60 Minutes - 4/26/2020: On The Line, Outbreak Science, The Unseen Enemy

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Temperatures are being checked before shifts at GM and workers at Ford have watches that notify them if they're too close to each other. Norah O'Donnell reports on how both companies are trying to protect their employees as they manufacture medical equipment. David Martin finds out how the military is handling the coronavirus pandemic. And Bill Whitaker reports on the role of artificial intelligence in fighting the pandemic. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Value is for illustrative purposes only. General Motors and Ford built nearly 4 million vehicles in this country last year. Today, they are making exactly zero because fear of the coronavirus has forced them to close their factories. While they're no longer making cars, both automakers are bringing back laid off workers to help manufacture ventilators and personal protective equipment. It went from a discussion to production in less than three weeks. These were many of the first cities that actually received cases of COVID-19 as it spread out of mainland China. We can analyze and visualize all this information across the globe in just a few seconds. It's a digital early warning system that uses artificial intelligence to track infectious outbreaks. Should the U.S. government be using it? This is a whole other level of sophistication and data collection. That's our story tonight.

It is a secure location that we intend to operate out of in wartime. Cheyenne Mountain was built to withstand a nuclear blast. But every time a watch team makes this half-mile walk into the mountain, they risk bringing the virus with them. The first step you do is you start wiping down every surface, your computers, your telephones, your desk surfaces, door handles. It's a bit like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but we have to be able to make sure that there's no exposure to that virus. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. This past week, another 4.4 million Americans joined the unemployment line, and among the companies shedding the most workers are America's car makers. The big two, General Motors and Ford, built nearly 4 million vehicles here in America last year. Today, they're making exactly zero. Their factories closed to prevent the coronavirus from spreading among employees. While they're no longer making cars, both GM and Ford are applying their manufacturing muscle to the pandemic by turning out ventilators and personal protective equipment in huge numbers. Last week, we spoke to GM CEO Mary Barra and Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford remotely. Both of them were in Michigan, and they told us they're thinking creatively to figure out how to get their workers

back on the line and keep them there. We're shut down pretty much everywhere in the world except China right now. And then, of course, we were shut down in China earlier. And we've never had a time like this where everything has been shut. I know that Ford reports its first quarter earnings in a few days, and the projection is a loss of $2 billion. And those losses will continue to mount. Can you sustain that? Well, obviously not indefinitely. Between them, Ford and General Motors had nearly $300 billion in revenue last year. Today, that river of money is running dry. Mary Barra is CEO of GM,

the first woman to run the company in its history. Has COVID-19 proved to be an existential threat to GM's long-term health? Between the strength of our balance sheet with the steps we've taken in the past, we will get through this and we will learn a lot of lessons that will apply. I mean, what's the long-term prognosis for General Motors if you're not making cars? No one knows when things are going to get back to what I refer to as a new normal. I've heard others refer to it as a new abnormal. In the new abnormal, GM and Ford have each tapped into about $15 billion in private lines of credit to pay their bills. One estimate is that Ford is burning through $165 million a day. Remember, it was just 11 years ago, in the last financial crisis, that GM declared bankruptcy.

Ford avoided that, but did get a $6 billion government loan. So do you think you'll need another loan to get through this crisis? We don't think so. We think we can get through this, and we think we can get through it and get back to work. But we're in an unprecedented time, and so I suppose you never say never, but that's not our plan. Part of the financial pressure is that under their contracts with the United Auto Workers Union, Ford and GM continue to pay millions of dollars to their idled workers. And now there's political pressure, with protests taking place in their home state of Michigan

and some demonstrators demanding an economic restart. What do you think's driving those protests? I think people are understandably nervous, scared, scared about the disease, but also scared about their own economic well-being. And so, I mean, I get it. I totally get it. Many people in your state want to get back to work soon.

