With the unknown. That was a beautiful tribute to the hero. I am chris comeau and welcome to prime time. Lets break down the questions about how the coronavirus is being handled here or mishandled. When trump promises, weve got it covered. Thats good to hear. And it makes it disturbing to hear news of a whistleblower warning that we dont have it covered, that there are failures to protect our own employees. Now we have a question. Is there a potential link to that whistleblower claim and the first confirmed case in california . And another question in california, why are there more than 8,000 people in that state being monitored . Why dont they know whether or not they have this virus or not . Why are so many others across this country not being tested . The virus is not that scarey. Its the unknown. So what do you say . Lets get after it. All right. Lets bring in dr. Gupta. Always good to have you. The unknown spreads panic faster than any virus can. And we have questions about the president s plan to deal with this. Cnn has not independently reviewed this whistleblower complaint. But here is the part thats interesting to me. I want to see if you agree with this. So solano county, california is not 5,000 people, but its not five million. Some of them are dispatched as Health Care Workers to bases in the country to deal with people that were repay treeuated from other parts of the world who might have the virus. Now we hear about the First Community based in california, a woman also in solano county. She has no connection to the work to the base. But isnt that what Community Contact is about . Right. The workers. Some of them are from solano county. Is that a potential link here to look at . That is a potential link to look at. To your point, chris, we dont know. The reason this is so significant, as people may have sort of realized by now, is that up until this point, up until this patient, this 15th patient, everyone, you could sort of account for as you made the point, chris. Either because of travel or because of known contact with someone who is in infected. Now someone is walking around, hasnt been to one of these areas, hasnt come into contact with anybody known to be infektsed, gets the infection. That basically means at some point the virus got out into the community. It means, most likely, that in addition to this 15th patient that patient got it from someone else, and that someone else may not have any symptoms or minimal sympto symptoms, never gets tested. Thats what it means now that this thing is in the community. Thats a significant thing. But we dont know. Its close to the air force base. Could it have been a Family Member of one of these workers . Right. Theyre good at this part of things, chris, from a Contact Tracing standpoint. You go back. You look at this persons life and you try and piece together their life over several days to figure out who were all the people they came in contact with and usually you are trying to figure out who they may have infected. In this case, theyre all just trying to figure out who may have infected this person. It is a real medical who dounni at this point. I start getting phone calls, just like you do, of people saying we cant test. Theyre not letting us test. And newsome comes out and says were monitoring 8,400 people. No reason to monitor anybody. You test. You see if you have influenza a or coronavirus or not. Thats not happening here. What do we know about why people arent being tested in the richest country in the world . Let me there is a couple of thoughts, and then i have done some digging today. Let me give you a little bit of context because i think this is important. In south korea, theyre doing about 5,000 tests a day. Okay . A day. In the several weeks that we have been testing in this country, probably done about a thousand tests total. So there is a huge disparity, i think, to your point. And surveillance is one of the primary pillars of Public Health. You got to know what you are dealing with in order to deal with it. So the testing becomes really important. Now, to be fair, sometimes people who dont have symptoms, even if they are carrying the virus, are less likely to come back positive. Why . Because the symptoms you get symptoms as the viral load in your body increases. Thats what makes you sick. Right. But also makes it more likely for you to have a positive test. So you get false negative tests if you are testing too often. Thats true. But i think a case can be made that we were not testing enough, you know, there were people who are very concerned. They may not have been in china, but they may have been in other cases like korea or italy, places we know the virus has been spreading. They get sick. Not only were they not getting tested, they were asking to get tested and they were told they couldnt get tested. So that is a problem that i think now people at the highest levels of our Public Health system are trying to address. What is a good reason that you say, sorry, i know that youre presenting in a way that it might be, and i know you want to be tested, but you cant. Well, thats a good question. I will tell you that there were some problems with the tests initially, as you will remember, chris. The goal was we want to get these tests out to all poc locations, point of care locations. But they found some of these tests ended up being flawed. The control didnt work. They couldnt be confidence in the testing. I dont know which led which. Was it because some of the testing were flawed . They sort of dialed it back and said, you know what, we dont need to test all these people after all. Or was it more, hey, look, we want to just