Moments ago california anoupsed at least three new cases. Moments ago, as well, minnesota announced its first case. And breaking now we are learning that the austin mayor officially canceled south by southwest after Many Companies had already pulled out. Now the city has canceled it. There are concerns that the full extent of the outbreak may not be fully understood here in the United States with a shortage of testing kits. It is an expect we expect members of the task force to have to address today and well take you to the briefing the moment it begins. President trump is visiting cdc headquarters in tlanlt after signing an emergency funding bill that just passed congress. Pretty swiftly. On a day of markets fell again, the white house is now saying it is considering what theyre calling targeted measures to potentially prop up faltering partses of economy. The death toll in the United States risen to 14, connected to a longterm care facility outside of seattle. Public anxiety particularly in that part of the country seems to grow. In fact, the university of washington said it is now canceling all inperson classes for the rest of the quarter. After a staff member tested positive for the virus. California, Washington State and now maryland have declared states of emergency. Around the world, the number of countries with reported cases now risen to at least 85. But there may be some good news out of the chinese province where the outbreak began. Officials say there are no new cases outside of the affected city of wuhan. Nbc news chief White House CorrespondentHallie Jackson in the Briefing Room waiting for this briefing to begin. And what do we know about what the president he toured the disaster scene after those deadly tornlds outside of nashville that killed an Alarming Number of of people, over 20 there. Its a tough personal day for the president. What do we know about what hes learned today at the cdc . Reporter he is there now, chuck, actually and a reason i suspect or theorize that perhaps the Vice President may be waiting to walk out the doors and come to us so as not to step on President Trump. The president is there. You can see him in the keep America Great hat touring the cdc. Dr. Redfield whos next to him, the head of the cdc taking some questions from reporters and alex azar. I dont know the last 45 seconds or so but most of it so far has resolved around the issue of testing, chuck. This is a concern for even the governments own top doctors. Dr. Fauci this morning acknowledged he was not happy with the delay in getting the testing kits the people who needed them although he acknowledged other areas of the response are going well or at least gong better. There are questions of why it takes so long to get the kits to the communities, chuck. Secretary azar is saying that the cdc is sending out 75,000 or enough tests to have the capability to assess 75,000 people. There is a private contractor who is working with the u. S. Government here, working with the cdc shipped out about 700,000 more tests according to azar. That is still short of the million or million and a half depending on who you talk to that the administration initially predicted this week. Secretary azar said maybe 4 million next week and there is skepticism that that could happen. I spoke with a democratic lawmaker today saying that secretary azar needs to be trance parent and tell us the truth. Dont keep saying next week, next week. Theres real frustration, chuck, building up here on this front. So that is kind of a lay of the land relating to this testing issue and you have smul tan youly this investigation saying 1,900 people in the country, talked to dozens of local officials, tested for the coronavirus which some critics say is simply not enough. That is why the cdc director in the last couple of seconds, chuck, as we talk here acknowledged that the number is likely to go up. Right . More people tested you will have more people, stands to reason, who have the coronavirus. Right. All right. Ill let you get situated. I want to let you go from there. Thank you. Well come back to you, obviously, when the briefing begins. Dr. Zeke emanuel served as a special adviser to president obama and Austin Goolsbee is a professor at the yuruniversity chicago. And i know the both of you, i appreciate you sticking around. I hope after as we wait to get this briefing started but, doctor, let me start with you and the issue of the testing kits and, frankly, what feels like this bureaucratic culdesac that we are in here. Can you explain what happened . No. Im not sure i can explain what happened. First, the cdc decided to make its own testing kit rather than use one available and used in other countries. From the w. H. O. Sec, they seem to have assembled it incorrectly and set a high threshold or peculiar threshold for who to test. Only if you had been to china initially and then person to person contact. A lot of other people were suspected given their symptoms. And maybe relationships that they should have been tested and they couldnt use the tests and just were not enough distributed. I talked to a someone in Washington State, worked in the emergency room and, you know, they had 300 test kits in the whole county, kings county, to utilize so, you know, they were clearly hampered in taking a wide look. Can you explain why its so difficult to get these