New hope for a covid19 treatment. The data shows that remdesivir has a clearcut significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover. How long until we have a treatment or a vaccine ill to Sir John Bell from Oxford University, where a promising vaccine study is well under way. Declaring victory . I think when you ask how did we do . I think they with a spectacular job reporter with more than 60,000 dead and 30 million out of work, is the Trump Administration risking its own Mission Accomplished moment . Vlt joe biden takes the lead in the battleground states but calls are calling for investigation into his accuser tara reade. Here is a look at my upcoming guests welcome to sunday. Its meet the press and our continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic announcer this is meet the press with chuck todd good sunday morning. It was on january 6th that the cdc first issued a travel notice for one china. Consider what has happened in less than four months time more than 1. 1 million confirmed cases of covid19 have been diagnosed in the u. S. And more than 66,000 americans have died. The American Economy shrunk by nearly 5 in the First Quarter with the worst yet to come some 30 million americans have filed for Unemployment Benefits just in the past six weeks those are the sobering numbers but this is not like another crisis think 9 11e challenger acciden we see it in states stayathome guidelines. We see it in a gallup poll find 44 of americans would be willing to return to activities right now if no restrictions right now while only 4 of democrats say the exact same thing. We see it in Vice President not wearing a face mask at the mayo clinic where its the rule we can even see it in the the wall street journal that the Trump Campaign has ordered trump face masks for supporters. It prompted this statement yesterday from former president george h. W. Bush in the final unless, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings. Equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of god. There are other counts of heroism from our Health Care Workers especially but much of that is obscured by the partisan debate over when and how to reopen this country. We got to open safely and quickly, i hope, because we have to get our country back. Reporter the president is pressing states to end stayathome orders. By tomorrow, 33 states will have begun the process of at least partial reopening. After federal socially distancing guidelines expired on thursday. Mothers day is coming up your mamma told you to wash your hands and cover your nose and mouth if you cough or sneeze as long as we do those simple things and use common sense, we ought to be just fine. They did misleading pictures acting like, you know, this was like lalapalooza on the beach or Something Like that . Hearth black and blue a major outbreak swastika and rifles dont represent what we are from michigan nothing i want more than to flip the switch and return to normal but that is it not how its going to work unfortunately. Reporter president promised to meet a benchmark set by harvard study. Youre confident you can surpass 5 million tests per day . We will be there soon. On wednesday he walked it back. I didnt say it but somebody had a report 5 million i think from the harvard report but we are going to be there at a certain point. Reporter even so the president and his political aides are trying to recast the response to the pandemic as a success story. We did all of the right moves. I think we did a spectacular job. We have saved thousands and thousands of lives i can even make that, if you want, hundreds of thousands of lives. The federal government rose to the challenge and this is a Great Success story. Reporter the language is nothing new. For months as the death toll has risen the president has declared any way, shape or form Mission Accomplished. You have down close to zero in 15 days pretty good job we have done. We are here the end of the battle with our invisible enemy. We can ginel the nebegin the nr our war which we are calling opening up again. Back in february you predicted the number of cases would go down to zero. How did we get from your prediction of zero to 1 million. Well, it will go down to 1 million eventually. You cant just leap over things and get into a situation where you really are tempting a rebound. Reporter but perhaps motivated by the political calendar, th rosier time line. Early summer, we could be in a much better place as a nation. May is the transition month may and june, probably. By june a lot of the country should be back to normal. Reporter joining me is dr. Tom engelsby doctor, welcome to meet the press. Let me just start with a simple question 33 states are doing this we noted that 18 states have hit their oneday case total high of those 33 in the last two weeks so technical not meeting those phase one metrics. Are we ready to be doing this as a country . I think we need to be Going Forward very cautiously. I think if you look at the overall country numbers, we are about 200,000 new cases a week at this point. The last month, we have had something on the order of 60,000 deaths so most of the illness and death has occurred over the last 30 days so, overall, as a country, we still have a long way to go, but the states are in very different places and some states, a smial minority of states are getting closer to the white house metrics of two weeks in decline. In those places if they have other capabilities in place and this they are able to rapidly isolate and trace the contacts of patients with covid and if they are able to diagnose very widely the people who have symptoms of covid, not just the sick people but everybody, those are the states that its less risky to go ahead and be ready to be reopen. Do we not have the Testing Capacity right now to give the states the security they have of making these decisions how much is this somewhat guesswork because of our lack of surveillance capabilities when