sign it tomorrow after he was going to speak in prime time. this makes more sense on the timeline, getting to talk about already having signed it for his speech tonight. this is a singular achievement for his first 100 days in the agenda. as we keep talking about, a year ago today, a freight train was essentially about to hit this country. >> we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. we have therefore met the assessment that covid-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. >> is the worst yet to come, dr. fauci? >> yes, it is. >> can you elaborate? >> we will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now. >> we are moving very quickly. the vast majority of americans, the risk is very, very low. >> and just look at how startling a year it has been in this country as measured by, well, every single metric you can come up with. infections, multiple sushlgs in cases, each one with more confirmed cases than the last. deaths, a tidal wave of suffering that's taken the lives of more than half a million people at a clip of a thousand a day. the surge in hospitalizations, which pushed our health care system beyond its breaking point in many states and regions and then there's the medical marvel, the safe and effective vaccines, one of the few right things we got -- we got correct in this pandemic. they're being dosed out at more than 2 million a day right now and that's growing. that is our lone success over the last year as we mark this one-year anniversary public officials say it appears the worst is finally behind us. here's president biden's chief medical adviser dr. anthony fauci earlier today on "today". >> the virus is still very much circulating in the community and when it is, then you get the possibility of being another surge and that's one of the things we're concerned about. i believe every day as we get 2 million or more people vaccinated, and if people continue to abide by the public health measures we should be okay. there is light at the end of the tunnel. things look good but we've got to keep putting our foot to the pedal when it comes to public health measures. >> dr. fauci's cautiously optimistic comments come as joe biden delivers his first primetime address as president. a hopeful story to tell from the improvements of just his first 50 days in office. the address falls on the anniversary of former president trump's oval office address fi beginning of this pandemic. as much as president biden wants to look forward he's faced with a harsh truth that he's speaking to a nation that's suffered so much, in many cases unnecessarily, because of poor government leadership. hundreds of thousands of people are dead simply because of bad leadership last year. president biden ran on defeating the pandemic, now he's halfway through his first 100 days with notable progress to show for it. it's a pivotal moment, both for his presidency and for us as a country on this one-year mark of the covid crisis. joining me now from the white house is nbc news chief white house correspondent kristen welker, and dan ball at the "washington post." so kristen, just a little -- this scheduling decision here, i'll admit i always found it odd that the plan was for him to sign this bill tomorrow after tonight's address. this seems to make more of a timeline sense here. >> reporter: it does, chuck. and i was just speaking with a senior administration official who gave us some new details about what happened here behind the scenes. we are told based on a conversation that my colleague peter alexander and i had that the reason they thought it was going to need to be on friday is because of the enrollment process. they were expecting the bill to arrive here at the white house today. well, it arrived last night. the enrollment process went more quickly and so therefore the president is going to sign the bill into law today and then he's going to have a signing ceremony tomorrow, chuck, and i can tell you i've just gotten some new details about what that's going to look like. we can tell you that democratic leadership will be here with president biden. he'll be joined by house speaker nancy pelosi, a senate majority leader chuck schumer, as well as other democratic leaders, those instrumental in moving the legislation forward. and then we're told afterwards the president is going to hold a zoom call with people outside who were engaged in getting this legislation passed. of course, because of covid, chuck, they have to be careful about how many people they actually have here at the white house for that ceremony. >> i'm guessing those would have been the republican mayors and perhaps republican governors that under normal circumstances would have been at the signing ceremony? i'm thinking the mayor of miami, the governor of vermont, perhaps? >> i think that that is a very good way to be looking at this and they haven't given us specific details but chuck i think you hit at the heart of this. they are going to want to show that somewhere there is some support for this within the republican party because of course this is legislation that passed without any republican support. and so now the work begins of trying to explain this and sell this to the american people while they're waiting for those direct checks to go out so we know that president biden, vice president harris are going to be hitting the road to do that next week and we were just told that they will have a joint event in the later part of next week, chuck. >> that's very interesting there, all right, kristen welker, helping us look forward here a bit but dan, i want to look backwards. this is a day that we are also reflecting on the