This is cnn tonight. I am don lemon. We got a busy hour ahead coming up. Covering all the angles of the coronavirus pandemic. Today, the president declaring a National Emergency and freeing up billions of federal dollars to combat the outbreak. The pandemics disruption of the economy is leaving millions of americans vulnerable to Food Insecurity. We are going to look at programs meant to make sure that americans in need have access to food during these difficult days. Coronavirus changing life as we know it by the hour. Many schools are closed. Peoples jobs are impacted. Sports and entertainment, shut down. Were going to see if americans are prepared for whats still to come as the outbreak worsens. And well take a look at how coronavirus is having a direct Economic Impact on Household Budgets and on american businesses of all sizes. But what have we all been told, ever since we first heard the word coronavirus . Wash your hands and dont shake hands. Wave wave. Elbow bump. Just dont shake hands. Well, it seems the president didnt get the message. Shaking hands with one ceo after another at his press conference today. But as Cnns Jim Acosta notes, one of those ceos dodged the handshake and opted for an elbow bump instead. That as stocks rebounded today. Probably no coincidence the president paraded those ceos before the nation and said the Energy Department will purchase crude oil to help prop up the industry. Then set autograph print of the stock surge to lou dobbs. That was a top priority of the president to do this afternoon. Unbelievable. Joining me now, staff writer for the new yorker. Our resident fact checker, daniel dale as well. Today President Trump put his support behind a house coronavirus bill. Declared a National Emergency. Is he coming around to how serious the situation is . Well, its been a breathtaking week of the president short of changing tact again and again and again. I just looked where we started on monday was the president of the United States tweeting that, actually, democrats and the media were seeking to needlessly inflame the situation far beyond what it warranted. By the end of the week, he is declaring a National Emergency. So, you know, its hard for americans, i think, at this point to understand why is the president changing his message to the American People so rapidly . And, even today, i felt like it was really hard to watch that press conference. That there was a lot of veering back and forth, you know . It was a little of everythings under control. And then a little bit of this is big. This is very, very big. Yeah. Little of this. Little that. Daniel, the president said today that google is building a site to help people with testing. Take a listen to this. I want to thank google. Google is helping to develop a website. Its going to be very quickly done. Unlike websites of the past. To determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby, convenient location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. Theyve made tremendous progress. Whats the truth, daniel . So this is comprehensively inaccurate, don. A Sister Company of google, not google itself, Sister Companys named veryli is in the early stages of developing a site to help people in the bay area, in the San Francisco area, access testing for the coronavirus. They do not have a timetable for rolling this out nationwide. And, again, they say theyre in the early stages even of the development of the local site. And so the president was exaggerating the timeline and getting the name of the company incorrect. You know, for trump, everything comes back to the obama administration, daniel. Today, he compared the pace of testing to for h1n1 to coronavirus. Take a listen to this. If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didnt do testing like this. And, actually, they lost approximately 14,000 people, and they didnt do the test. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late. What weve done and i think one of the reasons people are respecting what weve done, weve gotten it very early. And weve also kept a lot of people out. Fact check this for us, daniel. So as we have been covering extensively on cnn this week, the testing, in this case, for the coronavirus, has been hugely plagued with problems. But in regard to the h1n1 testing, in particular, the cdc started developing that test immediately upon the discovery of the first u. S. Case in april 2009. Within two weeks, they had a test cleared and ready to go. They started sending that test out to officials, not only in u. S. States but, around the world. A few days after they got that clearance less than two weeks in. So they started thinking about it immediately. They got it out very fast. And, again, trump has tried to cast dispersions on obama to deflect from the errors of his own administration. Susan, i want to bring you back. Lets talk about the president bragging about his administrations response to this pandemic. But says that he takes no responsibility for the shortage of testing. How do you square that circle . Look. Its utterly consistent with donald trump. And, you know, thats the thing about a crisis, right . It reveals sort of the man in full. And, you know, is there anyone after three years of paying attention to his presidency, who is surprised on some level that he would be focused on, you know, his own image and his own aggrandizing his own role . Minimizing any failures or casting blame elsewhere. You know, i went back and looked, don, and five weeks from his impeachment trial