it comes to where the virus is in many of these places . Yeah, i think the a lot of uncertainty but there is a range of diagnostict in the percent of persons who are who are positive in some states, they are testing so many people that the percent of people who are positive is very low and that is a good number in other places, the percent of people testing is very high and that is worrisome. It depends on where are you in the country in terms of access to testing, the operations around testing, and its like a patchwork across the country. Is there a way . When were you going to know whether this is a mistake or not . Is it basically waiting the next two to four weeks in these incubation periods yeah. For this disease, its going to take about two weeks two to three weeks for us to begin to see trends that come out of the changes in socially distancing, so a measure taken this morning, you probably wont see a change in hospitalization rates or icu capacity until two or three weeks from now that is the nature o the system. What is something that the state Health Officials dont have access to data wise that you wish they did before making these decisions . I think we should in the coming weeks and months, we need to get a much better handle on the number of mild and moderate cases of disease that we have. The good news is that many, many people do not get seriously ill with this disease. But the bad news is that we are not capturing those people in terms of numbers for the country and if we dont know who they are, then we cant break their chains of transmission we cant isolate them or know their quarantine contacts and we need to know about the moderate cases and that will come with testing. I want to ask you something about something wrote at the cdc. It was sort of the odd lacking of missing data that the cdc normally tracks. He said the following. What is going on here . Are we missing a huge component of our Public Health response . I think we do need more data. Clearly, i certainly agree with the need for the data that dr. Jha outlined there i think we are tracking this epidemic in a different way than we have tracked others we havent had this urgent need to understand hospitalizations on a daytoday, weektoweek basis, as we have had for some of the other things we have confronted before. And we need to get better as a country. We need to get our like if you will look at state Health Department data right now, some states are not reporting their hospitalization data we live in a federal system. If they are not reporting at the state level its hard for cdc to get that real data in realtime so i think we need to collectively get better and some states have more data than others but we should all be rising. Lets get a realistic time line next three months, next six months a lot of people are concerned about the fall how concerned are you . And is there any way of avoiding a bad fall outcome at this point without advancements in a treatment or a vaccine well, before we even get to the fall, i am worried that we will have small waves in various places around the country for the coming months. Hopefully, we wont, but as we begin to ease socially distancing in various places in the country,ing has changed in e virus. If we stop socially distancing tomorrow we will recreate the conditions that existed in february and march so what we need to do is continue to our best possible individuals all of the individual ests making around socially distancing, staying six feet apart, wear masks in public and avoiding large gatherings the extent we are able to do that the next couple of months will dictate how we do as states and a country. Hopefully, in the fall we will covid19 that will be mixed with the flu and we both will be contributing to hospitalizations and icu beds so we are going to have two concurrent large Public Health challenges at the same time i am worried about the uptick in hospitalization rate and the more people needing intensive care in the fall but i dont think people should think that there will be a lull, that just because the summer is coming, we are going to have a lull before the fall it would be wonderful if that happens, but i dont think we should at all assume that at this point, given the nature of this virus. Im going to leave it there because i think that is a single most important takeaway viewers need to have dont call it a lull its unlikely we will have a lull in the summer dr. Inglesby from Johns Hopkins university, thank you for your expertise on this. Much appreciate it. Thank you for having me, chuck. Joining me are two state officials central to making decisions how their state should reopen dr. Scott harris is from Alabama Department of health and dr. Janay caldoon. Thank you both for joining us. I want to start with you, dr. Harris, since alabama is doing a little more opening right now than michigan, although compared to some of your southern neighbors, i would argue you guys are being a bit more cautious than others but tell me the metrics you used that gave you the confidence to give you phasedin reopenings. Sure. We have followed a number of metrics like most states have including the white house for reopening the gating criteria im sure youve talked about many times on this show. We are certainly part of the things we have considered. We are not fully satisfied those in terms of cases per day, but we felt pretty good about our surveillance numbers and we felt very good about our Hospital Capacity what our governor chose to do is to make a very measured step, a very gradual reopening of certain types of businesses. We did not proceed to a full phased reopening like in the white house plan things like Entertainment Venues and gyms and inperson person, we have not chosen to do that so far. We think this is a gradual first step. What data are you missing, dr. Harris, you wish you had but whether its capacity or other reasons you dont have there are a number of things. I think, clearly, we would like