Opening up america again. The plan, if you want to call it that, is 18 pages. It may have some states effectively reopening in a month. Here is the thing, the president does not want states to ease into this. He thinks we can make a full on return to normal. Theres not going to be a new normal where somebody has been having for 25 years 158 seats at a restaurant that now hes got 30 or hes got 60 because that wouldnt work. Thats not normal. No, normal will be if he has the 158 or 68 seats and thats going to happen and its going to happen relatively quickly, we hope, but thats our normal. Our normal is if you have 100,000 people in an alabama football game. 100,000 people at an alabama football game. That is the precoronavirus normal with no social distancing, but that seems like an unrealistic promise if you think that will happen this fall. On a call with governors, the president who insisted he had total authority told the governors to call your own shots. So we will see how his plan plays out state by state but the push to reopen is out of sync incredibly enough with what a vast majority of americans believe. A poll released yesterday i found fascinating. 81 of registered voters said we should keep social distancing for as long as necessary even if it means continued damage to the economy. 10 said we should stop. Americans are unified on this in a very divided country and they have good reason to be. Donald trump claims we have passed the socalled peak of infections, but that is far from clear unfortunately. There is reason to believe new cases in the u. S. Plateaued only because the country is at a ceiling in the Testing Capacity. So far the u. S. Has more than 665,000 confirmed cases, more than 34,000 deaths from the virus. That is almost certainly under count due to our lack of wide spread testing. The reason people dont want to stop social distancing is people continue to have a very rational fear of this virus because we do not know who has it, and if you have people go back to work, theyre going to get sick and some of them will die and nobody wants that. Look at smithfield foods. A pork processor. This is a case study when you stick to business as usual. A single plant in sioux falls is the largest coronavirus hot spot in the entire nation. 644 confirmed cases tied to just that facility. Thats what you get if you ignore the virus. If people are scared of infection, youre not going to have a functioning economy no matter how many elected officials tell people to get back out there. The only thing that could change that equation at least until we get a vaccine is widespread testing. I mean, think about it this way, lets say you had a big party planned for august or september, a wedding or fundraiser or a big Anniversary Party with 100 people youre going to invite, and you really want that party. Youve been planning for a while and lets say the government says go ahead and do it. Its legal. Are you going to be able to live with yourself if someone comes to the party and gets sick or if it starts a cluster of dozens of people get sick and god forbid someone dies . No, youre not. But what if we lived in a world in which all 100 people could be tested that day. You know everybody showing up is negative. Maybe then you could go ahead and have the wedding or the fundraiser. Just like if you knew your coworkers were tested and negative, youd feel better to go and sit in an office next to them. Thats the obvious reason we need testing on a massive scale and, amazingly, we have seen a slowdown at commercial labs with less testing that have done the majority of the nations coronavirus testing. Now, there is some testing being done by hospitals and communities, not part of this count, but it would have to have been scaled up dramatically to make significant progress and right now there is not evidence for that. At his News Conference today, new York Governor Andrew Cuomo articulated the problem clearly. The bottom line is, well, you need largescale testing. Lets do it. We cant do it yet. That is the unvarnished truth. That is what we need to open the country back up. The countries that have weathered this the best, like germany that is planning to lift some restrictions, have relied on widespread testing as has south korea, another relative Success Story that held a National Election in all this. We all know how desperate the president is to get the economy going because he very badly wants to get reelected but most people are not going to get back out there just because he wants them to. Most people do not agree with cartoonist scott adams that believes losing a few hundred thousand people is an acceptable price for reopening the economy. We cannot truly reopen the economy without widespread testing because most people understandably do not want to sacrifice themselves and yet, while the Trump Administration wants us to get back out there, it has offered no real concrete plan with the kind of capacity needed to do the kind of large scale testing that would make that possible. President trump announced his reopening guidelines earlier today on a Conference Call with the governors. One of those governors joins me for more on what this means, North Carolina governor roy cooper. Governor, i suspect if there is good news out of the president s quote unquote plan today its that it does seem to delegate the authority and call to governors such as yourself which i would imagine you would choose over some kind of instruction from the feds about when to open up. Well, chris, welcome to the North CarolinaEmergency Operations center. We have taken strong action here in our state to flatten the curve. We pulled together our Public Health team with our Emergency Response team, and we have treated this as an emergency and we have succeeded, but essentially, the plan