Stocks Tank Again on Coronavirus Fears; Coronavirus Global Pandemic Inevitable?.
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Fears over the spread of the coronavirus sparking another drop on Wall Street today, the Dow closing in a moment, down around 400 points today, not as bad as previous days. It is down more than 3,000 points for the week. To put that into perspective, global markets have shed more than $6 trillion in value in just the last seven days. I want to go right over to Alison Kosik at the New York Stock Exchange. Alison, obviously, a bad day, not as bad as previous days, but do we expect this trend to continue, the downward trend, because the fear about a possible pandemic does not appear to be going anywhere?</s>ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: You make a very good point there, Jake. It is fear and uncertainty about the coronavirus that is driving this massive sell-off we've seen all. And right now, the people I am talking with are telling me the extreme trading action that we have seen all week, it really suggests investors are not confident that the U.S. government is prepared for an outbreak of the virus in the U.S. Some traders are telling me that what could stop the sell-off at this point is some action or positive piece news. The Federal Reserve chairman, Jay Powell, he gave a stab at it a little while ago, releasing a statement saying, the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong, that the coronavirus is a risk to the economic activity of the U.S., and that the Federal Reserve is monitoring developments and how they impact the economy, and that they will use tools as necessary to support the economy. But, interestingly enough, the only reaction I saw from stocks after that was that they went lower at that point, although this is a Friday and it's unlikely investors really want to hold onto stocks as they go into the weekend, just in case there's more bad news to come over the weekend -- Jake.</s>TAPPER: And, Alison, obviously, most Americans invest for decades, not for days or weeks or even months. So I assume investors are being cautioned by experts to keep their money where it is right now, if they can afford to do so.</s>KOSIK: Yes, I would certainly say leave it to the professionals to buy on the dips here and day-trade. When you have got a market that is this volatile, most money managers will tell you just leave your portfolio alone at this point. So unless you're retiring tomorrow, smart money people will say don't even look at your 401(k). And as we head into the weekend, history -- to give you some sort of food for thought as we head into the weekend, history has shown that the U.S. markets will bounce back. But the, of course, question is, when will that be and by how much, Jake?</s>TAPPER: All right, Alison Kosik at the New York Stock Exchange, thanks so much. The U.S. is clearly now at the beginning of a health crisis, but though the president and his team wants to convey strength and confidence, they can occasionally seem defensive. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney even suggesting today that, in order to calm the markets, Americans should just turn their televisions off for 24 hours. Mulvaney also suggesting that Democrats and the media are trying to use the outbreak of the coronavirus to try to bring down President Trump. And he made the odd argument that the press should not have been covering the impeachment trial of the president when the outbreak began five to six weeks ago.</s>MICK MULVANEY, ACTING WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: The press release was covering their hopes of the day. The reason that you're seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be what brings down the president.</s>TAPPER: I seem to recall a great deal of very aggressive media coverage during the Ebola crisis during President Obama's time in office. President Trump's top campaign surrogate, Don Jr., even said this on FOX about Democrats criticizing the administration's response:</s>DONALD TRUMP JR., SON OF DONALD TRUMP: For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump's streak of winning is a new level of sickness.</s>TAPPER: That's the president's son saying that Democrats hope millions of Americans will die from the coronavirus. The only actual sickness here, almost 3,000 people have died worldwide from the coronavirus, most of them in China, but the virus is spreading, including into the United States. The Centers for Disease Control saying there are 62 cases of coronavirus in the U.S. right now that they know of, and there are questions about how the administration has handled the crisis so far, for instance, questions about whether Trump administration officials at the State Department and at HHS made the right call when they overruled the Centers for Disease Control in allowing cruise passengers who were infected by the coronavirus to fly on planes back to the U.S. along with people who were at the very least asymptomatic. As CNN's Nick Watt reports for us now, the World Health Organization is now upping its assessment of the coronavirus to the highest level of alert.</s>NICK WATT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One patient in serious condition in Northern California, potentially the first case of community spread in the U.S., now a focus in the fight to contain this virus.</s>DR. BELA MATYAS, SOLANO COUNTY HEALTH OFFICER: Because the patient did not initially meet the criteria for coronavirus testing, the patient was not in airborne isolation.</s>WATT: So dozens of health care workers now quarantined and a state of emergency declared in that patient's home county. Meanwhile, at nearby U.C. Davis, three students now also quarantined, one of them suspected of having the virus.</s>MATYAS: There are probably cases of coronavirus from community acquisition in multiple parts of the country right now.</s>WATT: And this confirmed case in California is now changing policy nationwide.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We haven't been able to test more broadly. We have had kind of a bottleneck. We haven't had enough testing sites.</s>WATT: Now more labs are online, and the CDC's testing criteria radically overhauled. Used to be only those who had traveled to China or been in known contact with someone who tested positive.</s>REP. JOHN GARAMENDI (D-CA): Where, CDC, did you ever come up with a protocol that was restricted to people that only traveled to China? I mean, come on.</s>WATT: Now, if a doctor suspects coronavirus, they can test for it. Could be the key to prevent a silent spread. Today, Washington state began testing.</s>DR. SCOTT LINDQUIST, WASHINGTON STATE EPIDEMIOLOGIST: The goal is if it's in here in the morning, mid-morning, we will have result by 5:00 that afternoon.</s>WATT: Illinois just kicked its program up a notch.</s>GOV. J.B. PRITZKER (D-IL): We are beginning voluntary testing at select hospitals.