Well, I think we'd all like to get back to work soon, but we have to do it safely. And that's not a political question. That's really a scientific question. As Ford and GM shut down auto production in March, Michigan emerged as a major COVID-19 hotspot. The state has the third largest number of deaths in the nation, and its health care workers have endured shortages of protective gear. The state's largest health system, Beaumont, says that 1,500 of its employees are presumed to have COVID-19. What were your marching orders to your team when this crisis began? My team didn't need marching orders. Right from the very start, it was from our local hospital

saying, hey, we don't have any protective equipment. Who can help us? Our company just jumped into action. And that began Ford's transformation from carmaker to medical supply manufacturer. The company has since churned out millions of face shields, masks, gowns, and portable respirators for health care workers. This past week, Ford began producing respirators for health care workers. This past week, Ford began producing ventilators for patients.

There are companies that can make complicated things, but they make them in small numbers. There are also companies that can make lots of things, but they can't make complicated things. You know, we turn out an F-150 every 52 seconds. So when we look at this crisis as a country and said, you know, which industry is positioned to help us not only in terms of sophisticated machinery, but can do a lot of them and a lot of them quickly, the auto industry is uniquely positioned to do that. In mid-March, it looked as if American hospitals would quickly need thousands of ventilators that didn't exist. Can we get that here faster?

As the pandemic spread, GM's Mary Barra learned about a small, innovative ventilator manufacturer in Washington state called Ventec. Was putting the company's assets and its people to work to fight this pandemic an easy decision? It was a very easy decision. When I got the call and we got the introduction to Ventec, the team just moved so quickly and we thought if there's a way we can help, we absolutely want to do it. The manifold that we had before. After one phone call with Ventec, Phil Kenley, GM's vice president of North American manufacturing, got on a plane with three of his engineers. When we were on the flight to Seattle, I asked everybody to have a mindset of, what if your parents, your wife, one of your children had this COVID disease

and absolutely needed one of these ventilators? How far would you go to get this thing into production? How fast would you move? And given the speed with which you needed to act, how did you go about sourcing 400 different parts for ventilators? Our global purchasing and supply chain team really pulled off a miracle in sourcing this. We were in Seattle on a Friday. That same weekend, they were already sourcing the components for us.

GM and Ventec began transforming GM's Kokomo, Indiana facility virtually overnight, from one that made electronic car components to a ventilator factory. It was ideally suited because both products contain a lot of circuit boards. Then they called on a mixture of salaried GM employees and union workers from the UAW. George Vandermeier has been with GM for 43 years. He used to make sure parts for pickup trucks met safety standards. He's doing the same now for ventilators. With parts so small, they need to be picked up with a set of tweezers. When were you scheduled to retire? Yesterday. So I just extended my retirement for another month or two just to make sure this gets off the ground and everything works well

so we can get these ventilators out. Tracy Streeter used to move sheet metal with a forklift at his old GM job, and that was before he was laid off because of COVID-19. And just brought that plant to a standstill. He is one of 46 laid-off workers just brought that plant to a standstill. He is one of 46 laid off workers from a GM plant in Marion, Indiana, who got the call from Kokomo. I went and asked my wife.

She's an LPN and her eyes lit up and she went, you get to help. So it was a no brainer. Your wife is a nurse and she said said this is an opportunity to help. Exactly. In just two days, he was trained to assemble and test a part of the ventilator that holds oxygen and has to be airtight. There's a little tiny screw that goes into the part that I build. But even though that screw is so small, it's an important part, I look at it in the scheme of things,

I'm just probably just as insignificant as that small little screw, but I'll play a part in what's happening in the bigger scale. It went from a discussion to production in less than three weeks. At first, GM and Ventec were operating on their own. In late March, President Trump ordered them to make ventilators under the Defense Production Act. Twelve days later, they signed a half-billion-dollar contract to make $30,000 for the federal government by August. GM says it's not making any profit on the ventilators, but the project is teaching

the company valuable lessons to help get its car factories open faster, says Phil Kenley, head of manufacturing for North America. Well, we've actually pretty much used Kokomo as a beta site, if you will, for new safety protocols that will instill when General Motors restarts. That's really interesting. So not only are you making ventilators, you're also learning about how to work safely in this new era once you reopen the car plants. Absolutely. Many of those working in Kokomo, Mary, told us that they get their temperature taken before they go into work. Is that going to be the new normal in American manufacturing? Yes, it will be. Before I walked into this facility today, I had my temperature scanned.

