Rescue fund and what is done about oversight when all in starts right now. Good evening from new york. Im chris hayes. The coronavirus pandemic is along with Climate Change a global challenge, right . Weve already seen in the months of this how little the virus cares about things like boarders, how its altered daily life around the globe developed and developing countries alike, the global south, the global north, any solution to the virus to problems caused by the virus will have to be global. Vaccination, treatment, best practices, all of that. Today we learned President Donald Trump declined an invitation to address the World Health Organization while president xi accepted joining angela miracle and macron. I mean, every world lead ser facing some variation of the same challenge, and there is probably a lot to learn from the exchange between countries, particularly from germany to name one example thats successfully contained the virus and minimized fatalitiefataliti. The president refused counsel and advice of his own government, never mind others ones. Back on april 16th, the Trump Administration announced guidelines to reopen the economy in three phases. We keep coming back to this document because its the most orphan document in america. The president unveiled it. They posted it on the white house website. Theyre still there. You can go read them and theyre sensible. But President Trump got so im patient and could not wait for states to meet his own guidelines, the one he introduced from his cdc he started beating up on governors and beraiding them and urging states the very first day tweeting about liberate this state and that. On april 20th, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announced he was opening up the state starting with essential services which also happened to include massage studios and bowling alleys. Governor kemp was out front. He kind of branded himself as a first reopener, not abiding by the cdc guidelines but things have not gone great for him. I mean, they havent been catastrophic, either, we should explain. First, kemp got hung out to dry because he thought he was listening to the president by opening early, right . The president is tweeting liberate michigan, liberate virginia. Brian kemp is like im with you and the president cuts him off at the knees saying he disagrees with kemps decembision. Since then, georgia appears to be cooking the books to show the data was better than it really is or at least making a bunch of errors that have that cumulative effect. Here is the chart. Look at how the new confirmed cases appear to go down on a nice smooth slope. Getting better. Look closely and you realize the dates are not in the right order. Here is may 7th before april 26th. Thats not the way that chart should work. That type of screwup that has been an error in that direction has happened at least three times. The Governors Office says they were not trying to be misleading but i dont know, maybe as a result of these over optimistic messages, some georgians seem to be embracing the reopening and sort of thinking the risk isnt there anymore, its gone basically. The Washington Post is a great piece about people shopping at a mall in atlanta. Outside urban outfitters, jennifer was having a glass of wine as her daughter shopped inside. This feels great, i love it she said explaining she assumed she and everyone around her was healthy. I think people would not be out if they were exposed to anyone with coronavirus. I am sympathetic to the feeling of greatness and temptation of just like having a normal day and having a glass of wine at a place. That does sound awesome. There is no relationship between how good that feels and what the risk is and its not this individuals job to assess the risk. There are other states like georgia that are quick to reopen their state again at the kind of president s behest if his own guidelines say not to. Starting today ron desantis allowed restaurants and restale sto tail stores and gyms to reach 50 capacity. Not fully back but starting. Palm beach county is identified as a coronavirus hot spot in a Homeland Security document. And then there is Texas Governor greg abbott that announced today daycares can open immediately, which again, thats a vital thing for getting people back to work but it happens just days after the state reported a Record Number of coronavirus deaths in one day. So here is where things kind of stand right now as we look to this and think about our own future, all of us across the country and world. We know very clear things about the virus at this point, right . If you change absolutely nothing in your society and behavior and the way things happen, you continue life as usual, the virus will ravaged you and run. We know this. We saw it in outbreaks around the world. Weve been seeing it here in meat packing plants across the country and veterans homes and Nursing Homes, right . That much we do know. What we legitimately dont really know, though, is what happens now with the virus . Like, what does it do with some modified version of normal . And the big question is with modified physical distancing and masks wearing and some policies in place that can we keep the virus suppressed even if we do not implement some kind of Aggressive Program of testing and tracing and Contact Tracing and quarantine and all that stuff. Most virologists i talked to think no, probably not that well see the virus come back. Well see outbreaks in places. Whats unnerving about georgia, texas and florida and man, that does look appealing i have to say. Normal life in the sunshine and spring is they are taking on a very high level of risk with a very uncertain future. And here is the other thing, it may work out. I mean, we honestly dont know. I hope i literally hope it does. But if there are two things that we have learned in this era, two lessons we cannot unlearn or forget, one, you can elevate the risk of highly unlikely events, highly unlikely lly catastrophd get away