>> oh, i've lost sound from rachel. does rachel have sound from me? oh. >> bye. >> i hear your laugh. all i wanted to hear was your laugh. that was great. thank you. lost a little bit of rachel sound there but i got the laugh. that's all that matters. well, how long did you have to wait to get the food you ate today? did you have it delivered to your home? do you have to wait in line at the grocery store? how long did you have to wait? did you have trouble paying? in beto o'rourke's hometown of el paso, the daily lines for food banks are two and three miles long. that's how long you have to wait for food in this country now and some places have seen longer lines than that. beto o'rourke will join us in this hour. ezra klein will also join us. and we will end the hour tonight with some very special words of wisdom from gabriel garcia marquez, the nobel laureate in literature that wrote "100 years of solitude" and "love in the time of cholera." his son, the film director rodrigo garcia, shared wisdom in a beautifully written piece in "the new york times," one of the two most important things i've read today. i'll bring you that at the end of the hour with the other most important thing that i've read today which was written by 25-year-old chase beach who sees something now on her neighborhood walks that most if not all of us have been missing. and it is very important. and if you stick around to the end of the show, you're going to learn something profound as i did today when i read chase's writing. no president has flip-flopped more than donald trump. beginning with mexico will pay for the wall, to years of flip-flopping that has left the most self-contradictory president in history trying to spin his own spin during the coronavirus pandemic. he has gone from predicting zero deaths from coronavirus in the united states to 100,000 deaths in the united states. and after 24 hours of watching how badly his decision to end the white house coronavirus task force played on television, which is the only thing that counts for donald trump, today donald trump said this. >> i felt we could wind it down sooner but i had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when i started talking about winding it down. >> he's like the president of a failing tv network that cancels a show and then hears some protests from the audience and decides to renew the show. for donald trump, the coronavirus task force has always been about the tv show that he was able to produce for a couple hours every day in the white house press briefing room. when donald trump cancelled the tv show, when the worst possible thing that could have happened on that tv show happened. and donald trump said the stupidest thing anyone in america has been caught saying about the coronavirus. and those are the words that will mark donald trump's place in history, the words that got that tv show cancelled. donald trump's name will be forever matched with those words indelibly etched in america's memory, the way we remember abraham lincoln saying a house divided against itself cannot stand, and roosevelt saying the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and kennedy saying ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. and i've just recited them from memory. but no one will be able to recite the famous trump quote from memory because incoherence is too difficult to reproduce from the mind word for word. but when kids taking the s.a.t.s 100 years from now come upon this quote, they will have no trouble identifying the president who said it. >> then i see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. so it would be interesting to check that. so that you're going to have to use medical doctors with but it sounds interesting to me. so we'll see. the whole concept of the light the way it goes in one minute, that's pretty powerful. >> yeah, that's pretty powerful. you know how it feels to be in a foreign country where you don't speak the language and no one speaks your language? that's the way donald trump feels every day, all day, all the time. donald trump knows that whenever he's talking about anything other than golf and the leading modeling agencies in new york city in the 1980s, he has no idea what he's talking about. and since donald trump is firmly opposed to doing any work that could replace his ignorance with knowledge, he knows that that could happen again in the white house briefing room. that's why he cancelled the show and because we all criticized him for cancelling the show, today he is saying something else. nobody knows what will happen next with the coronavirus task force, least of all donald trump because he's at the mercy of his moods. he does not control his moods and so the task force might continue as a tv show. it might not continue as a tv show. it might continue as a disorganized group of people who collect information about the pandemic and share some of it with the public. we don't know. and donald trump doesn't know. because donald trump doesn't know what his mood is going to be tomorrow or the next day or the next day. that's why we will continue to bring you health care professionals and policy experts to share with you the latest, best information about the pandemic every night. you cannot expect the white house to do that for you. they won't. a troubling new report in "the new york times" indicates that coronavirus could pose a danger to children in a way not previously recognized. reporting on the experience in a long island hospital for children, the "times" says, in the past two days alone, the hospital cohen children's medical center admitted five critically ill patients, ages 2 to 12 that somehow appears to be linked to covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. in total, about 25 similarly ill children have been admitted there