World. All that and more on tonights pbs newshour. Major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by judy there are two major stories tonight, the postelection transition as President Trump refuses to concede or even allow for the traditional preparations that would normally have begun and the surging burden of covid cases in most areas of the country. The u. S. Hit a new daily record of covid19 infections with more than 144,000 reported yesterday. Hospitalizations top 65,000 for the first time, 22 states are reporting more hospitalizations than at any time says the pandemic began. Deaths are up by 22 from a week you. Ago. Lets look at how this is hitting a number of states especially hard no matter which region. In el paso, texas, makeshift clinics outside hospitals are opening up. Mobile morgues are moving in and a lockdown of nonessential businesses has been extended, testing lines are growing in wisconsin. Cases there have jumped from 700 a day to more than 6000 in two months, to deal with this surge, chicagos mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a 10 person limit on social gatherings and a stayathome advisory for nonessential needs darting next week. And in south to cota, the highest hospitalization rate in the country. One out of every 1600 residence is hospitalized with covid. We asked a small group of americans how these searches are affecting their lives. My name is dave, i am a registered nurse at the medical intensive care unit and the covid intensive unit at the united hospital. My name is valerie, i am from des moines, iowa and i am a stayathome mom. My name is gerrit, i work in the Culinary Department at a Senior Living community and i am in sioux falls, south dakota. My name is jennifer and i was a substitute, live in north dakota. My name is caroline and i am a special education teacher. My name is marie, i am a registered nurse in chicago. I feel like i am drowning, it has gotten to the point where in the last month for sure, we have been completely full in the hospital. Every single covid designated room has been full and even last week, we had every room in the intensive care unit was full and we would just get patients rolling onto the unit with no open rooms to go to. I got sick on october 13nd within a week, i found out that my husband, daughter, his best friend, and about 10 other people all became positive within a weeks worth of time. Every potential exposure i haves a potential exposure to everyone of the 140 residence that i have to help make food for and at the end of the day the way i think about it is, would i be able to sleep at night or live with myself knowing that i could have potentially given this to somebody who cannot fight it off . I find myself running and not finding times for breaks. Sort of normal on a perspective of being a nurse, but on the way it is happening with covid right now is that it is nonstop. There and all these reports that has a negative impact on communities of color and having preexisting Health Conditions myself and then being a woman of color, then i really worry about that. In a family oriented state like iowa, it is hard. It is stressful and it makes you feel like there will be some days where i feel like i am the only one on board. Or maybe me in just a few hundred people that live here are taking it seriously. It is only seeming like it is getting worse. And i am afraid for the future, the burnout is from knowing that it is not getting better. Only see maybe 10 of people Wearing Masks and do not social distance. In fact, if you do wear a mask, you are often looked out like at like it is that crazy person who does not kno how to live life. It is unfortunate that this pandemic has been made so such a political argument and i do not think that needed to happen because it is really about the safety of lives. I can be there for my patients, but more and more it is less of a bedside being there emotionally and physically for that person, it is being there on a very strict medical level. On the few days at a time where i dont leave the house, all i do is drop my son off at school and then pick him up because i just want one less body out in the world at can be potentially getting this or spreading this. I have held the hands of patients a they are dying and i have had to tell family members that they cannot come see their family members because they could potentially get the virus or spread the virus. And it is awful. Judy two states, california and texas have no reported more than one million cases since this all began. Dr. Anthony fauci of the nansen will of the National Institute of health said he was hopeful vaccines will make a real difference of slowing the pandemic, but he warned the virus could remain a chronic problem and said americans need to double down on Public Health measures. We are going to look at that Bigger Picture now with dr. Nicholas kristof was, he is a sociologist at Yell University and the author of the new book, apollos arrow, the profound and enduring impact on coronavirus on the way we live. Thank you for joining us, it is a powerful book and with the fact the pandemic is doing so poorly right now, we are seeing it spread across the country again. I want to come to a point you make in the book and that is you think a lot of decisions were made in the wrong direction early on. Not enoughpe, not enough done with regarto testing, not consistent guidance around masks. Paint that picture for us if you would. The thing we are experiencing right now is a once in a sentry event and early on, back in december and january even, experts had a very high expectation that this was likely to happen. What we should have done in my view, as soon as china locked down and put nearly one billion people under home confinement, we shouldve put perked up our ears and prepared, we shouldve done the things you mentioned. Preparing our