with it for awhile until you dont. All these actions to reopen aggressively, right, in violation often of what the cdc says, they are high risk. But not only are republicans and the white house and state capitols ignoring the cdc guidelines, they are openly going out and attacking the cdc. Here is peter thnavarro in me the press. Early on the cdc had the most trusted brand around the world in this space really let the country down with the testing because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test and that did set us back. That is a fascinating clip because hes correct. The cdc screwed up enormously. Donald trumps cdc. The trump like its not a foreign saddle ligt satellite. Its in the Trump Administration. We do not know what the new normal looks like but there is a chance of something bad happening, 1 in 100 and increase it to 1 in 10. Thats dangerous but there is a likelihood you can avoid the 1 in 10 chance. We have managed to get by almost four years without something catastrophic at this scale, right . This incalculable scale. There are ka stas fcatastrophes Hurricane Maria but we escaped three and a half years but it doesnt mean the risk was there the whole time and look where we are now. So the other thing weve learned, right, which we absolutely cannot forget when the head of a government sends a signal that they quote like the numbers where they are that they think theyre going down when they peg their own political fortune in what they perceive as an economic fortune to the virus not being that bad and going away, right, that has tangible effects for the way that actors within the government behave. The real risk right now that maybe showed up in the good faith error in georgia, right . We dont know. Was it intentional or not was that when you have governors sending the message to the people in their bureaucracies open for business, governors that do not want to hear about another outbreak, right . Thats contrary to the message. That is dangerous. That is a dangerous message to send to people. Im joined by politzer prize winning science journalist and analyst laurie garrett. I wanted to start on that point because its something you have written about and thought about, ways in which governments, heads of state send messages formally and informally about the virus and the dangers of sending the message like were open for business, this is behind us, lets look on the bright side. I dont want to hear any debbie downers about this and what that could do to actual policy. Yeah, well, you know, this weekend i had the rude awakening of riding my bike around brooklyn, i of course, wearing my mask and gloves and seeing a city that was starting to really say we dont want to go on lockdown anymore. It was like mardi gras. Kids out in the streets in huge numbers. No masks. Getting drunk. And there was a giant party scene and i had the opposite reaction as you were just describing about seeing opening. I felt fearful and i think that one of the things were seeing is that the talk about opening up seems to negotiate mentioning masks. Do you open and wear a mask . Do you throw the mask away . Similarly, do you keep washing your hands all the time or do you say to heck with it, its over . The virus is not all over. In fact, if you look at National Data right now and you take out of the data set new york city, the immediate tristate area, detroit and new orleans, what youre left with is a graph that looks like this. Straight up skyrocketing, no slowdown whatsoever. This downward curve they keep showing is really the downward curve of new york and since new york is such a huge percentage of the total number of national cases, it skews the data. So there i mean, i guess the response to that when we think about texas, florida and georgia, the big question is where is that curve going . Is that there has been a lot more testing, right . In places where cases are going up were seeing percentages driven down in places like texas and florida that are the cause of some concern. I wonder youre skeptical of that maybe as a met trick. You sound concerned about the trajectory of this virus outside the places that have been hot spots and in places like texas, georgia, florida, et cetera. I am concerned. Demonstrators to protest against lockdowns across state lines went as much as 200 miles to attend without masks in tight conditions. These protests and now were starting to see the ability to actually track which viral subtypes individuals are infected with and do the epidemiologist tracing if john was in, say, dallas, protesting and drove back to lafayette, louisiana, we can tell if john becomes infected did he get a strain thats in circulation in lafayette and picked up in dallas and brought home with him. All this kind of work can be done, if there is a will to pay for the science and fund this kind of this is Contact Tracing and its another way of doing Contact Tracing by tracking the genome circumstances. Its like a fingerprint of the virus itself and what fingerprint is in me may not reflect whats in brooklyn. Maybe this is the fingerprint of miami and i just got off a plane from florida. So one of the things that strikes me about this moment when you talk about brooklyn and the scenes of people out in the street is that a, i think its maintaining the sort of social sense were engaged in this struggle for a long term is a hard thing to do but the danger of that binary thing, this is fairly universal like phew, thats over were out of lockdown. If we do that, were screwed. Thats the dangerous thing. We can get some version of normal if we carry with us these behavioral things but if we say that was a long ten weeks or that was a long two months, were back. Thats the most dangerous thing. Well, look at china. I mean, they did the most extensive lockdown on the planet. They declared victory and now theyve got three outbreaks and theyve put another, you know, 11 Million People in testing and many millions more back in lockdown, and i think