</s>WATT: Meanwhile, Google just canceled an upcoming summit, Amazon and J.P. Morgan advising employees against nonessential travel, Miami-Dade schools prepping to teach kids online if need be. And Green Day just postponed its tour of Asia. Overseas, in Italy, a soccer game in an empty stadium and a motor show canceled in Geneva. Best advice to all of us, wash your hands, use hand sanitizer a lot, but CVS now warning demand may cause temporary shortages.</s>WATT: And, today, Jake, the CDC did admit that the initial rollout of the testing program did not -- quote -- "has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked." Some of those kits were flawed. That led to delays. And it is unclear right now how many states are actually ready to start testing. But the CDC says that, by the end of next week, they want every state and every local health department testing for this novel coronavirus -- Jake.</s>TAPPER: All right, Nick Watt in California, thank you so much. Joining me now is CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, thanks for joining us.</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: You got it.</s>TAPPER: You have you have said there are almost certainly many more cases out there that we do not know about. How widespread could this actually be?</s>GUPTA: I think it could be considerably more widespread, Jake. I mean, they have been testing thousands of people a day in South Korea, for example. Here, we have tested not even 1,000 in several weeks, so the surveillance just hasn't been there. And also keep in mind that around 80 percent of people who do have this infection have mild or no symptoms, so they wouldn't necessarily go to the hospital or the clinic in the first place. So I think it could -- two- to three-fold more widespread. That's why community spread starts to happen.</s>TAPPER: The World Health Organization is getting closer to calling this an actual pandemic. You think we're basically already there. Why does that term matter?</s>GUPTA: I think there's two big reasons. One is that it's from a -- from a resource standpoint, WHO, U.N., if a outbreak is considered a pandemic, it starts to divulge more resources, divert more resources to certain areas of the world, and particularly areas that don't have a stronger public health infrastructure. But, also, Jake we're still in sort of containment mode. There's this belief that maybe this can be contained to certain regions of the world, as opposed to mitigation mode, meaning that, OK, we know that it's in these places, we just want to slow down the spread. Once it's declared a pandemic, it sort of shifts, the resources and the efforts, and more into this mitigation mode. And that changes how the public health community approaches this.</s>TAPPER: The CDC now says that the goal is to have every state and local health department able to test for coronavirus by the end of next week.</s>GUPTA: Yes.</s>TAPPER: That's not happening now, though.</s>GUPTA: It's not. And, I mean, this is quite striking. Again, I hate to say this, but if you look at our public health system, which I do think is one of the best in the world, with regard to this particular issue of testing, we're kind of near the bottom, sadly. We have 10, 11 sites, seven public health sites, three DOD sites and the CDC, where that testing can occur now. So someone shows up in a hospital or a clinic someplace in the world and says, look, I was just in Italy. I don't feel well. I'm worried about coronavirus, and many times they're being told by their doctors or the hospital, they can't be tested. As you point out, by the end of next week. That should change. But, look, we're two months into this and days matter, let alone weeks, Jake, when it comes to testing.</s>TAPPER: There's a whistle-blower seeking protection. The whistle- blower's with the Department of Health and Human Services. And he or she says that health workers from HHS were sent into quarantined areas, and they did not have protective equipment. They were not properly trained. They knew that they were going to be dealing with evacuees from Wuhan in China who had been exposed to the virus.</s>GUPTA: That's right.</s>TAPPER: What does that tell you about how prepared we are? What does it mean for health workers across the U.S.?</s>GUPTA: I was really surprised by this one, Jake, because there's there's some just basic public health 101 type stuff. And that is, if you're dealing with people who potentially are carrying a pathogen like this, personal protective equipment, PPE. You have it. You're trained for it. That's stuff that we learn first year of any kind of dealing with infectious diseases. So, what it tells me is I think there was a little bit of a -- obviously an uneven sort of approach to this, maybe a minimizing of it, thinking maybe this wasn't that serious. Officials at HHS have disputed some of that whistle-blower's complaints and how that person has described what happened here. But, regardless, it's concerning. I have also talked to sources and I have asked them. Look, right now, today, if health workers needed to deal with a larger outbreak, how are we doing in terms of resources? And what I'm hearing is, we have maybe 10 to 30 percent of some of the personal protective equipment that we need, clearly not enough. We can ramp up manufacturing of this gear quickly. But we're not there right now, if this were to get quite large in terms of numbers.</s>TAPPER: Something else I wanted to ask you about is this "Washington Post" report from a few days ago. Back when those Americans who were infected were brought back to the United States from the Diamond Princess, that cruise line, the CDC did not want those infected patients to be flown back along with passengers who were uninfected or, at the very least, asymptomatic. But the State Department and a Trump administration health official overruled the CDC. What do you think about that?</s>GUPTA: I think it's some of the same sort of interplay, entanglement between politics and science here. I mean, sadly, there was clear science in terms of how patients should be treated that were known to be infected. In the past, as you know, people who were suspicious because they had been in an area where the virus was circulating, they were brought back and placed into quarantine. But prior to that cruise ship, people who had been diagnosed with the infection were stayed -- were quarantined in that particular area. This case, they just totally flipped the decision. And there's no logic to it. And, again, it's part of this uneven approach to how this has been handled.</s>TAPPER: All right, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you, as always, for your expertise. The Trump White House saying, turn off the TV, maybe we can have a miracle, hoping the virus will just go away, as critics slam the strategy, or lack thereof, to fight it. And the Trump White House is warned that the deal in the works with the Taliban could help a terror group declare victory, the warnings coming from Republicans. Stay with us.