Democratic Candidates Cancel Rallies Over Coronavirus Concern.
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: And welcome back. I'm Anderson Cooper. We're following two major stories this hour. Super Tuesday II and the rapid spread of the coronavirus in the United States and around the world. Those two stories are colliding on the campaign trail right now. I want to go to Abby Phillip covering Bernie Sanders' campaign. Abby, Senator Sanders is canceling a rally tonight, correct?</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Anderson, it is the first time we have heard of a campaign event being canceled due to coronavirus concerns. But the campaign's spokesman Mike Casca says in a statement that after consultation with Ohio public health officials they have made the decision to cancel the rally that was planned for here in Cleveland, in just a few hours. Just a few blocks from where I'm standing right now. A source tells CNN that Sanders made the decision to cancel this rally himself. This is after several days of saying that they've been consulting with public health officials wherever they go before hosting a rally. They had about 5,000 people RSVP'd to tonight's event. That's according to the campaign. So it was a major decision for them to do that but it was one that Bernie Sanders made himself. Anderson, in recent days we have had many conversations with Sanders himself and with the campaign about what their plans were to adjust for the coronavirus. Sanders, a 70-something-year-old man who has prior health concerns, he had a heart attack several months ago, said that he is consulting with doctors all the time and that he is running for president and it takes a lot of work. So he said that his personal routine has not changed much except that he is using perhaps a lot more hand sanitizer. But this is the most telling sign that the campaign is responding pretty aggressively to these growing concerns that these large indoor gatherings could pose a public health risk -- Anderson.</s>COOPER: Abby, thanks very much. Want to go also to Jessica Dean covering Joe Biden's campaign. What's the status of Biden's campaign events tonight?</s>JESSICA DEAN, CNN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, we're just hearing from their deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield that they are also canceling their rally here in Cleveland tonight. You see people were still setting up and kind of continuing to. Let me read you what Kate Bedingfield said, "In accordance with guidance from public officials and out of abundance of caution, our rally in Cleveland, Ohio, tonight is canceled. We'll continue to consult with public health officials and public health guidance and make announcements about future events." She goes on to say that, in the coming days Biden will thank supporters here in Cleveland and they're going to have additional information on where he'll address the press tonight. But, Anderson, we started to see yesterday at the event in Detroit, everyone that came in was getting squirts of hand sanitizers from volunteers and staffers there and trying to keep their hands as clean as possible as they came in. But the big news right now, Anderson, just hearing from the Biden campaign their event here in Cleveland will be canceled tonight out of an abundance of caution and over public headlight concerns -- Anderson.</s>COOPER: Any sense moving forward or is this just for today?</s>DEAN: Yes, that's a great question. We're still kind of figuring that out. What Kate said is that they're going to kind of assess moving forward. We know he has events scheduled for the rest of the week. He's supposed to be in Phoenix for a debate over the weekend here on CNN. So, Anderson, we'll see. We're hoping to learn more here in the next few hours about what they're planning ahead.</s>COOPER: Yes. Ohio's governor recommended rethinking these kind of events, obviously both campaigns making the decision that they have made to cancel events today there in Ohio. Back now with our team. There are a lot of folks who have actually dealt with public health emergencies, Andrew Gillum here, Mayor Landrieu, and we actually have a doctor, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Talk about what public health officials are going through, what the governor in New York is considering, how you get your arms around it.</s>MITCH LANDRIEU (D), FORMER NEW ORLEANS MAYOR: Every governor in America, every mayor in America, every county executive right now is meeting with their emergency preparedness team, from their firefighters to their first responders, to their public health -- in this instance your public health officer would be your incident commander. And you're beginning to figure out exactly what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, how you're going to get it done. There's a lot of clarity right now. There is a playbook here that works. Clear command and control. Clear coordination. Clear communication between all levels of government. And you have to be honest, you have to be transparent, and you have to have a high level of competence. Those are the things that really produce confidence. Right now there's a lot of uncertainty about who can get tested, when the tests are available, whether or not we're past containment and into mitigation. All of these things have to get cleared.</s>COOPER: But for all the talk about the vice president last week about a million tests going out by the end of the week --</s>LANDRIEU: Well, just to give you a scale of that, I mean, we have 330 million people in the country. This thing is going to spread, clearly everybody cannot get tested and there are not enough tests and there's not a protocol set up. If you don't have insurance, you can't get a test. You can't get a test if it's not prescribed by a doctor. And you certainly can't get it soon. And so that's not accurate information today. They could be getting ahead of it, but it's going to be a challenge for them.</s>COOPER: Doctor?</s>DR. ABDUL EL-SAYED, SANDERS SUPPORTER: Yes, to piggyback off what the mayor said, I think that's entirely right. Even if you have these tests, you need to triage them to the highest probability of action. There's a saying in medicine that you don't run a test the outcome to which you can't respond. And so you've got to put the test where they're most useful. And the fact that we're so behind this is a real issue. And one of the things people need to understand about containment is that containment literally means tracing every single individual who's plausibly exposed to the virus and then finding their contacts and tracing them. What you have to be able to do is rule out the negative cases, and say, look, we're going to stop tracing them because we tested them and we found them to be negative. But without that capacity, you've just got to assume everybody is a presumptive case. But if they're a presumptive case, you have to keep tracing, which means that you very quickly overwhelm your ability to contact trace. And that's where we find ourselves and these mitigation strategies are really about saying, well, look, once we've overrun that ability out of an abundance of caution, we have to reduce the potential that somebody could be spreading it to another and that really is where we are right now.</s>COOPER: We're going to take a quick break. We're going to have more immediately on the coronavirus with our experts. We'll be right back.