make sure that were not going to run into a situation of a lot of false negatives, you know, things that because people are healthy or not having much in the way of symptoms, they come back negative because they fault sense of comfort. I dont know. But i can tell you this, that thats not the way its been done in many other countries around the world. Right. Most other countries around the world have erred on the side of more testing. We have erred on the side of less testing. That may change now in part because people are talking about it like us but also this 15th patient now evidence that this thing is in the community and weve got to start to broaden the approach here in terms of who were looking at because we clearly that one would have been missed otherwise. Right. Who else is out there . How do we find those people . You are the doctor, but i keep talking to clinicians, and they say it doesnt make sense to not test because whats scarey is the unknown. The boogie man is how bad can it be . Newsome would rather say i have 8,400 confirmed cases and theyre going home. Most of us make it through. If youre old or immune compromised, maybe not. How are states trying to adapt to this . I heard a couple of interesting things. This wasnt a uniform decision. I dont think everybody was onboard for the criteria of who should get tested in the first place. The criteria was pretty stringent. You had to travel to one of these places or have had contact with a known infection. In other countries, it let more discretion to the Health Care Provider saying, okay, this person has a pneumonia or some sort of problem. There is no clearcut reason. Were going to test for coronavirus because we think that coronavirus is circulating. Up until today, frankly, that sort of discretion wasnt given to doctors. I dont think everyone was onboard with that. I heard from very high levels that even early on there was a push to sort of broaden out the testing. Who was pushing in which direction and who was pushing the other direction, i dont exactly know who and why they were doing that. But it wasnt a uniform sort of approach to this. The second thing i think, you know, again these flawed tests, i think, were a real problem. You know . And on one hand the United States developed a test at the cdc very quickly. And that was a great thing because that test was important to identify these people. But after that, after trying to distribe yut these to clinics around the country, i think things fell apart a little bit over there and that really hurt some of our initial surveillance. It led to ron klay say anybody who knows how many cases they have is not telling the truth because theyre not testing enough to know. And what happens is now the states are starting to push back and say, we can test. These are sophisticated states, california, new york. Many states across the country have the capability to do this. Theyre being told no. Thats the next piece of the puzzle. Thank you for helps us understand this better. Appreciate it, brother. So california, 8,400 cases monitored. They have to meet these weird federal criteria for being able to test when they could do it themselves. Why . So we check here in new york state, right . Not 8,400 cases or anything, but they are getting reports of people getting the symptoms, they dont meet the criteria. So we get the commissioner of new york to come in and tell us whats happening here, what makes sense and what doesnt just in terms of understanding the problem. Next. 5g will change business in america. Tmobile has the first and only, nationwide 5g network. And with it, you can shape the future. Weve invested 30 billion dollars and built our new 5g network for businesses like yours. 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New york state, other side of the country from california. First no confirmed cases. Obviously, though, the risks here are great. Tens of millions of tourists every year, 20 Million People live in the state and of course it is the Global Financial center. We start hearing reports from different hospitals and sources. People are coming in. Could be influenza. Maybe its not. They say they want to be tested for coronavirus, and they keep being told no. Why . Dr. Howard zucker is the new York State Health commissioner. He has the answers. Thank you for joining us. So when we look at california, first confirmed case, case number 50 from the community. Five days they wait to test. The governor comes out and says were monitoring 8,000 plus cases. He should know what he has on his hand, as you know, the fear for the public is, what, what they dont know. Why wait so long . Why cant they test . I think part of it is there is a challenge that the federal government has these tests coming in to one place, which is the centers for disease control. We have in new york a lab, the wadsworth lab, that has looked at the protocols and based on the cdc protocols has developed a test that we are ready to move forward with as soon as the fda approves it. The same is true in california. I suspect so. But you cant . No. I need the fda approval. So the panic is in the unknown. Thats the worried well. The worried well, very nicely said. You can test, but the federal government says no. Why . Well, right now, they feel that they want to run the test at the cdc, and its a matter of getting this through and to be able to get our test approved as well as probably other state labs that are calibered like our lab. Ordinarily that would be fine. You just be patient. This is not a time for patience because time is the enemy. You were talking earlier saying, theyre also overwhelmed at the cdc. How can they