in recent weeks with symptoms ranging from reddened tongues to enlarged coronary arteries, no solid data yet exists about how many children in the united states have fallen ill with what doctors are calling pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome. this is really only a disease that has been clear for two weeks now so there is so much we're trying to learn about this. the chief of pediatric critical care, dr. james snyder, said in an interview on tuesday. nathaniel lash has produced two important paragraphs for "the new york times" that depict what the coronavirus curve looks like in america. first, there is this curve showing the coronavirus for the entire united states, which appears to be at a plateau that might be headed down. but that's mostly because the numbers are going down in the epicenter of new york. here is what the curve looks like in the rest of the united states with new york removed from the calculations, just removing new york city, changes that curve. the national trend is still increasing in cases of coronavirus. michael has joined us on this program many times. he's the director of the center of disease and infectious policy at the university of minnesota. he describes what those graphs mean this way. it's not a leveling off, it's a painful handoff. new york is handing off the problem to the rest of the country as new york's numbers continue to go down. the united states now has 1,234,677 reported diagnosed cases of coronavirus, and the united states now has 73,863 officially reported deaths from coronavirus. pete sussey is a critical care nurse at the cook county health in chicago. >> i keep coming back because the patients need us. but the biggest thing is the patients who need us, need us to stay healthy for them because if we get sick, who is going to be here for you? the biggest concern for the public is reopening cities and getting stuff moving, which would be great for all of us including me. i want to be able to go out to dinner and do something, but unfortunately we can't right now. we really have to get this virus under control to prevent it from spreading out even further than what it has. >> leading off our discussion tonight is ron clain, who served as ebola czar during the obama administration and his co-host of the podcast "epidemic" and dr. kass, the medical contributor of yahoo news. the white house coronavirus task force, is there any way to guess if it's still working and will ever make a public appearance again, and what they will be allowed to say? >> lawrence, the problem is it's never really worked. it's been more reality show than reality and that's why we're in the mess we're in. look, the virus is a disease but the response is a policy response. and that response has been wholly inadequate in the united states. it's why we lead the world in cases. it's why we lead the world in deaths. we're 5% of the world's population but a third of the world's cases, and that failure of the white house task force is what drives us. president trump is focused on this as a tv show and the tv show at one point in time had good ratings and now some bad episodes. as a tv producer, he's struggling what to do. but as president, he should be focused on how we fix this response, we get testing, we get our health care workers protected, we bend the curve down and we continue to practice social distancing and by focusing on the tv elements of it, there is just another distraction from the hard work that isn't getting done. >> dr. kass, i want to begin tonight with this new reporting about how coronavirus might be affecting children. have you seen any of these cases or have they been reported to you in your practice in new york? >> yeah, so, these cases are being seen in new york and at the hospital i work at. friends of mine who work in the pediatric e.r. and pediatric hospital have been seeing them. it mirrors similar symptoms to adults but we don't know much about it, which i think highlights the larger picture. we don't know a lot about what this virus is doing to anybody. we don't know what the long-term effects are. if this is actually something that happens after you recover from the virus and not part of the active infection, that shows us how much more we need to stay home and learn more about this virus before we just declare that we've, you know, mission accomplished. which seems to be the message coming out of the administration. >> so, doctor, what do we say to parents now? they were worried enough and i think parents had a right based on public information to be relatively relaxed about the kids, especially elementary school aged kids. this story says we really have to pay attention when kids that age have any kind of symptoms. >> so i think that this story and reporting needs to be put into context, which is still very, very rare to see these things at all in children. it much more common for a child with a fever and abdominal pain to have appendicitis, but both conditions should be evaluated by your doctor or in an e.r. our emergency departments are open. and we're ready, willing, and able to take care of all the patients that need us, not just those with the coronavirus. so if you're concerned about your child, call your pediatrician, call a telemedicine visit, or go to the e.r. >> doctor, quickly, how long has that been the case? it's funny to hear you say our emergency rooms are open and open to anyone with a complaint, you don't have to come in with coronavirus, i'm not sure when new york city crossed that line where you could say that. >> so i think that that happened, i would say, about a week or two ago. we said we know you stayed home to help us take care of the coronavirus patients but we want the patients that need to be in the e.r. coming in. the best way to figure that out is call your