I think it's a very important part of the protocol. Morning, how are you doing? Good, how are you? In the plant I'm in today, we're wearing face masks and we're wearing face shields. Ford's executive chairman, Bill Ford, said the company has also installed plastic barriers between each workstation to enforce social distancing.

Everybody is also wearing watches that buzz if you get within six feet of somebody else. That's the first I had heard about these wristbands that buzz when you get within six feet of somebody. Yeah, we're trying it out. The watches that Ford is testing are made by Samsung and use Bluetooth technology. It also tells you who you've come into contact with that's also been wearing that wristband so that if anybody was infected, it's very easy to trace who they were interacting with. Ford is testing the watches with small teams of workers now making medical equipment. And what do you do when it buzzes? Back off. 30-year Ford employee

Joanne Ritchie is on a line that's made over a million face masks. Just six weeks ago, in another clean room, she was making transmission valves. Joanne's daughter, Andrea, is a critical care nurse in one of the hospitals near Detroit that has seen both shortages of protective gear and multiple staffers diagnosed with COVID-19. And when your manager called to ask if you would come back not to make cars but to make face masks, did you think about your daughter and helping her? That was the first thing that came to my mind. I thought, I'm going to protect her. If I can, I'm going to protect her. I'm going to give her what she needs to do her job. Joanne Ritchie goes to her job at the factory every morning at 4 30 a.m., seven days a week. About an hour after she leaves for work, her daughter heads for her job at the hospital to treat COVID-19 patients.

The first couple days that she came home, she was, you couldn't even look at her in the face. She didn't want to talk. And I said, I'm worried about you. I'm waiting to make sure that you come home at night because I don't know if you're going to come home. She really is on the front lines. Oh, yes, she is. Sorry about that. Turns out it runs in the family.

During World War II, Joanne's grandmother, Kiara, worked for the Hudson Motor Car Company in Detroit, helping to make planes and engines for the U.S. war machine, just as millions of other women did in factories all around the country. Your grandmother, Kiara, was a real Rosie the Riveter. Yes, she was. You just step up to the plate. GM's George Vandermeier also stepped up. The first shipments of ventilators he helped build went out to Chicago area hospitals last week. When you first saw a ventilator built and completed, ready to ship, how did that make you feel?

It was amazing. What we could do in such a short period of time, taking a vision and making it reality in three or four weeks. And we all got the opportunity to sign the box of the first shipments. Worth putting retirement off for? Absolutely. Hands down, no question. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

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more than speed. A little-known band of doctors and high-tech wizards say they were able to find the vital speed needed to attack the coronavirus, the computing power of artificial intelligence. They call their new weapon outbreak science. It could change the way we fight another contagion. Already, it has led to calls for an overhaul of how the federal government does things. But first, we'll take you inside Blue Dot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It's a digital early warning system, and it was among the first to raise alarms about this lethal outbreak. It was New Year's Eve when Blue Dot's computer spat out an alert. A Chinese business paper had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in Wuhan, a city of 11 million.

The signs were ominous. Seven people were already in hospitals. Almost all the cases came from the city's sprawling market, where live animals are packed in cages and slaughtered on site. Medical detectives are now investigating if this is where the epidemic began, when the virus made the leap from animals to us. Half a world away on the Toronto waterfront, Blue Dot's founder and CEO, Dr. Cameron Kahn, was on his way to work. An infectious disease physician, he had seen another coronavirus in 2003, SARS, kill three colleagues. When we spoke with him remotely, he told us this outbreak had him worried. We did not know that this would become the next pandemic, but we did know that there were echoes of the SARS outbreak,

and it was something that we really should be paying attention to. COVID-19 soon got the world's attention. Blue Dot's Toronto staff now works from home, except for Dr. Khan. But in December, the office kicked into high gear as they rushed to verify the alert. Chinese officials were secretive about what was happening, but Blue Dot's computer doesn't rely on official statements. Their algorithm was already churning through data, including medical bulletins, even livestock reports, to predict where the virus would go next. It was also scanning the ticket data from 4,000 airports.