be overwhelmed . This is why its important to prepare for what could happen. You dont want to play catchup on this. We are, it seems like. This is why in new york we have moved forward. The governor has put forward a 40 million appropriation to the budget to provide the ability to have diagnostic testing and supplies that are needed. And so we are working on that, and we would like to get the approval from the federal government so that we could help those that are concerned and be able to take some of the burdens off of federal government not only for the state of new york but also for some of the neighboring states that may not have the same kind of lab. I would add one more thing, which is that they have changed the criteria recently. So it is today. They changed the criteria. So there will be more tests that will need to be done. So it would be better to have states like new york do the test. Now, theyre getting negative pushback. People like sanjay talking to people like me. Its getting out there this criteria was too constrained. It was basically you didnt come from this one area of china or you werent in contact with someone who did, you can get tested. But it doesnt make sense anymore, right . Well, it is an evolving process and you need to change it accordingly. So we should be testing whoever, based on the clinical exam, clinical assessment needs to be tested, and i think thats the next step. Now, my suspicious is that i want you to give me a good reason for policy for it to be this way because the suspicious to me is this is a great way to keep the numbers down is that you dont get to test. Ill do all the testing, and i will control what the number throw is and thats all well know. It may be slow in getting out, but at least there arent numbers popping up all over the place. When it comes to Public Health, all those kind of issues should be put aside because were dealing with the public safety, the publics health. Whatever needs to be done to move this forward, to make sure people are getting the tests that they need should be done. And that should eclipse any concerns that we have. Do you have any concern that your test is not as good as their test. I think our test is better. Im sure california feel it is same way. To be clear, this isnt a sophisticated thing to find, right . You can test for this the way you do with influenza and figure out what it is. Once we have the protocol and our team came up with the test, we were able to move forward. And the center is phenomenal. That was actual hi tly the cent. Our lab came up with the acetate in the story. Thats another story. Lets end on the right note. Im worried about the flow of information because i fear the unknown, and i think that thats what spreads panic, and we dont need that. More testing will give more confidence to the american people. Who should also give confidence is this isnt the boogie man. If you get sick from this, you are not automatically going to die. We may have a falsely exaggerated sense of how lethal it is and there are plenty you can do to not get it. Help us through that. I think we need to remove some of the anxiety everyone has about this. The way to do that is to prevent problems. And the way to prevent a problem is use good Public Health practice. Wash your hands, sneeze into your sleeve. Sounds basic, but it really works well. It does. Stay home. And they are boring concepts, but they work. The second is to prepare for a problem. And thats what were doing. We are preparing. Dust off those plans. Look at the strategies. And then to partner, to partner with hospitals, with nursing homes, with schools and to be ready for a problem. I think together, if we do all of that together and we work as a community, we actually could overcome any virus that nature sends our way, and i think we will be successful. How long until youre able to Start Testing people . I wrote to the fda the other day, and i hope as soon as possible. And i hope by the beginning of next week. Because every day there are more and more people coming in. Right. It is an evolving process. It is important to keep this in perspective. A lot of people are getting nervous about this. I understand. If you dont know something, you would get nervous. You have to remember that even though everyone speaks about sars, but sars is in the same family. They are coronaviruses. But two people in the family, one kid as blue eyes, one kid has brown eyes. Same family, but they may be a little bit different. We need to keep this different. In my family, the one with brown eyes is far inferior to the one with blue ies. Thank you very much. Let us know how the information process goes so we can make sure people have no reason to panic. We will do that. The president s selfproclaimed best economy ever is having a very bad week . Why. Well, coronavirus fears is a big part of this. The president takes credit for the gains. Now hes blaming anything that goes wrong on everybody else. We have a very valuable guest next with some perspective on our economy, a celebrated former labor secretary. Well be right back. snoring whats going on . Its the 3pm slump. Should have had a p3. Oh yeah. Should have had a p3. Need energy . Get p3. With a mix of meat, cheese and nuts. They Work Together doing important stuff. The hitch . Like you, your cells get hungry. Feed them. With centrum® micronutrients. Restoring your awesome. Daily. Feed your cells with centrum® micronutrients today. Wild thing, you make femy heart sing. Ith you make everything. Groovy. Done yet . Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. You sure . Hmm. Mmm. 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