today gave us some guidelines and thats positive, but it says essentially, governor, its your responsibility. We already knew that. We took action very early to try to thwart this virus and slow the spread in our respective states, and weve been successful at that. In fact, here in North Carolina i have already talked about a plan of trying to reopen our economy in a smart way, and ive said in order for us to do that, we have to rely on testing, tracing and trends. The trends need to be going in the right direction. We need to be able to trace after we test, and the biggest problem that we have right now is Testing Capacity. And what we need from the federal government right now is help on that Testing Capacity and with supplies and with personal protective equipment. In North Carolina we have lab corp headquarterd here. And they stepped up and created and a test and running a lot of tests but you have to have the people with the personal protective equipment to go out and take the sample, collect the sample from the person. And if were going to open up in a new normal, which i want to do, if there is one outbreak in a nursing home, i want to go in there and make sure we test everybody, but we need personal protective equipment and supplies in order to be able to do that. And we dont have enough personal protective equipment to do that. We need to supply that to be able to do the kind of testing we need to do. Youre identifying sort of a mismatch between sort of capacity and need that ive heard from a bunch of people which is that labs have capacity right now. The bottleneck on testing is not lab capacity. The bottleneck is the equipment, the swabs, the ppe for people and labor. Its actually there is a lot of people out of work. Would you agree thats what the big bottleneck is to get to the Testing Capacity you need . My state and every state because we do have the labs with the capacity to run the test, but we need people to help collect the samples and one of the biggest problems and shortages we have in our state and across the country is ppe, the personal protective equipment that you need in order to collect the samples. And weve appreciated the help weve gotten from the federal government. We had a good communication from the white house and task force and i talked to the president and Vice President on numerous occasions. Talked to dr. Fauci today, but i think the president doesnt want to believe that testing is a problem, and it is a problem particularly if we want to get the country going again. I want to do it. In North Carolina we are used to having 12,000 people a month file for unemployment. This past month, we had 619,000 people file for unemployment. No one wants to get the economy going more than i do, but i want to make sure we save lives. I want to make sure my hospitals are not overwhelmed with people who are sick coming into them, and i want to be able to make sure people are safe. In order to do that, we need to be able to do widespread testing. We need to do Contact Tracing. We do have to have a lot of boots on the ground making sure we can get that done to isolate, so that we can take precautions when we find out someone tests positive. This virus is going to be with us until we have a vaccine, and we are going to live in a new normal. I want to live in that new normal, but the new normal is going to rely on testing and right now we dont have the full capability to do it. Were working on it. If you notice the guidelines today, chris, it says that testing is the responsibility of the states. Weve figured that out, but we need significant help from the federal government right now. When you talk about normal, no one can predict the future, but the president was talking about normal being 100,000 at an alabama football game. That is what the precoronavirus normal is but the question about like this coming College Basketball season there are going to be 20,000 at the duke unc game . Do you envision that being a realistic reality . Were going to have to look at the trends. Were going to have to put the testing in place that we need and do the tracing in order to determine what kind of reopening that were doing, but like in your first phase, like theyre talking about, you know, the new normal would be going into a restaurant but realizing that it would have to be limited capacity. A lot of people Wearing Masks and probably watching that duke carolina basketball game on tv but without live inperson fans being there. Thats the kind of new normal that were going to have to live with for a while as to when we can get back to normal, its going to depend on putting all of this together with testing. Its going to depend on effective treatments. It mostly going to depend on whenever we get that vaccine discovered, manufactured and administered across the country. Governor cooper of North Carolina, thank you so much for making time tonight, sir. Thanks, chris. Appreciate it. Joining me now for more on how we get our testing where it needs to be, dr. Asheesh jha, director of Harvard GlobalHealth Institute and professor of global harvard medical school. First, the idea of a phased in distributed reopening of the economy plan, how does that strike you . Thats good. I looked at the plan, i said okay. I like that. It should be phased in. It should be done slowly and done with metrics. I think the conception sounded right. Then you get into details, which is where it gets more challenging. Thats the thing. The problem is its a little like my plan to dunk a basketball. You know, i can plan to do that. I can plan a lot. I can practice. But can i do it . Thats sort of the question here, right . I mean, the plan of like we have these metrics and phase it in and do testing but getting to Testing Capacity is the big bottleneck. Is that how you understand it . There are a couple bigger issues. One of them certainly is and maybe the single most important issue is the issue of testing. We fundamentally cannot we can open up whenever we want, chris. The question isnt that. The question is can we stay open . Can we not can we avoid massive outbreaks . We cant do that without substantial more testing. And the other thing i keep thinking about is, it should be the case, theres a weird thing in this discourse driven by protests and folks, some of the president s propagandists and a few kind of cranks on the right there is this tension between the Public Health concern and economy but if you open up and there is a huge outbreak in a city and a bunch of people get sick at an Office Building and a number of them die, the economy is going to shut down. People arent going to go to work. You havent succeeded in doing anything if that happens. I thought from day one this is a false choice for exactly the reasons you articulate. Imagine the hospital is overwhelmed, people are dying, nurses and doctors are getting sick and dying. Do you think people will want to go to restaurants and bars and get on a plane to go to disney world . No, thats not happening. We have to fix the problem. This was created by a Health Problem and the economy will take care of itself. The economy comes after dealing with the virus. We cant deal with the virus until we know who has the virus, and we dont know who has the virus unless we get more testing. Do you have a clear sense. There was a ramp up of testing. At one point it was appearing to plateau. The white house makes the argument thats the Lab Processing plateaued because there are more tests being run in hospitals. It true that is expanding. Not nearly enough. Do you have a clear sense of what the bottleneck here is, like how to go from 150,000 a day to 1. 5 million a day . Yeah, weve been trying to know how many we should be doing. Our best estimate is we should be doing 500,000, 600,000 a day to stay open. That the three to four times. Then the question is what is causing the bottleneck . Ive been talking to lab companies, states, anybody willing to talk to me to sort it out. The bottlenecks vary from state to state. Sometimes, there are still states stuck on number of swabs and im like were shut down because we dont have enough swabs . You find you mean like wait a second. Wait a second. Ive heard this, too. Swabs. You mean like literally the extended q tips, like not enough of the extended q tips . Correct. We cant test everybody we need to test because we dont have the right size q tips. And the Economic Cost of being shut down is so massive and there are like four or five Things Holding us back and you would think somebody in the federal government would say, were going to throw whatever we need to throw at fixing these four or five things. Some have more than enough swabs but not enough reagents. Some have more of one and not enough of the other. Seems like we could share. There is a blocking and tackling problem. Its not going to get solved by 50 states all going it alone and to me the biggest disappointment until the report is the president said to the states when it comes to testing, youre on your own. Its not going to work. Were not going to be able to stay open like this. All right. Dr. Jha, its always illuminating when we get to talk to you. Thank you for making time tonight. Thanks, chris. Weve talked about the vital role testing will play but Contact Tracing which Governor Cooper talked about will be just as crucial. What it is, how its done and who is already trying it out after this. [ ] think you need to buy expensive skincare products to see dramatic results . Try olay skin care. Just one jar of microsculpting cream has the hydrating power of 5 jars of a prestige cream, which helps plump skin cells and visibly smooth wrinkles. While new olay retinol24. Provides visibly smoother, brighter skin. For dramatic skincare results, try olay. And now receive 25 off your purchase at olay. Com brand power. Helping you buy better. Daddy, i found you good job. Now im gonna stay here and you go hide. Watch your favorites from anywhere in the house with the Xfinity Stream app. Free with your xfinity service. Now any room can be a tv room. Stream live tv, on demand shows and movies, even your dvr recordings. Download the Xfinity Stream app today to stream the entertainment you love. Take a look at this graph from the financial times. Its become something of a famous graph for coronavirus watchers. You can see that there are countries that have been successful in flattening the curve and turning the corner against the coronavirus, those ones down at the bottom, right like new zealand, australia, south korea, norway. They were all able to control the virus and one thing they have in common, they have a regime of testing and crucially Contact Tracing. The idea behind Contact Tracing you idson that test positive, right . Test, find out someone is positive and find people around that person and allows Health Officials to track the virus and slow the spread. Iceland is another country that had had success with widespread tracing and Contact Tracing, things weve not been successful at here. The things we used in iceland to test widely to bring about this kind of control, these are all things we learned from the americans. You taught us how to do this but havent been doing it yourself, and that is pretty sad. You hear what he just said, to sequence the virus from everyone infected and that we taught them, the americans, but havent done it. Can that be done here . My next guest is trying to do just that. Joining me now is chief medical officer at partners in health to run a new coronavirus Contact Tracing project in massachusetts. And doctor, maybe just can you just start by describing what a