ending to the declaration on wednesday of coronavirus being a global pandemic. He mentioned coronavirus 48 times in his twitter feed. Guess what . The by far, the largest number, half of them essentially, were touting his own Great Success in controlling and containing the coronavirus. Its all about donald trump, even in a Global Health crisis. And i have to say that this week has just been a breathtaking week for anyone who who has ever observed the american presidency. You really have a situation here where its inconceivable that any president , democrat or republican, would have acted the way that donald trump acted this week. You know, and so clearly showing a concern for himself. His own political fortunes and the stock market, at the expense of even a shred of empathy for americans. Today, you know, he tried to change tact in that in that press conference. I dont think that it really was a different donald trump that we saw today. Its a Pretty Amazing week. Thank you both. I appreciate it. Thank you, susan. Thank you, daniel. I want to bring in now, president of Echo Health Alliance and also dr. Esther chu, associate professor at Oregon Health and science. Good to see you. Dr. Cho, i dont think youve been on before, have you . Have not. Its a pleasure to be wihere. So welcome to the program. The president said today that 5 million coronavirus tests will be available within a month. That soon enough you think . No, its woefulfully inadequ. I mean to really understand the level of infection in the community right now, we need to get out there and test. We need to know who is infected. Whos really where this virus is doing really badly right now. And we dont know that because we dont have the test going on. We were told two weeks ago we would have, what, 2 million test kits by now. Theyre not there. This is not a good response. Six to twelve weeks. What did he say . Developing test to get to the market. Six to twelve weeks. I mean kind of crazy. It is embarrassing, actually, to the u. S. And i think we missed an opportunity when, during the first weeks of this outbreak, we could have gone ready and we didnt. We squandered that opportunity as the virus was raging in china. We squandered the chance to get ready, get prepared, and deal with the problem. I wonder if the president had done earlier what he did on wednesday. Exactly. If if we had been more prepared and people wouldve taken it more seriously. Theres three ways of looking at this outbreak. One of the Public Health risk. Getting the Public Health message wech message. We need scientists, cdc, nhi, w. H. O. , to tell us what the issues are. Then the other is the politics. Clearly, there are politics involved in getting a state of emergency declared. Leveraging the funds. And thats a really gaunt step the president s taken but its too late. And the other issue is communication. The communications been lousy. Weve had mixed messages from the administration, from congress, from different members of congress. Weve had misinformation on the internet. Its its fairly disastrous. If you are worried and youve got fear right now and you can feel it on the streets, where do you go for the honest truth . Yeah. I asked in the form of a question but i believe i should have said if the president had taken it seriously instead of saying it was a hoax, democrats, and a media hoax and all of that. And sat down and addressed the American People and say this is whats happening in these other countries. People are getting sick by the thousands. People are dying. We need you to take this seriously in our country, america, this is what we need to do. I think people would have taken it seriously and we would have been in a better place now. The stock market would have been in a better place and so on and so forth. Dr. Chu, i want to bring you in. What else the president said about testing today. Watch this. We dont want everybody taking this test. Its totally unnecessary. And this will pass. This will pass through, and were going to be Even Stronger for it. So its interesting, dr. Chu, he doesnt want everybody taking this test. Its not necessary. But thats the only way we know who is affected and whos spreading the virus. Why doesnt he want it . Does he not want the numbers to be high . What is going on here . That was a very frustrating and confusing sentence to hear. I mean, i think there might be two issues here. I mean, the truth of the matter is we do not have tests available. So what we are doing right now is testing very sick people who have who have come in sick enough to need to be hospitalized. I mean, in the state of oregon, we can test about 40 people a day across the entire state. You know, so i, as a doctor, in my shift to order a single test is an agonizing decision because its an extremely limited resource. And i have to make sure that we are deploying it to the right patients. So the the practical consideration, right now, is that people who are well, who can be discharged, are not getting that test. But it doesnt mean they shouldnt get it. I mean, how do we know where the disease is . How do we know whos spreading it . How do we start to contain it, effectively . We cant answer those questions unless we have widespread testing. How do we know that all these massive containment measures that we are doing, that we need to do, are even working without testing . And documenting where the disease is and where it isnt and we have succeeded. So it is it is just fundamentally untrue that we do not need testing and this will simply