to make sure we are testing to the level we would like. We probably have a total amount of Laboratory Bench capacity to do the number of tests that we would like to do, but those tests are really unevenly distributed throughout the state. If youre in a bigger more urbanized part of our state like Jefferson County where birmingham is located or madison county, where huntsville is located, you can probably have really good access to testing whenever youd like. In some of our more real parts of the state, we are able to get testing done but there are definitely barriers there for people to attain that particularly if they have to find transportation or they dont have access to a health care provider. We have also been surprised to find we have not necessarily gotten negative tests. Its hard to come up with a denominator so we not percent of positive tests we have we reached out to the labs that report to us but many are out of state and difficult to get all of that information. Dr. Caldoon, let me ask the question slightly different. What are you seeing in your state that makes you uncomfortable advising the governor to begin even a partial phase one reopening . Yes so here in the state of michigan, we have over 43,000 cases and over 4,000 deaths. We are actually third in the country when it comes to the number of deaths while we have seen significantly improvement in the past couple of weeks but over capacity in the southeast part of the state several weeks ago but part of the state are seeing an increase in the rise of cases and we know their Hospital Capacity so not what it should be. We have to get our testing up as i know people across the country are working on while we are cautiously optimistic, we still think we need to be very careful. All right but dr. Caldoon, what are you saying to those in the state southeast michigan is hit hard, yes. Are you not comfortable having sort of a lets isolate parts of the state, tougher stayathome measures for southeast michigan and lets loosen things up in more rural parts of the state . Why are you not there yet . We actually looked at this data on a daily basis regionally again, we are still seeing, for example, on the western side of the state that there are increases in the rates of rise of cases we have several outbreaks there. We know in some of our rural areas the number of hospital beds is not what it should be. Many rural hospitals in the area are at capacity. Every part of the state is different. In the southeast even though seeing a decrease in the rates of rise, we seeing many cases and many deaths every day. We will be working on dialing up as far as how reopening the economy. The governor has actually already started that so we have to it in a incremental datadriven approach. I imagine both of you are feeling pressure, whether its pressure from friends and family tired of the quarantine, pressure from friends of yours who maybe run businesses, or fullon political pressure dr. Khaldun, how have you handled it how have you handled the public blowback and how do you strike that balance in your own head where youre giving fullon medical advice versus let me give you the best medical advice i can for the policy you want to implement . You know, this is certainly not personal people hire me to give mental and Public Health advice and that is what i do. I take you to the governor and other folks in the Governors Office on a regular basis to tell them the facts. These are the number of tests that we are currently doing, this is where we want to be. This is what is going on with our hospitals. And, again, if we dont do well with these socially distancing measures, more people will die and that is just the fact. Dr. Harris, how much have you felt that pressure obviously, its significant as you know. There are, you know, many alabamans that dont have the option of making a living, you know, under Certain Health orders we have to find a way to strike the right balance there. I think our governor has done a great job of trying to balance the health of the economy with the health of everybody from alabama. My job is Public Health is to give her the best Health Information i can. We present the data on just as dr. Khaldun on how many cases we have and what our deaths look like i think alabama has been a little bit different you know, every state is different. 51 different plans for reopening, i guess, because we are all trying to look at the data and make our own decisions with the best information that we have about how to proceed but there are people who are certainly wanting to maintain their livelihood and their businesses and we have to balance that with keeping everyone safe and healthy as much as possible. Dr. Harris, are you concerned that california has been more aggressive senator doug jones in alabama has encouraged alabamians to be careful traveling to georgia. We look at that very closely. Certainly some good aspects about having, you know, every state having its own plan because every state is a little bi clearly, all states affect the others we are watching that very carefully. What we have done in alabama, i think, is, again, have this sort of measured approach and i think what ive heard many states say and what our governor has certainly said is that these arent steps forward that are just going to ratchet forward and never come back. These are gradual steps and we certainly will consider dialing things back if we see an increase in cases. I think that is the approach probably all states would want to take. We see where we are after changes are made and then make changes, if necessary. Thank you both, doctors, for sharing your expertise in the sort of the regional observations that you both can share with the country good luck and stay healthy out there. Thank you. Thank you when we come back, the race for a Coronavirus Vaccine. Im going to talk to a professor of medicine at Oxford University in the uk as they think they have a vaccine that is showing real promise t