And just draw right over the city of Wuhan, and it'll reveal the locations of airports. Blue Dot wasn't just tracking flights, but calculating the cities at greatest risk. On December 31st there were more than 800,000 travelers leaving Wuhan some likely carrying the disease. So these yellow lines reflect the non-stop flights going out of Wuhan and then the blue circles reflect the final destinations of travelers. The larger the circle the larger number of travelers who are going to that location. These were many of the first cities that actually received cases of COVID-19 as it spread out of mainland China. You can do that in a matter of seconds? We can analyze and visualize all this information across the globe in just a few seconds.

The virus wasn't just spreading to East Asia. Thousands of travelers were heading to the United States, too. Most of the travel came into California and San Francisco and Los Angeles, also into New York City. And we analyzed that way back on December 31st. Our surveillance system that picked up the outbreak of Wuhan automatically talks to the system that is looking at how travelers might go to various airports around Wuhan. So when you see that map, you don't just see flight patterns. If you think of an outbreak a bit like a fire, an embers flying off, these are like embers flying off into different locations.

So in this case, that ember landed in dry brush in New York and started a wildfire. Absolutely. Dr. Khan told us he had spent the better part of a year persuading the airlines to share their flight data for public health. Nobody had ever asked that before. But he saw it as information gold. How is it that someone knows 16B, that seat is available, but 14A has been taken? There clearly must be some kind of information system.

Why is that so important? There are over 4 billion of us that board commercial flights and travel around the world every year. And so that is why understanding population movements becomes so important in anticipating how diseases spread. The virus spread across Asia with a vengeance. Blue Dot has licensed access to the anonymized location data from millions of cell phones. And with that data, it identified 12 of the 20 cities that would suffer first. What we're looking at here are mobile devices that were in Wuhan in the previous 14 days. And where are they now across East Asia?

Places like Tokyo have a lot of devices, Seoul in South Korea. So you're following those devices from Wuhan to these other cities? That's correct. I do want to point out these are also anonymized data, but they allow us to understand population movements. That is how we can understand how this virus will spread. To build their algorithm, Dr. Khan told us he deliberately hired an eclectic mix. Engineers, ecologists, geographers, veterinarians, all under one roof. They spent a year teaching the computer to detect 150 deadly pathogens.

We can ultimately train a machine to be reading through all the text and picking out components that this is talking about an outbreak of anthrax and this is talking about the heavy metal band anthrax. And as you do this thousands and thousands and thousands of times, the machine starts to get smarter and smarter. And how many different languages does the computer understand? So it's reading this currently in 65 languages and processing this information every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. So it's a lot of data to go through. Within two hours of detecting the outbreak on December 31st, Blue Dot had sent a warning of the potential threat to its clients, public health officials in 12 countries, airlines and frontline hospitals like Humber River in Toronto.

We've been able to really make a lot of decisions, I think, a little bit earlier because I kind of feel like we had a bit of an inside scoop here. One of Canada's top infectious disease physicians, Dr. Michael Gardam, told us it was like getting real-time intelligence. What did you do when you got that information from Blue Dot? Getting that intel allowed me to kind of be the canary in the coal mine to stand up and say we need to pay attention to this and to start thinking about it start thinking about supplies start thinking about how busy we might be now at this point everybody knows about COVID-19 but it's it's not so much now now you've pretty much bought whatever PPE you can buy it's very hard to buy that anymore it's what did you do a month and a half ago that was so important. So none of this is any surprise to us whatsoever. And yet you see countries around the world where this has been a surprise.

Blue Dot had no clients in the U.S. So while Dr. Gardham's hospital was making plans in January, President Trump, as late as March, was still assuring Americans that everything was under control. We're prepared and we're doing a great job with it, and it will go away. Just stay calm. California wasn't so sure and braced for the worst. In March, it became the first state in the country to lock down its cities. Mickey Mouse suddenly looked lonely. Drivers had only dreamed of such empty freeways.

But the lockdown bought time. Despite having its first case of COVID-19 five weeks before New York, California dodged the hurricane of infection that slammed into New York City. At his daily teleconference in Sacramento, Governor Gavin Newsom made no secret where he'd gotten his edge, outbreak science. It's not a gross exaggeration when I say this. The old modeling is literally pen to paper in some cases, and then you put it into some modest little computer program and it spits a piece of paper out. This is a whole other level of sophistication and data collection. With the virus spreading around the world, California enlisted the help of Blue Dot, Esri, Facebook, and others, using mapping technologies and cell phone data to predict which hospitals would be hit hardest and see if Californians were really staying at home.