doctor, we will tell you to go to the e.r. if you need to be there. the most important thing is that we continue to take care of the patients with coronavirus and those having the other syndromes and symptoms that have been staying away from the e.r. before this. >> ron klain, you show the picture with new york city in and it take it out and the country looks like it is in much more trouble than it does with the declining numbers from new york city. that seems to me to be what you might expect in the behavior of a pandemic like this. >> yeah, i mean, i think i've said several times on your show, i think that we have this image from early on in the epidemic that the curve of this disease would be some kind of parabola, like a figure you saw in high school geometry that went up smoothly and came down smoothly. in the history of epidemics is different. they go up quickly and come down very slowly. they're steep on the rise and flat on the decline. that's what we're seeing. even in new york, where they are making progress and the number of cases is down, it's still more flat than down and the rest of the country is still going up and that's the most important point here, lawrence. i understand this has gone on for a long time in people's minds but we're in the craziest circumstance you can imagine, which is not only we're reopening as in many places as the disease is getting worse. i mean, the lax white house guidelines said we should see 14 days of decline in a jurisdiction before it reopened, we have places reopening where the disease is going up, not down, let alone down for 14 days. that means that line that's still going up on the chart will continue to go up in more and more places. >> ron, are you surprised that no one involved with the white house coronavirus task force has come out and said these places are violating our guidelines by reopening? >> yeah, lawrence, i think it's stunning. i mean, dr. fauci and dr. birx stood in the white house briefing room and said on april 16th, the first step before reopening should be 14 days of decline in jurisdiction. i didn't think that was strong enough. but let's take that standard as it is. to allow places to reopen and not to really vigorously stomp your feet about it where the low standard isn't even met seems like something the white house should be on top of. instead, the president is cheering on places opening in contravention of his own white house's policy. i mean, that's a level of disconnect. i think just impossible to understand. >> and ron, with my experience inside government, tell me if it would work this way in a situation like this. i assume the experts asked for four weeks and the politicians gave them two weeks in the guidelines, that that guideline two week was a compromise to begin with. ron, can you -- i guess we lost ron's connection, too. we'll have to leave it there. thank you both for starting us off. when we come back, beto o'rourke will join us. texas is setting records for the number of cars in line at texas food banks. beto o'rourke says there is a better way to feed the millions of people that can't afford to pay for food in this country now. beto o'rourke joins us next. ande that liberty mutual customizes your insurance, so you only pay for what you need! 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[squawks] only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ across america, business owners are figuring things out. finding new ways to serve customers... connect employees... and work with partners. comcast business is right there with you. with a network that helps give you speed, reliability and security. and enough bandwidth to handle all your connected devices. voice solutions like remote call forwarding and readable voicemail. and safe, convenient installation. when every connection counts, you can count on us. get the connectivity your business needs. call today. comcast business. and platelet donations and asks all healthy donors to schedule an appointment to give. now, with the corona virus outbreak, it is important to maintain a sufficient blood supply. your blood donation is critical and can help save lives. please schedule an appointment today. download the blood donor app. visit redcrossblood.org or call 1 800 red cross today. you can make a difference. it is very hard to prioritize needs in a crisis like this pandemic. if you had to choose tonight between getting enough food to feed your family or getting tested for coronavirus, what would you choose? it's an impossible choice of course that no one should ever have to make but it is also a choice that we have to make in the way we report on this pandemic. we have a medical crisis. we have an employment crisis. we have a rent crisis. we have a food crisis. and others all happening at the same time and we have spent more time talking about the medical crisis than all of the other aspects of this crisis combined. which might be the right balance. but if your problem tonight is you're hungry and your family is hungry and you cannot afford food then there is nothing more important than that. the food crisis needs a voice. it needs someone who can get our attention and keep our attention and make that crisis real to people who aren't experiencing it every day, to people who are just worried about their own health and safety. el paso's former congressman beto o'rourke watched the lines at the food bank stretch two and three miles long. he knows the people. and he's here to speak for them. joins us to speak is beto o'rourke, the founder of powered by the people, a political group to support texas democrats in the 2020 election. beto o'rourke, tell us what you're seeing in those lines unlike anything we've seen before. >> lawrence, it is absolutely heartbreaking. the lines in el paso, which is where i live, stretch