kits made . I mean, what makes this so difficult getting the right testing kit . Or tell me what one looks like. I mean, you have got a set of blood tests and reagents that need to be measured. Right. And they need to you need to calibrate them and that happens in a particular lab. So, im not you know, chuck, im as mystified as you are why this is so complicated and why they screwed it up, frankly. Let me ask you this, im not a doctor. You are. Let me ask this. Why arent Health Officials at least taking the cultures that you need to then test when the kits get there . Is that something that can be done . Well, you can. You can preserve the blood, yes. Right. But the other thing is you already have lab core and quest reporting that they will have tests out, you know, either today or by monday so this isnt look. This isnt Rocket Science and obviously some glitch has seriously happened and they didnt follow through. You know, the other thing to remember is, they had six or seven weeks to do this and get this right. It is not like we should be rushing once we have got nearly 300 cases confirmed in the country of very sick people. And probably thousands of cases. I was just going to say, you agree, i assume, with the head of the cdc saying getting testing out there its probably thousands of cases in this country, not hundreds. Well, if the data are right that 80 of people have very mild or asymptom attic then you expect that the area, the iceberg underneath what we have seen is going to be, you know, four or five times larger at a minimum and it may be much larger than that because a lot of people with symptoms might say its flu and not think its coronavirus. I honestly could see that at my household to treat Something Like this as that and getting through it we would nt get tested. Should we be moving to mitigation and or containment or containment strategy worth focusing on at this point . No. I mean, it is clearly a mitigation strategy. It is not a containment strategy. You know . I work in philadelphia. Happen to be in d. C. But, you know, down the 95 corridor, you know, new jersey, now its in bucks county just north of philadelphia. This is not containment. And were having outbreaks in all sorts of places whether its, you know, dartmouth, now you reported in minnesota. Were not containing this. What we have to do is mitigate it and i think we also need to have a lot of tests available for people so that theyre not self quarantined. They can be tested and know whether they need to stay in quarantine or not. Let me shift over to the economic conversation but i want you to stick around, zeke, if you dont mind. Sure. Austin goolsbee, you just heard from zeke saying its time. This is a mitigation strategy, no longer a containment strategy, but the Economic Impact here is look. Appears pretty dire. We may have a supply and demand problem at the same time which is an unusual issue for an economy. Yeah. And not a good one. Look. This kind of scares me a little what zeke just told us because my observation is if you look in china at in wuhan or in the hard hit areas, people were terrified and everything shut down. So people stopped going out of their house. They stopped going out to eat. Youve seen nobody wants to take a cruise now. They dont want to fly on an airplane. The only thing is, all of those services, the face to face services, that you see in the economy, those are much bigger shares of the u. S. Economy than they are of the chinese economy. So what has happened, the severe slowdown that took place in china, if we had an outbreak of the magnitude they have in china thats going to be worse for our economy than what its been in the chinese economy. And you only get one chance to make a first impression. If we blow our Health Credibility right here at the beginning so that everybody is actually terrified and says, you know what . Im not going to leave my house for three weeks, the recessionary impact is quite severe. You had can i say one thing . Go ahead, yeah, sure. First of all, big medical conference of the i. T. People in orlando, 25,000 people, canceled. You look at the harvard website. The harvard website says no international travel. On university business. And Domestic Travel and they recommend that even other personal travel, think very carefully, you know . To wipe out all non what they call nonessential travel. This is a Major University saying, basically, saying we wouldnt travel. Im not sure i agree with that but you can imagine the Ripple Effect that austan talked about. Everyones scared and when youre scared you become very cautious. I want to follow up on that. That is, i get the sense, and this i feel like over 48 hours, it is a we have an ier in sha panic. Means, because theres uncertainty from the public Health Officials about the testing and the diagnostic that theres a lot of private entities that made better safe than sorry decisions and while individually thats prudent, collectively it can look like a panic. Look. I think, yes, it can look like like a panic. If we were at the beginning of a mass epidemic that was going to be like one of the bad flu epidemics, it might be that ep deem logically the correct thing to do to shelter in place and try to have more social distancing where we reduce the rate of infection. My only observation is that from an Economic Perspective if we start the