Data became California's all-seeing crystal ball. We are literally seen into the future and predicting in real time based on constant update of information where patterns are starting to occur before they become headlines. Can you just sort of like give me an example? We can see in real time on a daily basis, hourly basis, moment by moment basis, if necessary, whether or not our stay-at-home orders were working. We can truly track now by census track, not just by county. Here's what it looked like.

Blue dots scanned anonymous cell phone data over a 24-hour period last month in Los Angeles. The blue circles indicate less movement than the week before. The red spots show where people are still gathering. It could be a hospital or a problem. That cell phone data allows public health officials to investigate. It also raises worrisome privacy issues. How are you able to ensure that this cell phone data will remain anonymous? Well, I didn't want to take the company's words for it. I say that respectfully. I have a team of folks that are privacy first advocates in our technology department, and we are making sure that no individualized data is provided. If it is, we're out.

So what's been the most frustrating part of this for you? It's just incumbent upon us to have a national lens and to recognize we're many parts but one body. And if one part suffers, we all suffer. From this experience, do you think the federal government needs to overhaul the way it tackles pandemics? I don't know that there's a human being out there, maybe one or two, that would suggest otherwise. No, the absolute answer is, of course, unequivocally.

Data technology has transformed the way we do business in many aspects of our lives, but it has not transformed the way things are done in public health. For Dylan George, that's an urgent priority. As a scientist tracking biological threats in the Bush and Obama administrations, he has seen firsthand what he calls the panic-neglect cycle. Perhaps the most tragic idea in all of public health is this in a time of an outbreak, everyone lights their hair on fire and is running around trying to figure out it. After it's over, everyone forgets about it. He has joined a growing number of scientists

pressing to revive an old idea, an infectious disease forecasting center modeled on the National Weather Service. We need to have professionals that their day job is dedicated to helping us understand how infectious diseases will risk our well-being economically and from a national security perspective. That idea has been kicking around for a while. It's never gotten the funding. Do you think things will be different this time? When we see that there is $2 trillion being spent on stimulus bills to help us get out of this, to make sure that we can rebound, we need to think transformatively. We need to think broadly about how we can move these things forward.

This kind of a center would help us do that. As the coronavirus continues to upend our lives, Toronto's Dr. Michael Gardam told us he has seen the difference a digital early warning system can make. One of the biggest challenges in infectious diseases is you never want to be the doctor that picks up the first case because you're probably going to miss it and you probably weren't wearing the right gear and it's probably already spread in your hospital. And so getting the early warning that gives you the intel to make that first call is so incredibly important. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning.

You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Tonight, David Martin on assignment for 60 Minutes. Anyone joining the United States military takes an oath to defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Safe to say, very few of them had coronavirus in mind when they raised their right hand. By latest count, some 60,000 servicemen and women have been sent into action against this new enemy. But the military's number one mission has been to defend its own ranks against infection. It can't protect the nation if it can't defend itself. The aircraft carrier Roosevelt made headlines when coronavirus ran roughshod through its crew, and there have been other outbreaks that required drastic measures to contain. The U.S. military was up against an enemy it could not see and did not understand. Everything, two, three, two! Everything in the Army starts with basic training.

And every day starts before dawn. But it never looked or sounded like this before. Hard surfaces, everything that your little hands touch, everything. It's got to get wiped out. Your beds, everything. It's got to get wiped down. Your beds, everything. If it's a hard surface that collects dust, you're going to wipe it down. You understand? Yes, real son, yes! It's not dust Drill Sergeant David Castillo was worried about. It's coronavirus. And that's why he takes every recruit's temperature first thing.

If your organization is infected by something like this, you know, these people, these initial entry trainees, are our combat power. So if they go down, and if we can't do it safely, then we are rendering ourselves obsolete. Do you understand? Last month, 63 recruits in a class of 940 here at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, tested positive for the virus and upended basic training.