two to three miles long every single day. and in those lines are people who have never before needed food assistance or been food insecure. in those lines are the newly unemployed but also in those lines i often see nurses in scrubs who have just gotten off work perhaps, their wife or husband lost their job in this economic contraction and on one salary alone they can't feed themselves. i see people in beat-up trucks and in nice cars. this economic downturn and food insecurity spared almost no one. the ceo of the food bank was talking to a cashier at walgreens where the starting pay is $10 an hour and told her she ran the food bank and the cashier almost broke down in tears saying, you mean there is a place i can go to for food? nearly 1 out of every 5 moms in this country who has young children report their kids are not getting enough to eat. that is three times the level that we saw in 2008 in the worst of that recession and crisis. so these are food insecurities and demand for food that we haven't seen since perhaps the great depression. >> how do you -- you could come on this program any time you want and talk about anything you want, any aspect of this pandemic, any aspect that you want. how do you choose this and how do you get people to focus on this problem when they're home with their doors closed just worried about their own health and safety, even though they have enough to eat and they have so many other issues that are coming at them in this? if this was happening alone as a phenomenon in this country, it would be getting all of our attention. but how do you get the attention that it needs? >> i think you said it well in introducing this segment. if you don't have enough food in your system, then the health concerns that you have amidst this pandemic, your job concerns you have with this historic economic contraction, your ability to provide for yourself and your family to make sure they are healthy to go out and find another job down the road, all of that is compromised if you cannot put enough calories in your system to survive. but most alarming of all are those little kids that mothers across america are telling us are not getting food they need. that will stunt their development, their growth, their potential, their opportunities down the road, and by extension, it will stunt our growth and our opportunities as a country. you know, i was seeing this crisis develop in el paso and across texas and then matt russell, who is a farmer in iowa, and bob leonard, who is a reporter that covers rural communities throughout that state, reached out to me and told me farmers are plowing their produce back into the field. dairy farmers are dumping milk instead of getting it out and you have lines where people are waiting hours long to get help and they hit upon this idea, what if you just expanded the supplemental nutrition assistance program known as s.n.a.p. or food stamps and make sure more people could go to a grocery store, which is already figured out the logistics of getting food from the farm to the warehouse, to the store and into people's shopping carts and into their homes and stomachs instead of making people wait in these humiliatingly long lines and putting all this pressure on food banks, who are seeing extraordinary demand in el paso, demand has increased 400% at the food bank in this community. they just were not built for this and charity alone won't solve the problem. so a s.n.a.p. program that now costs us, the american taxpayer, $60 billion to expand that to make sure that everyone who is unemployed is eligible, to expand it to include the undocumented immigrants who as you know, lawrence, are by and large the ones picking our food in the fields to make sure that we can put dinner on the table for our families, to expand it for the length of the economic downturn and not just the health care crisis is morally the right thing to do. it's in our own self-interest. and we, the wealthiest, the most powerful country on the face of the planet, can afford to do so. >> how do you do it in a washington where the president and the republican senate is more worried about getting cruise ships back on the ocean than feeding people in texas? >> we're really going to need members of congress and by extension their constituents, regardless of party affiliation or geography, to demand we do the right thing. an interesting fact that matt and bob brought to my attention, the largest beneficiaries of s.n.a.p. or food stamps are those who live in rural communities and we often know that's correlated with republican representation. so this is something that should appeal to all of us regardless of partisanship or any other division, geographic or otherwise, to do the right thing and while we are rightfully trying to get money to small businesses, trying to get cash assistance to our fellow americans, in some instances bailing out very large corporations, this country has the resources to help those who are in need and who cannot feed themselves and another really important point, lawrence, if we expand this to allow people to use s.n.a.p. in restaurants, we help that mom and pop restaurant stay afloat. pay their employees, contribute to the local economy. this is a win/win across the board for everyone. >> of course, the food stamp program was born in bipartisan compromise. bob dole getting together with one of the most liberal members of the senate, george mcgovern, both from farm states. they located the program in the agriculture department because they knew it would be good for farmers. if they could get a bit of spirit back, you could get some of this done. beto, thank you for joining us tonight and thank you for bringing our attention and keeping our attention on this program. really appreciate it. >> thank you. and when we come back, dr. harvey