every single country is starting to realize this is coming in waves. You got to build up a system and an infrastructure that can see each wave as its arriving, do the proper Contact Tracing to figure out who needs to be in quarantine or lockdown so you dont have to do the entire society. You target it. You do smart testing. Smart targeting, and you wait it out and then when that seizes spreading, you can go back to normal for awhile but you got to know theres going to be another round and another round and another round. We are in for a very long haul and just last week, the chief scientist in charge of the whole epidemic response at World Health Organization said something that ive been saying for now three months, which is that theres a very high probability this virus will end up goin ing endemic meaning it l be a permanent future in the human landscape like hiv and if we get to that stage, we must adapt all behavior accordingly. We cant, i dont think, follow the swedish model. Sweden said well never go to full scale lockdown. Well do a wimpy, small scale, voluntarily, you decide for yourself what lockdown youre prepared to carry out. Right. And then, you know, well keep our economy going. They have the highest death rate per capita in the world. I mean, second only to belgium. And theyre the highest in scandinavia and shame of northern europe. I guess they decided those dead people were not important. This is the sort of awful message, right, about the valley of life by the decisions that get made at a policy level and the awful consequences of it although the idea of it is really bumming me out on this monday. Thats why you have a politzer for reporting on the actual dangers the world faces. Thank you so much. Thank you, chris. For more on where we are on this crisis, im joined by former new York City Health commissioner, the director of the center for health and human rights at harvard university. You ran, doctor, a large one of the most agust and important Public Health organizations in the country in the new york Citys Department of health and i wonder how youre looking at this, these risk assessments and how policy makers send messages to people about this, about risk, about being clear eyed about it so that it gets through. Well, one of the basic messages is of course, to give consistent messaging and thats been a catastrophe in the united states. There are so many people saying Different Things and now were seeing the same thing happen with the conversation about reopening. There was a quote from a georgia resident that really struck with me. We have covered and you have written about, you had an op ed in the inequities and sort of effects of this disease particularly among african americans, among people have comorbidities among the poor. I saw this quote and it was hunting me. There was a worry if you highlight these disparities that are real to highlight and talk about, some people get the message its not coming from me. There is a georgia resident in the Washington Post. When you see where the cases are coming from and demographics, im not worried. What do you think about that quote . Does it say about what message people are receiving . Well, it speaks to the long legacy of racializing risk rather than talking about the peoples circumstances that place them at risk. When you talk about who they are, how they are classified. So youll have the same thing happening with the meat packing can kath f catastrophe with escalated rates of covid and the people that work there are latino, not on the conditions they work or their homes or the ways in which they have to commute to work. So this is theres a long legacy of this and it very dangerous because it is really true that our society is segregated but this virus doesnt recognize race. It recognizes opportunity and in our society those opportunities for infection are unequally distributed. I guess the thing that always sticks with me about this is we think about sort of Going Forward is, the nursing home situation just stands out to me so much as something that i didnt think our society would abide. I mean, i understand like the desperate power and the legacy of sort of racialized risk and people thinking well that thing happens to those people over there and over there but, you know, Nursing Homes have been just hammered by this. I mean, tens of thousands of deaths in Nursing Homes and there doesnt seem to be a kind of collective national out cry that says this is fund mentally unacceptable. Youre right. The risk of Nursing Homes for people that work in them as well as people who are residents in them has been very high. Some estimates are 25 to 50 of deaths are occurring in that sector, and the issue is how poorly regulated the Nursing Homes have been, how under staffed and under paid the workers are. So when you have a situation where for example, one of the aids who is having an intimate relationship with the residents in terms of assisting them with daily activities, you know, has to work two jobs in order to pay her bills. Then you have a situation where there is risk. Now, i cant explain the fact that death of the elderly is considered sort of inevitable. These were preventable deaths and it says something terrible about our society if we think its okay that people die preventable deaths because they are old. I could not agree more. Dr. Mary bassett who is a wealth of knowledge. We spoke back during the ebola situation in new york city on the street outside the hospital. Thank you, doctor, appreciate it. Thank you, thanks, chris. Ahead, does political gravity exist during a pandemic and can the biden strategy stay relatively quiet and be effective . The data is telling us after this. Doctor bob, what should i take for back pain . Before you take anything, i recommend applying topical relievers first. Salonpas lidocaine patch blocks pain receptors for effective, nonaddictive relief. Salonpas lidocaine. Patch, rollon or cream. Hisamitsu. And ask your doctor about bikta