You're going to do everything that I tell you. You do not move unless I tell you to. That's not a recruit he's barking at. It's a four-star general, Army Chief of Staff James McConville. Make sure that he's standing on top of the red and the white X. Is that clear? McConville took on the role of a recruit to witness the revamped training firsthand after coronavirus had forced the Army to stop taking in new soldiers. We took a two-week pause. So for two weeks, you're not taking in any recruits? That's correct. Has that ever happened before?

I'm not aware of any time, at least in my 39 years, where we've stopped taking recruits in, but these are different times. Training is still going on at Fort Jackson for recruits who arrive before the two-week pause. But now every soldier is wearing a face mask, loading up on hand sanitizer before moving into firing position and trying to stay six feet apart. Stop. Stop.

Keep your distance. We call it social distancing. The Army calls it tactical dispersion. We have been executing socially distance-enabled training since week two. Either way, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Collins tells General McConville it's a problem. Day to day, our biggest problem is keeping them in that six feet, because you tend to tell them, OK, separate, get your six feet. You know, a couple minutes later, you know, just kind of natural human behavior.

They start clustering again, and you've got to tell them again. Move back, move back. Nothing at Fort Jackson is natural anymore. The Army likes to say it has the best-dressed soldiers in the world. But tailors, who usually alter uniforms for a better fit, are now turning out face masks. He's just got it. These are brand new. And the single most important equipment McConville saw on his tour was a pair of high-speed COVID-19 test machines. That would give us the ability to test

750-plus in one day with a one-day turnaround. And then they go and we can then test that bubble also. We can continue to expand the bubbles of testing so that we can make sure that we cut it off right at the source rather than watch it spread through a unit. The chief of staff's job is to get the Army ready to fight. But these days, General McConville told us he spends three-quarters of his time trying to fight coronavirus to keep his soldiers healthy. Just six weeks ago, he was sending heavy armor to Europe for one of the largest exercises since the Cold War. The toughest decision that we had to make was to cancel Defender 20.

Hey, sir, how are you? Defender 20 meant sending an entire division-sized force and its equipment to Europe just as the virus was assaulting the continent. We just started wargaming. What would happen if we had 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers in a very close environment and, you know, and the virus broke out? How would we take care of them? And did we want to put our soldiers at that much risk for a training exercise? And we chose not to. You have to curtail training. You have to postpone major exercises. That's got to take a toll on the readiness of the Army.

From where I sit, I'm looking at the long game. And the long game is that we have to protect the force to protect the nation. How big a price have you paid so far? I don't think we've paid a huge price yet. Am I concerned long term? Absolutely. I'll be honest, it's been a little bit intimidating thinking about it. You train in your career to fight an enemy that you can see this is one that you can't. Air Force Brigadier General Pete Fessler, a fighter pilot, is about as far removed from basic training as it gets. Underneath 1,500 feet of granite at this command post inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. It is a secure location that we intend to operate out of in wartime.

Well, this is wartime, isn't it? It is, but it's really a different kind of war. Cheyenne Mountain was built to withstand a nuclear blast. But every time a watch team makes this half-mile walk into the mountain, they risk bringing the virus with them, which is why each team spends 14 days in quarantine before going on duty. When their watch starts... First step you do is you start wiping down every surface,

your computers, your telephones, your desk surfaces, door handles, et cetera, to make sure that all those are clean as well. It's a bit like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but we have to be able to make sure that all those are clean as well. It's a bit like an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but we have to be able to make sure that there's no exposure to that virus. Because our 60 Minutes team had not been quarantined, our cameras were not allowed inside the mountain. This footage was shot by the military.

The interview was conducted from the Pentagon. When occasionally we have to bring somebody from outside into our bubble for work on an IT system, for example, we scatter like cockroaches. It's as if this is the most dangerous thing we've ever done in our careers. It's not being shot at. It's not flying combat. It's actually having somebody from outside the bubble arrive inside of here. This command center performs what Fessler calls a zero-fail mission, a 24-7 watch against a missile or bomber attack on the United States.