totality of this year. and i want to play something dr. fauci said about the role -- essentially our politics played in making this pandemic worse than it should have been for this country. take a listen. >> one of the things i keep harkening back to, that you can't run away from, is that we had such divisiveness in our country that even simple common sense public health measures took on a political connotation when people, you know if you wanted to wear a mask you were on this side. if you wanted to stay in and avoid congregant settings, you were on this side. it wasn't a pure public health approach. it was really, you know, very much influenced by the divisiveness that we had in this country. >> look, dan, we're still seeing it. the republican attorney general in texas is threatening to sue the democratic mayor of austin over masks right now. you can't help but look at this death toll, look at the aggressive way that some elected leaders, starting with former president trump, quite a few republican governors, essentially attacked the public health suggestions and the public health officials and contributed to a worse outcome for us. >> chuck, you know, it's interesting, this is often described as a wartime effort to try to defeat this terrible virus and yet we've never fought a war in which we've been divided red versus blue, republican versus democrat. it was a shocking aspect of how this turned from, you know, an effort to stop this and have all americans involved in it into a political war and a culture war. part of the culture wars that define our politics today and it certainly has contributed to the suffering of people and to many of the deaths that were probably needless. and as you put your finger on it, chuck, the former president was responsible in large part because of the way he directed or did not direct this and the way he undermined the science, the scientists, the experts, the public health experts and it is part of the legacy when we look back over this past year of what did go wrong. >> right. is this -- you know, dan, is this a reminder, how divided we ended up being after this pandemic? and here we are, at the -- we're sort of at a point where it looks like we may -- we may win, okay, we may finally win this battle over this -- with this virus. and yet we're not looking -- you know, it's still despite these efforts. i guess i look at it, do you now conclude, dan, that nothing can bring us together? if we couldn't come together to battle this, you know, for the forseeable future how do we bring us together to be on the same page on anything? >> chuck, it's a great question. i mean, this is bay far the largest issue that the country has faced over the last two decades. that might have brought the country together and, in fact, it did not and in some ways drove the country farther apart. you can start back with the 9/11 attacks and the country rallied certainly but within a year we were back to more divisive politics. the election of barack obama in 2008 gave us a moment when people, i think, thought the country could come together. we learned very quickly that that wasn't the case. this was the biggest challenge of all in the way that it disrupted and killed so many people, and yet we were not able to come together. you know, i don't want to say we can never overcome that but i don't think that there is anything on the immediate horizon that suggests we're going to be able to do that. >> all right, so let's do the reality check for this west wing and for president biden and what he pursues next, dan. you know this is the atmosphere. you see what it is. do you continue to try to keep your promises or do you take a break and pursue a tough on china bill as a way to see if you've got a shot at either toning down the temperature of the culture wars here for a few weeks, but see if there really is a bipartisan group of folks to work with on an issue like that, that's supposed to unify the left and the right? >> perhaps. i think that the administration is still trying to figure out the sequencing of what comes next. they've got -- you know, they've obviously got major campaign promises and priorities, you know, immigration, and they've got a serious problem on the border at this point that they have to deal with beyond his hope of trying to get legislation passed. they've got the issue of infrastructure, which could provide some coming together between republicans and democrats, although there are a lot of issues that divide them on that topic. they've got climate change. there is more consensus on china in terms of getting tough but again i think that there will be divisions on that as to exactly what to do. so i think that they have to sort these things out and it will probably take a little bit of time and the next -- the next big fight that they have absent it being on china, they're going to run into the same problems they ran into on the covid bill, but they're not going to have reconciliation to get them through it. >> kristen welker, last word to you. do you get a sense, infrastructure, immigration, election reform voting rights, china, what path do they pick next? >> chuck, i've spent just about every minute of every day trying to figure that out and i just put that same question to the administration official with whom i was speaking and they're still not giving any indication. what we do know obviously china is something that has been a key focus here behind the scenes and as you point out it's an area where there may be room for bipartisanship. infrastructure is another one. it is hard to see if they put another bill forward without any republican support how that does not undercut the