testing capacity, our masks, the public should have been steeled with resolve that was ahead of us. Unfortunate we do not make adequate preparations until we were hit hard in march. Judy you also write about the politics of this frankly misinformation that went around. Just frankly conspiracy theories that were allowed out there without being corrected, bad guidance. How much did that contribute to the slowness of the response in the United States . One of the things that is important to realize unfortunately is that for thousands of years as the germ has spread through social networks from person to person, lies and denial have followed right behind. You might even say that lies and denial are part of what makes an epidemic and epidemic and you can understand from a human point of view, people do not want to believe that this bad thing is happening. People wish to have superstitions about what might cause it or what might cure it, these are very normal human responses that human beings have been manifesting for hundreds or thousands of years. But is the role of leadership in my opinion, our leaders who we elect to help us not be that way. To help us actually see the world for how it is and not in a fantasy way, pretending that nothing is happening when in fact our world has changed. Judy we just learned of the last few days that the vaccine may be available in coming weeks or by the end of the year early next year, but we are also hearing this warning from dr. Fauci and others that it may be with us for a while, what do you think the real timeline is in terms of when life returns to a semblance of normal . I think even if the vaccine or several are invented in the next few months which is likely, we still have challenges in manufacturing, distributing, and persuading the public to accept the vaccines. Those challenges will take about a year and meanwhile the virus is still spreading and will continue to spread until we have reached a threshold of about 40 50 of americans who are infected. Right now we are at about 10 . That threshold is known as the herd immunity threshold. That will take us into 2022. The first period during which we are confronting the biological and epidemiological impact of the virus and we are living in a changed world Wearing Masks, physical distancing, School Closures and so on, will last until sometime in 2022 and then we will begin a Second Period where we recover from the shock of the virus and this has been seen for thousands of years with other epidemics. That will take a couple of years for us to rebuild our economy and recover and so sometime in 2024 i think life will slowly return to normal. Judy you see the behaviors with that we have adopted today whether it is mask wearing, social distancing, that is going on for the foreseeable future. Do you think we will go back to what life was like before 2020 ever . Yes, although there will be some persistent changes. In the 1918 pandemic to pick a trivial example, the restaurants you to have spittoons and those were seen as unsanitary during a time of a respiratory pandemic. Afterwards, spittoons disappeared. There are things like that on a bigger example for example Business Travel will change, teaching and working from home will change. I think there may even be changes in womens labor market participation. We are not the first generation of people to confront a serious epidemic. This has been a part of the Human Experience and we will see the other side of it. Judy yes we will see the other side, but you also write about the profound loss that we all have experienced. Thank you so much again the book is apollos arrow the profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live. We appreciate it, thank you. Judy now we turn to our other top story tonight, the president ial transition. President elect joe biden is forging ahead despite President Trumps refusal to concede. Last night he tapped a long time eight to be his chief of staff. There is also a growing chorus of republicans who say the president elect should be able to receive a Daily National security briefing as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the Trump Campaigns legal challenges to the vote count go on despite many rejections. To discuss all this i am joined by hello to both of you, lisa following the biden folks, we know that as so far as we have reported, he has been denied access to what he would normally get which is the daily briefing. As we say there are some republicans who are beginning to speak up for him, tell us about that. This is fascinating, today we saw more republicans come out not for saying that the election is over, but saying that it is time for president elect biden to get classified briefings, that includes some Top Republicans and some trump allies like senator Lindsey Graham of south carolina, they seem to be threading a needle here, not yeteady to openly defy the president , President Trump but saying some steps need to be taking taken to allow resident elect biden to understand critical classified information. Heres one of those republica senators of south dakota. One of these two men will be the president after the Election Results have come in, i think at this point just as a matter of protecting our nations interests, i think that both the president and his competition here of Vice President biden should have access to those classified reports. You hear that threading of the needle there where republicans are saying if joe biden becomes president e should have this information still not saying they are ready to declare him president elect. This was tipped off by oklahoma senator James Lankford who is pressing the General Service is Administration Agency with a very broad name to make of this call. To push forward on with transition in some ways, the gsa which is run by a trump appointee has refused to do that so far. Adding to this