so that's just one point of data. There was another study out of South Korea showing that younger kids did not contribute to overall spread as much as older kids, but the problem was those kids had largely been at home. When you looked at it overall, out of roughly 60,000 contacts that were followed, only about 250 or so were in young kids. They had largely been at home. It wasn't that they weren't spreading as much. It was that they didn't have as many contacts over that period of time when the study was conducted. So I have to believe. I mean, we'll see, obviously, and in some ways, we're undergoing this big national experiment right now in this country, but I have to believe that young kids can transmit the virus. I mean, we don't know for sure, but I haven't seen anything to lead me to believe otherwise and plenty of evidence would prove these viruses to suggest they will.</s>HILL: I see you nodding your head in agreement, Dr. Walensky. You're also helping to advise the State of Massachusetts, as I understand it, on their plan to move forward. You're meeting later today. How does all of this data that we're looking at, that is noisy, that is important, how does that influence your advice, where you stand and what you'll tell them?</s>WALENSKY: Right. And I look to the science, as Sanjay just mentioned. There are data from other places in Europe, Norway, Denmark, that have done this really well. And you need to first look at the community and the case count and see how much disease is surrounding you to see if you can do this safely. Places that have done so safely have case counts of less than 5 per 100,000. Places like Georgia and Florida and Texas don't meet those marks. Places in Massachusetts do -- some places in Massachusetts do meet those marks. Then you have to sort of de-densify your classroom. You have to make sure that you don't have kids on top of each other. You have to ensure that people are wearing masks. I also want to remind people, we're talking about our kids here. We also have to remember that there are 4 million teachers who teach in these schools. We have facility workers in these schools. We have to not just keep the children safe, we have to keep everybody safe.</s>BERMAN: So, Sanjay, one of the questions we ask in my household is, what is Sanjay doing? How does Sanjay see this when it comes to how we navigate the public health crisis? I promise, I'm not kidding. My wife honestly asked me that when in regards to school. You wrote an op-ed about how your decision process inside your family about how you are approaching this school year. And people should know, you live in Georgia, which is seeing obviously a much higher case rate than other places.</s>GUPTA: Yes. And I'll preface by saying, these are some of the toughest decisions, not because of the science and public health. I think that is pretty clear once you start to actually do something, your homework. But I got three pre-teen and teen girls, and this has been some of the toughest stuff, because they want to get back to their friends and social structure and humanity and all of that. So I don't take this lightly. But I think that the science is pretty clear. Our school has done a reasonably good job. I mean, there is a mask mandate at our school despite the fact that there isn't one at the state level. They have hand hygiene. They're doing their best with physical distancing, being smart about the use of libraries and gymnasiums and other big spaces, trying to do outdoor classes. I visited the school. I spent time really trying to do my homework here. The problem is there's just too much virus that is actually spreading within our community right now. We've seen the numbers have gone up, not gone down. I mean, by the White House's own criteria, the numbers should have been going down 14 days in a row, a 14-day downward trajectory, before you would graduate to the next phase. that hasn't happened here. As Dr. Walensky has mentioned, we looked at our own county, even there's been 360 new cases out of the last hundred thousand people over the last several days. It's supposed to be much lower, as Dr. Walensky was mentioning. And also, the positivity rate here is not as high as Texas, but it is, you know, closer to 11 percent, which is too high. The thing that strikes me overall, and we've talked about this, and just in terms of the overall picture, is that when we pulled our kids of school in the country, there were around 5,000 people who had been infected and fewer than 100 people who had died. And we made a decision that we needed to pull kids out of school. Now that there's more than 5 million infections and 166,000 people have died, we're putting kids back in school. The numbers are higher, they're growing faster and we're doing the exact opposite thing. Everyone has to agree, that doesn't make sense, right? I mean, I'm not a crazy person. That doesn't make sense. And now, where Dr. Walensky lives in Massachusetts, they've done a much better job, frankly, than we have in Georgia. They can point to these same numbers in that community and point to a different picture. We can't do that in Georgia. It's hard to do it as a country because of the overall numbers that I've said. But it's a hard decision, but it's the right decision for our family.</s>BERMAN: You're not a crazy person, Sanjay. You have affirmation right here, I think, from all of us.</s>HILL: I'll second that, yes.</s>BERMAN: Thank you both, Sanjay, Dr. Walensky, we really appreciate you both being with us this morning.</s>GUPTA: Thank you.</s>WALENSKY: Thank you so much, John.</s>BERMAN: President Trump's handling of the pandemic now a major focus of the 2020 race. What the Democratic ticket, the new Democratic ticket is offering as a way out of the crisis, next.