president's promise to try to move forward in a many of bipartisan way and to try to unify this country, frankly, chuck. >> kristen welker and dan ball, great way to get us started. thank you both. one constant through this entire year of this pandemic has been the push and pull and debate over restrictions and lockdowns. what started as 15 days to slow the spread at the federal level turned into mask mandates, capacity restrictions, lockdowns of various lengths that were instituted at the state and local levels. one state that opened up quickly was florida, which never had a statewide mask mandate, lifted all of its public restrictions in september. their republican governor and now potential 2024 hopeful ron desantis has been eager to celebrate that policy and contrast it with other states. >> florida got it right and the lockdown states got it wrong. >> there aren't a whole lot of floridians who are itching to move from florida to lockdown states. but there are thousands and thousands of people who are seeking to leave the lockdowns behind for the greener pastures here in the state of florida. >> our own terry sanders has been covering the pandemic all year in florida and he joins us now from fort lauderdale. look, one of the biggest, i think, misconceptions that a lot of folks like governor desantis and others who rail against quote/unquote lockdowns is that a lot of other states were a lot more open than he wanted to claim. they just -- those states had mask mandates and things like this. but i guess let's start with this, the question's going to be, ron desantis versus gavin newsom, florida versus california, and kerry i know you've been looking at this in terms of who got it right. what's the answer? >> reporter: well, when you do the compare and contrast of the tale of two states let's once again show the difference of the republican governor in florida and the democratic governor in california with what the restrictions were. in florida no mask mandate. as you noted in california mask mandate. restaurants, florida, no restrictions. california, capacity restrictions. and then let's look at the two disneys. in florida, disney world, open, in fact, next week during spring break already sold out. in california it is still shut down. so if you want to look at the numbers on a per capita basis you can see it's almost the same in terms of covid infections. we have in florida one out of 10.97 people who had coronavirus. one out of 10.93 who had it in california. but there's another way to look at it. the l.a. times looked at it and said if california had had florida's version of very relaxed restrictions, basically no restrictions, then an additional 6,000 people in the state would have died. but if you reverse it around, and florida had been under california's tight restrictions, 3,000 fewer people would have died. we put this question about the numbers to a non-political person in the medical community, dr. marty. this is what she has to say. >> if you just look at the actual numbers that -- you cannot make the case that we are better than california. unfortunately not. >> but the governor's been doing that. he's been saying florida did it right. didn't shut down. california and other states shut down, and look at the success in florida. but you're saying the numbers say something else? >> i'm just giving you the raw numbers. as they are these are the values from the center for disease control, and you're looking at twice our population, but not twice the confirmed cases, and not twice the confirmed deaths. and a lower testing positivity. so -- >> a lower testing positivity -- >> those are the numbers, those are the real numbers. >> so this has been a public health debate but also a political debate and chuck, you know it best, so much of the political debate has been over the economy where shutdowns were a huge economic crushing situation. and political decisions were made. >> but kerry, i think there's one other thing i'd introduce into this comparison. the major metro areas in florida did try to have tougher standards than the governor wanted, whether miami did, palm beach, broward, orange county. how would that have factored into this comparison? >> reporter: because there are so many variables, you are correct. i'm in broward county, i see people walking here without masks but there are still suggestions to wear masks here. but just this week the governor of florida has said that the counties like broward that held businesses responsible and fined them for breaking the local rules, that those fines will never be collected. the state has ruled there will be no fines. and even though the counties gave them fines they don't have to pay them. it's free and clear. and as you know some people just ignored the county rules and moved forward, even though there were inspectors and police who came in and said you couldn't do it. so, you know, a lot of variables. but when we compare state to state it's kind of interesting to see that there are two ways to look at it. >> yes, it is. >> absolutely. kerry sanders, i'm old enough to remember when conservatives used to advocate for local control, not top down. anyway, kerry sanders in south florida for us, still ahead on this special edition of "meet the press daily," we're expecting to hear from president biden as he officially signs the covid relief bill into law at the white house in a few moments. take you there live when it happens. to close, twist until it clicks. tide pods child-guard packaging. riders, the lone wolves of the great highway. all they need is a bike and a full tank of gas. their only friend? 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