feinberg will join us. he was watching last night when laurie garrett got a lot of attention by talking about the difference between tactics and strategy in fighting the coronavirus. dr. harvey feinberg, former dean of the harvard school of public health, joins us next. (vo) at farmers we've seen a thing or two. especially lately. we've seen you become sweat-pant executives, cat coworkers and pillow-fort architects. we've seen you doing your part. so, farmers will keep seeing you through. with fifteen-percent-reduced personal auto premiums and immediate savings through our signal app, which gives a discount for safe driving. and then we'll do the next thing, and the thing after that, until this is another thing we've seen and done. we do things differently and aother money managers, don't understand why. because our way works great for us! but not for your clients. that's why we're a fiduciary, obligated to put clients first. so, what do you provide? cookie cutter portfolios? nope. we tailor portfolios to our client's needs. but you do sell investments that earn you high commissions, right? we don't have those. so, what's in it for you? our fees are structured so we do better when our clients do better. at fisher investments we're clearly different. this virus is testing all of us. and it's testing the people on the front lines of this fight most of all. so abbott is getting new tests into their hands, delivering the critical results they need. and until this fight is over, we...will...never...quit. because they never quit. pulitzer prize-winning journalist laurie garrett got a lot of attention on this program when she made the very important distinction between tactics and strategy. >> all of the arguments, the discussions, the debates we hear across america whether it's angrily storming the state capitol to protest lockdowns or demands for test, test, test, these are all tactics. they're not what is your long-term strategy, what is your strategic goal? we don't have a national strategic goal. >> she went on to say that the only strategic goal that matters is getting rid of coronavirus which she said ultimately needs an effective vaccine that is affordable worldwide. joining our discussion now, dr. harvey feinberg. the former president of the national academy of medicine, the chair of the national academy's standing committees on emerging infectious diseases, which is advising the white house. dr. feinberg, i want to read something you wrote in the new england journal of medicine on april 23rd, which reads like an echo of what i was hearing from laurie garrett last night. you said the aim is not to flatten the curve, the goal is to crush the curve. rather than stumble through a series of starts and stops and half-measures on both the health and economic fronts, we should forge a strategy to defeat the coronavirus and open the way to economic revival. dr. feinberg, what would that strategy look like? >> the first point in strategy is to establish a unified command structure. lawrence, we have not had a hierarchy of control and management of this pandemic with the strategic aim of crushing the curve, of eliminating the virus. if we had that, we would then need to have sufficient intelligence about the enemy, about the virus. and that means an adequate number of tests deployed strategically to give us the intelligence that we need to fight the virus most effectively. even today, with all the improvements, we still do not have the number or types of tests deployed around the country to give us that intelligence that we need. third, we have to have an adequate capacity to follow up and manage isolating the cases that have the virus, isolating the people who have been exposed in a quarantine situation so they do not contract and send the virus to others, and contact tracing, which gives us the capacity to identify those who are at risk. if we do these things while we intensify the search for effective treatments and ultimately a vaccine that is safe and effective, we have a strategy that has the winning potential. we need to play offense. we cannot constantly simply be reacting to what the virus is doing at one point in time or another. >> doctor, when you framed it basically in war terms and you said we need to have intelligence about the enemy, and that that is the point of testing, the most basic point of testing, is getting that intelligence about the enemy, that to me is the most persuasive phrasing and conceptual framework i've heard yet for testing's role in this battle. >> testing has multiple functions, lawrence. yes, you need to identify individuals who are infected or who could be infected but you also need what's called surveillance in the community to identify the number of cases, the distribution of cases where risk is increasing, where it may be diminishing, so you know how to deploy your resources most efficiently to curtail the spread. the whole game here is to stop the spread of this infection from one person to another, and that's where you start with that intelligence about the virus. we know that through testing. >> dr. harvey feinberg, thank you for joining us once again. we need your guidance in these times and we appreciate your joining us. we really do. thank you. >> my pleasure. and when we come back as ezra klein joins us, he wants to discuss the tactics and strategy we need to be using to deal with an economy that is racing past recession toward depression and they aren't the tactics or strategy that the white house is talking about. the way it works best for you. even the big stuff. you get a delivery experience you can always count on. you get your perfect find at a price to match on your schedule. you get free two day shipping on things that make your home feel like you! wayfair. way more than furniture. ibut you're not alone. apart for a bit, we're automatically refunding our customers a portion of their personal auto premiums. learn more at libertymutual.com/covid-19. 