pass. It will pass if we have effective measures, including including scaling up testing so that we can figure out whats going on. How many people are asymptomatic and may be carriers, right, and how many people have had it and may have may have gotten over it. Listen. I just want to say that, you know, interviewed a doctor who had symptoms consistent with this virus. Says that she couldnt get tested. Not even doctors treating patients can get tested, dr. Choo . I mean, is this what youre seeing in oregon 1234 . Yeah, again, with 40 tests per state, i mean, i have 100 doctors in my own Department Just in the Emergency Department at a single hospital. This is allergy season. It is flu season. So it seems like every other person has some sort of of symptom that could be early coronavirus. We, simply, do not have capacity to test healthcare workers. Nor can we yank all healthcare workers from their duties the moment they have an itchy nose so we need to make smart decisions about who should be on the front line, and coming into contact with patients, including elderly and immuno compromised patients who are susceptible to the disease and likely to get very ill. So it is a problem simply with our Healthcare Workforce as well. Wow. I want get to some of the viewer questions. So far, new York City Schools are staying open. Is that counterproductive when you are social distancing to have kids go to school and then come home to their parents who are staying home . Dr. Dashay . Well, there is a tradeoff between what we are trying to do with social distancing to reduce flatten the curve as we heard from chris cuomo. Reduce the spiking cases early on so the hospitals dont get overwhelmed. You mean the governor . Im sure the governor doesnt want to be compared to chris. But, look. The the the tradeoff is between dampening down the transmission early on so the hospitals dont get overwhelmed. And then the negative impacts, which are, you know, some healthcare workers have kids. Theyve got to go home and look after them and they cant be in the hospital looking after patients. So there is a certain point at which it becomes counterproductive and there is a debate on right now about what that point is. And we need to know we need to know more about the outbreak to really get to knowing exactly when to close schools. And what size of crowds to contain. I mean, we hear we shouldnt go to mass gatherings. What is a mass gathering . Is it a bar . Is it a wedding reception . Is it, you know, going around to be with family . Or is it a crowd of a thousand people . Well, what is it . Well, we dont know yet because we dont know enough about this disease because we dont have the testing data. Okay. Facebook question. I think its a really good one because people are concerned about kids being out of school and about childcare and so on. Dr. Choo, from facebook, should grandparents baby sit their grandchildren during School Closures . I mean, i think this is where we need to be very vigilant about symptoms. If grandparents who are more susceptible to the disease may, practically speaking, need to separate themselves. But theres also a massive issue with childcare. And we have a ton of School Closures. And how are people to get to work if if their backup childcare system is not available and there are social and economic consequences for this . So i think communities need to be creative in finding Childcare Options that are afford aable f people. So that they have dont have to lean on grandparents putting themselves at risk. And i think i think if there are situations where grandparents where theres no other option and the only way for children to be safe is to be with elderly family members, then i think you try to do reasonable social distancing in your home. You know, its not a good time for snuggles and openmouth kisses. I think you try to keep people at arms length and use as much hand hygiene and avoid, you know, direct and close contact for sustained periods of time as much as possible. Just real quick. I have to run. But people keep asking me this. How soon before you can test positive . Is it 24 hours . Is it a week . Is it two weeks . Is it three weeks . Whos better who can better answer that . You need to ask a medical doctor. You guys dont know. Do you know, dr. Choo . Yeah. Right now yes, right now, our Public Health lab is taking between one and three days to run the tests. There is a lot of talk about Rapid Testing kits that actually give you an answer on the spot at point of testing. I do not believe we have wide availability of those tests, yet. Dr. Choo, thank you so much. Appreciate your time. For answering the questions as well. For millions of americans, coronavirus means a struggle to feed themselves and their families. Were going to talk about what we can all do to help. Thats next. Want to brain better . Unlike ordinary memory supplements neuriva has clinically proven ingredients that fuel 5 indicators of brain performance. Memory, focus, accuracy, learning, and concentration. Try neuriva for 30 days and see the difference. 9. 95 . No way. . 9. 95 . Thats impossible. 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Its our way of saying thank you just for calling. So call now. The sbrapread of the crow s virus sparking new concerns, including millions of people who struggle to get a healthy meal. One organization responding to help food banks secure resources they need to help those in need. Joining me now, claire, ceo of feeding america. I love that name, claire. Reminds me