Since the pandemic began, Cheyenne Mountain has scrambled jets to intercept Russian aircraft off the coast of Alaska three times. Do you think they were testing you at all to see if anybody was home at Cheyenne Mountain? I suspect that the way that they look at those sorties probably is related to understanding our ability to operate in a COVID environment. Cheyenne Mountain was ready for the Russians, but not for coronavirus. This is something new. This is something that we had to invent on the fly, as our adversary was not exactly like the one we had planned to fight.

There are so many aspects of what's going on now that are not things that we expected that we would be doing. General Terrence O'Shaughnessy, head of the U.S. Northern Command, is the man in charge of defending the homeland. He had plans for dealing with all kinds of disasters, including a pandemic, but nothing on this scale. Often we practice what we call the complex disasters, where we might have an earthquake maybe that hit multiple states, and we consider those to be complex. And to have actual disasters declared in the 50 states and the response that's happening with them, that is unprecedented. So you know the old saying about plans, no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. This plan did not survive contact with the enemy.

Despite all the top secret intelligence he sees, O'Shaughnessy did not have a good understanding of the virus. Having an enemy that you don't fully understand is always a little bit frustrating. We still don't fully understand the virus. General John Hyten is the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the number two man in the military. Twice each day, he holds a video conference with the Pentagon's crisis management team located two floors below in the National Military Command Center. We had so many assumptions of what a virus would do, what a pandemic flu would do,

and then when you actually see what coronavirus does, what COVID-19 does, it's completely different. The nastiest surprise was the aircraft carrier Roosevelt. Not only did the virus sideline one of the most important ships in the Navy, but the majority of the more than 800 crew members who tested positive had no symptoms. You think you finally start to understand it, and then you get data off the Theodore Roosevelt of the very large number of asymptomatic cases, and then you try to understand whether the asymptomatic cases is contagious. How contagious are they?

That's medical questions that, well, we still don't fully understand the answers to. Many of the answers depended on testing, and the Pentagon had to use its transport planes to airlift millions of test swabs into the United States from Europe. From the outside looking in, it seemed like it was one emergency stopgap shipment of medical supplies after another. Was that what it was like on the inside looking out? On the inside looking out, I'll say it didn't look like an emergency, but it was difficult. It was difficult to figure out exactly where to go.

And then when we decided to move, we had to move quickly to get it to the right place. But the one thing that we do really well is we move stuff. The Army Corps of Engineers set up hospitals like this one at Chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center all across the country, creating by last count about 15,000 beds in case local hospitals were overwhelmed. Were those hospitals the last line of defense? We looked at it as the last line of defense? We'd looked at it as the last line of defense. Where would the medical personnel to staff all those beds come from?

I have to be honest. We were worried about whether we'd run out of capacity early on when we were looking at those big numbers. It was not just space, but we were worried about doctors, nurses, corpsmen, respiratory therapy. We were worried about all those things. If this virus had not been slowed by social distancing, would the U.S. military have had the capability and capacity to defeat that virus?

That's what we were worried about, a situation where we would have been basically mobilizing everything we had would have been a different world. And I can't tell you right now how we would have closed that. It's a question the American military rarely has to ask itself. But the definition of what it takes to be a superpower has changed forever. So what will it take to get the military back to normal? 2019 normal will never exist again. We have to figure out how to operate and fight through a world where coronavirus exists.

If we just wait for what, you know, everybody hopes is going to happen, which is the disease goes away, and it doesn't, and we haven't planned for the other case we're in a bad situation. Now, an update on a story from earlier this month called Critical Condition. Scott Pelley visited Melba's, a 109-seat restaurant in Harlem where owner Melba Wilson had laid off 24 employees after the pandemic shut down restaurant dining rooms. Among them was Alicia Navarro, a 30-year-old single mother. Today, Melba is preparing about 200 meals a day,

ordered and paid for by customers, then distributed to medical workers, schools, and first responders. Melba has begun to call back some of her kitchen staff. Alicia Navarro, who didn't work in the kitchen, remains on unemployment, caring full-time for her daughter. Alicia tells us she received $500 from 60 Minutes viewers. She spent $300 making sandwiches, which she gave out to public housing residents and the homeless in her neighborhood. The rest covered groceries for her daughter and herself. I'm Bill Whitaker.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.