social distancing thats going to have a major negative impact on the u. S. Economy because all rich economies are dominated by the very services that you stop doing when you go into that social distancing and thats not the kind of recession thats that easy to get out of with just some stimulus because the fed i was going to say, yeah. What is the stimulus that you would do . You are not going out to the restaurant. Right. It is not like you can force people to go eat at the restaurant. That sort of thing. It is not because they dont have money. Right . Interest rate cut or a tax cut, not going to persuade someone to take that cruise. Zeke, im curious. Theres an uncomfortable question here. Chinas authoritarian regime quarantined cities that in this country you never would have seen. Did they slow the outbreak or is it possible we just dont know everything thats taken place in china . I think both things are true. They probably did slow the outbreak. The modeling suggests that it slowed. It did not stop the outbreak. But you can slow it only for a short amount of time. It is not like a virus you are not locking down everyone. It is not like a virus doesnt go around. And believe me, there are lots of people in every community, not every community, but a large number of communities in the United States that probably have the virus and may unwittingly be spreading but theres a lot of doubt about the chinese numbers and as you reported at the top, you know, the number of new cases gone to zero. That doesnt sound right to most people. Right. You go from this very large number of too good to be true. Exactly. And so, you ask, did they change who theyre testing . Did they decide not to test lots of people . Or are they just covering it up . Zeke go ahead. That lesson that you see in china, they ought to bear in mind in the press conference to witness which is once you blow your credibility then as i say it bams a paradox. Everything you say people take to mean the opposite f. You have blown your credibility and say theres no reason to panic it leads people to panic f. You say there are no infections, people assume there are tons of infections. And so, theyve got to start telling the truth and just blocking and tackling or else there will be Major Economic implications. Zeke, i understand why individual leaders of different organizations thinking i dont want to be the big group that suddenly gets a whole bunch of people quarantined because one person got it. Would you go to south by southwest or the conference in orlando regardless knowing what you know or not . Well, so heres the way i explained it to people. First of all, on sunday i am flying to norway to give a presentation and engage in a conference. Are you going on a cruise . I am definitely not going on a cruise. Well, part of the reason i think a big factor is, what is the chance to be quarantined for or isolated for 14 days waiting to see what whether you got infected . If it is like the through, right . Okay. So im taking some kind of risk. I know what the risk is but in the coronavirus case theres the added 14 days of isolation and unless youre someone writing a book and needs to finish a book that 14 days means out of work, out of circulation. Youre probably socially distancing yourself from the family and problems there. Got what. So i think thats the added consideration. Would i have canceled south by southwest . I think you have got to be careful. I probably would have canceled it. You noticed that they pushed that decision down the line. To the city. Yeah. I would also say the other thing thats, you know, theres a Big Air Force base in san antonio there with a lot of people who have coronavirus and we havent really heard from the area around it and i worry that it could be like the seattle situation. Interesting. Okay. And other situations where, you know, youre housing these people, people in and out of the base. Never know. You need to evaluate this. Okay. Two veterans of government service, thank you both providing fur points of view. Thank you. We are waiting on that briefing right now from the white house on the coronavirus. And well bring it to you when it happens. We believe in about 12 minutes. Up ahead, first going and then wasnt going and then going again. White houses mixed messages of the cdc visit a small part of what might be a much bigger problem. Seating t ceding the south, Bernie Sanders heads to michigan tonight instead of mississippi. Before we go to break, a quick update on the democratic primary. 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It tushed out negative so were seeing if we can do it but yesterday afternoon we were informed that there may have been a person with the virus and they now find out that that was negative test. The shifting explanations over something as simple as a visit to the cdc perhaps showing the problems of the administration right now with the virus. Joining me is susan paige, doug thorknell and david patterson. Hello. Susan, this has been one of those we have seen Crisis Management before. And like with anything, the Trump Presidency does it a little bit differently. And the way trump handled previous crises in the administration doesnt work this time, the bluster, the denial, the assertion over and over again, the hoax with the russia investigation. Or even the happy talk. Like during the well g