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>> we have made this so much harder by being so bad at it. i can't stress that enough. look, this was always going to be hard but it didn't need to be this complicated and the way it wouldn't have been this complicated is if at the beginning when we the people made this tremendous sacrifice, economic, social, personal, to go into lockdown, the government had an actual plan which they actually followed. there are two words to talk about strategy that are important in talking about this, security and predictability. you want on one hand security and health and want it in the economy. for a while those will require unusual things for us in the economic dimension there has to be a tremendous amount of government support of the economy, of wages in particular to say nothing of businesses themselves to be secure from the virus. but the other thing you need is predictability. and that is particularly true in the economy, right? we need to say six months from now we'll be doing "x." here is where we expect to be and that's also true with the virus. people will not lock down forever if they don't believe time is being used well and don't see what is coming. the word quarantine comes from the italian word for 40, it 40 days originally when we were doing this many, many, many years ago. the federal government completely has failed to execute a plan and so what they've been in is an incredibly costly holding pattern that they are now no longer willing to pay the cost of, and it's the most profound and far-reaching failure of political leadership probably in our lifetime. >> i want to go back to a tweet that you did in april, at the end of the month, april 29th. you said donald trump does not want to be in charge of any of this. he wants to play president on tv. he doesn't want responsibility for governance in time of crisis and in every way he can, he's refusing to do that job and lashing out at those who ask him to do it. and ezra, that's what we're seeing in the point you made about the guidelines being announced of, we want to close things down. we want people to socially distance. the white house guidelines. but after issuing the guidelines, they had no strategy whatsoever on how to achieve something beneficial during that time period. it's like the guidelines came up and they just sat there and hoped. >> guidelines are not a plan. and also, the president never followed the guidelines. to this moment is not following the guidelines, is routinely contradicting them. the whole thing is wild. but think about a hypothetical here. imagine this was the obama administration. imagine it was the hillary clinton administration. you remember as i do, lawrence, a couple weeks ago in what we now call the stimulus 3.5 that it was described as a concession to democrats. it was $25 billion and a mandate to have a national testing strategy. can you imagine a clinton administration on this? how desperate they would be for the money to do testing, how many bullet points their testing strategy would have? a normal federal government -- by the way, not just a democratic one, if governor dewine was president or romney or marco rubio were president, they would be desperate to have a plan here. the financing for a plan and the structure for a plan. and to be carrying it out so when they ran for re-election this year they could say we saved the country. but donald trump, the reason it was a democratic concession, which it actually was, was donald trump does not want to have responsibility for testing. he has wanted from the beginning to put this entire thing on states and cities, which do not have the resources, the power, the coordination capacity to solve the problems in the testing supply chain, not to mention to get the innovation to get the sort of 20, 25, 35 million tests a day we will ultimately need to open up safely in the absence of a vaccine. he has never wanted this. he wants to be the head of state. he enjoys doing these press conferences. which is why he keeps doing them despite the fact they've often been bad for him. and now as people are pulling him off of it. but he has never wanted to dot hard work of daily governance. the grind of the meetings, the actual pushing of it. and we are all suffering for it. >> ezra klein, thank you very much for joining us tonight. really appreciate it. >> thank you. >> thank you. when we come back, i'd like to leave you with some wisdom and beauty, and that means i'm going to be quoting other people. we'll be right back. hey, can i... hold on one second... sure. okay... okay! safe drivers save 40%!!! guys! guys! check it out. safe drivers save 40%!!! safe drivers save 40%! safe drivers save 40%!!! that's safe drivers save 40%. it is, that's safe drivers save 40%. - he's right there. - it's him! he's here. he's right here. - hi! - hi. hey! - that's totally him. - it's him! that's totally the guy. safe drivers do save 40%. click or call for a quote today. i wanted my hepatitis c gone. safe drivers do save 40%. i put off treating mine. epclusa treats all main types of chronic hep c. whatever your type, epclusa could be your kind of cure. i just found out about mine. i knew for years. epclusa has a 98% overall cure rate. i had no symptoms of hepatitis c mine caused liver damage. epclusa is only one pill, once a day, taken with or without food for 12 weeks. before starting epclusa, your doctor will test if you have had hepatitis b, which may flare up, and could cause serious liver problems during and after treatment. tell your doctor if you have had hepatitis b, other liver or kidney problems, hiv, or other medical conditions... ...and all