pressure, there is a letter from 150 National Security officials, former officials, generals, admirals, people who worked in many different counterterrorism agencies saying president elect biden needs of these classified briefings if he does not get them there could be in their words, immense consequences for National Security. Judy and what about at the white house, any Movement Today in terms of how they are handling this transition and any movement in terms of the president accepting the Election Results . There is not much movement, the president remains angry, isolated, and unwilling to acknowledge that joe biden is in fact the president elect. It was one week ago today that the president took to the white house podium to say he had one won the election. The president has continued to do that over and over again in tweets and messages, but one thing we have to note, this is the longest period of time the president has not spoken publicly in his entire presidency. He is someone who likes to speak and firmly in front of that goes to the isolation, i have been talking with people in the white house and they feel anxious and fearful, their anxious that he is continuing to process this and that the world is waiting for President Trump to get on board with the fact he has lost the selection and there are young white house staffers, young republicans who have been warned that if they start looking for new jobs, that they will be fired immediately. Campaign aides have told me that people are already starting to roll off, coming to ts weekend you are going to see the Campaign Staff get smaller. Even though trump does not want to admit it, this is a white house that is unwinding. Judy staying with you, youve been taking a close look at some of the claims the president and people around him are making both in their public statements and in these legal suits, legal actions, what are you finding . The president and his allies continue to make false claims in most cases that there is mass fraud that hurt President Trump in this election and just this hour, the Trump Campaign was holding a briefing and they said it is going to take time. This is not something of a matter of instant gratification and they are not going to bite all of the apple at once. As a result they have been trying to fend their lawsuits. I want to walk you through some of the claims they are making the ricks are saying our friction and frivolous. One is in nevada, they are saying there are ballots that have military addresses used by active military officials that should be invalidated. There are people that say those addresses are of course completely valid. In michigan we saw a republican woman say see she supple workers wearing black lives matter gear and a man was following her that looked vague. We see in arizona there was this argument that sharpies, if he used a marker on a ballot that it was not going to be counted. All of these things have been disclaimed or are being fought through in court, but we are seeing judges throw these cases out one after the other because of some of the information i just said. These are not people who have real information about voter judy and finally, we know that president elect biden is starting to make some announcements about positions he wants to fill, his chief of staff he says will be ron klain, what do we know about him and how he will operate . Ron klain has been with president elect biden since he was a whiz kid at 28 on the judiciary committee. This indicates that president elect biden are going to rely on people who know him and people who are expert and strong in their fields. Ron klein a long resident resume including fighting the ebola pandemic. Judy all right, we will eat at their thank you both. Our president elect biden continues to push forward with transition planning, there are several states it to be called. In georgia, biden leads President Trump on more than 14,000 votes and the state will conduct a hand recount of nearly 5 million ballots. The state republican and congressional delegation is asking for an investigation into any claims of voter fraud. The secretary of state, also a republican says that no such claims have been substantiated. Congressman buddy carter is a republican from georgia and he joins me now. Thank you very much for talking with us, first of all, do you expect this counts to go ahead tomorrow and do you expect to what you expected to show . I do expected to go forward and it should. Let me clarify that the ngressional delegation, the house delegation, what we asked for was for the secretary of state to grant the wishes of the donald j Trump Campaign and the Georgia Republican party and the secretary of state has done that, he h acknowledged that he is going to do a hand recount. We appreciate that, we apply those efforts and we think will lead to a transparent and honest result. It is a good thing we are doing this. Judy do you expected to overturn the results and if it does not argue except prepared to accept the results . Certainly we are prepared to accept the results and certainly that is a lot of vote to overturn, we understand that. The important thing to remember here is whether you are a democrat or republican, you are an honest, transparent elections, you wants to make sure every vote is counted. You want to make sure no illegal vote is counted. You want to make sure that no vote is miscounted. We need to have confidence in our election system and that is what this is about. Judy as you know with three counts in the past, nothing like that number of votes have been changed, it has been in the hundreds. What i want to ask you, you were reelected in your district and along the atlantic coast, if there were problems statewide, do you believe there were problems in your district and with your account . Possibly there could have been and we have gotten calls in our office from co