medicines you take, including herbal supplements. taking amiodarone with epclusa may cause a serious slowing of your heart rate. common side effects include headache and tiredness. ask your doctor today, if epclusa is your kind of cure. saturpain happens. aleve it. aleve is proven stronger and longer on pain than tylenol. when pain happens, aleve it. all day strong. your cells. trillions of them. that's why centrum contains 24 key nutrients to feed your cells, supporting your energy so you can take care of what matters most. centrum. feed your cells. fuel your life. you're clearly someone who takes care of yourself. so when it comes to screening for colon cancer, don't wait. because when caught early, it's more treatable. i'm cologuard. i'm noninvasive and detect altered dna in your stool to find 92% of colon cancers... ...even in early stages. tell me more. it's for people 45 plus at average risk for colon cancer, not high risk. false positive and negative results may occur. ask your prescriber if cologuard is right for you. i'm on it. that's a step in the right direction. so we're working 24/7 toected maintain a reliable network, to meet your growing internet needs. we're helping customers who are experiencing financial difficulties stay connected. we're increasing internet speeds for low income families in our internet essentials program. and delivering self-install kits to your door. nos comprometemos a mantenerte conectado. we're committed to keeping you connected. for more information on how you can stay connected, visit xfinity.com/prepare. the two most important things that i read today were written by friends of mine with whom i always have light and easy conversations that never get to the depth displayed in their writing. the first is from the brilliant filmmaker rodrigo garcia, who i've had the honor of working with. he has published a piece in "the new york times" entitled "a letter to my father, gabriel garcia marquez." gabriel garcia marquez, the nobel laureate in literature and author of "100 years of solitude" and "love in the time of cholera." gabriel garcia marquez died six years ago, and in the letter rodrigo wonders what his father would have had to say about our world being gripped in a pandemic. "he said once that what haunts us about epidemics is that they remind us of personal fate. despite precautions, medical care, age or wealth, anyone can draw the unlucky number." rodrigo garcia speaks for me, and i'm sure many of you, when he writes, "i'm still in a fog. it seems for now that i'll have to wait for the masters, present and future, to metabolize the shared experience. i look forward to that day, a song, a poem, a movie, or a novel will finally point me in the general direction of where my thoughts and feelings about this whole thing are buried. when i get there, i'm sure i'll still have to do some of the digging myself." the other piece of writing i want to leave you with is by 25-year-old chase beach. there's a picture of chase back in the days when i met her with her father, steve, who is as kind and capable and dependable as you could ever hope for in a friend and neighbor. like many 25-year-olds, chase is riding out the pandemic at home with her parents, sleeping in her childhood bedroom. but chase got a head start. chase writes, "i got the call from my mom two years ago. daddy is in the icu, she said. he has a brain tumor." chase didn't have to think about what to do. she immediately flew home to los angeles from new york city and never looked back. she gave up her promising job, where she was getting promotion after promotion. and devoted herself to taking care of her father. now, chase is not the only one of her friends who is worried about her parents' health. many other 25-year-olds whose parents have aged into the higher-risk group for coronavirus have a new worry tonight that they didn't have at their last new year's eve party. chase beach says that her friends' new worries about their parents' health has made her feel not quite so alone on what she calls this island of parental anxiety. since the quarantine began in los angeles, chase's life and her father's life haven't changed too much. they take the same walk every day, with chase pushing steve's wheelchair. but chase sees something on her neighborhood walks that i've totally missed. something beautiful. something profound. "when neighbors see us coming, they make an effort to swing well away, even more than the suggested six feet. this gesture, the way our neighbors step away, is a small example of this puzzling reality we're all facing. in order to stay safe, we must stay away. we stay away in order to remain in a way together. if we are afraid enough of one another or for one another, we may be able to save each other. love and fear, distance and solidarity, have never been more obviously conjoined." chase beach gets tonight's last word. good night, chase. good night, steve. "the 11th hour" with brian williams starts now. well, good evening on this day 1,203 of the trump administration. 181 days to go until our next presidential election. the president has adopted the use of a scorsesean phrase to sum up our sorry circumstances as a country these days. yesterday he said about the state of the u.s. economy and unemployment, "it is what it is." today when asked about the death toll he again said, "it is what it is." adding 70,000 sounds correct to him. just yesterday the president announced he was winding down the coronavirus task force. even though the pandemic is just now ramping up in some places, with the largest spike in new cases now in nebraska and minnesota. the president seemed fine with winding it down. mike pence, who runs the task force, of course seemed fine with doing away with the task force.

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