Front Burner - Trump pushes the economy while experts warn of COVID-19 deaths
Episode Date: March 25, 2020On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he "would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter," which is two and a half weeks from now. But many public health experts say... the result could be an increase in COVID-19 deaths. Today on Front Burner, CBC senior correspondent Susan Ormiston on the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. — Trump's hopes to see the economy reopened in mere weeks, and what it could mean for a country the World Health Organization warned could become the new epicentre of COVID-19.
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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson.
The United States is being hit hard by the coronavirus epidemic.
Right now, they've got more than 50,000 confirmed cases, and that number is still rising.
In New York, they're expecting to hit their peak in two to three weeks.
And while much of the country is being asked to stay home, President Donald Trump, well, he wants the
country back to work. And soon. It's such an important day for other reasons, but I'll make
it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.
Easter is two and a half weeks away.
Today, my colleague Susan Ormiston on the tension between the president's political wishes and the public health of the country.
This is Frontburner.
Hi, Susan. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with me today.
Hi, Jamie. It's a pleasure, even though it's a very odd circumstance.
I'm actually in my closet with about five pillows and two blankets.
The best way to get the best quality sound.
So thank you so much for making that effort for us.
So first of all, could you give us a sense
of where the United States is at in terms of the coronavirus crisis right now?
Well, a very disturbing prediction from the WHO this morning saying that the US is on track to
become the world epicenter of the coronavirus. And this is because the cases here are doubling fast. So that curve
we all talk about is going straight up at the moment. There's a lot of testing going on. So we
actually don't know how much community spread there is now. Okay. And I was listening to some
of the press conferences today, and some of the numbers coming out of particular areas are quite astounding,
right? Like New York, for example. Yeah, I have been speaking about this for a number of days.
New York is very serious. That was repeated in the coronavirus briefing late on Tuesday. They
called it serious. They called it a high risk area. They said anybody who's been in metro New York and
has gone to other places in the United States
should be in self-quarantine for 14 days.
Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President.
Because of the rate of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left New York.
The rate there in New York City is doubling every three days.
It's very critical.
They have 7,000 ventilators, according to the governor. They need 30,000.
We're going so far as to trying an experimental procedure where we split the ventilator.
We use one ventilator for two patients.
It's difficult to perform. It's experimental. But at this point, we have
no alternatives. The attack rate in New York City is one in a thousand, which means that the
virus had been circulating in that great city for a number of weeks before it was even being
monitored because of that kind of penetration. So they're testing now samples coming back are 28% positive
compared to with about 8% in the rest of the United States.
So these kinds of numbers paint a really dire picture of Metro New York.
And what everyone in the U.S. is worried about is that other areas will see that kind of surge
and also that people from that international city, really, the crossroads,
will have traveled elsewhere in the United States and will seed the virus in other places.
Governor Cuomo, I know, has taken steps in New York.
So what is he doing and what are we seeing elsewhere in the United States?
Well, he's been banging on the door of the federal government saying, please
prioritize the supplies to come here, ventilators, masks.
New York has 25,000 cases. It has 10 times the problem that California has. You prioritize resources and your activity and your actions to
where they are needed. There's a thousand bed hospital being created in the convention center
in New York City. There's a hospital ship on the way to the Hudson to provide extra support for
regular medical cases in New York so that the actual hospitals can double down on the
virus. And he's begging, really, for all kinds of equipment to come to New York City. One of the
forecasters said to me, we were looking at a freight train coming across the country. We're
now looking at a bullet train. The new projection suggests that the number of hospital beds needed
could be as high as 140,000.
In other parts of the United States, we see about one in three Americans
are in some version of a lockdown, meaning they've been asked to stay home
except for essential trips to the grocery store or if they have to go to work. Businesses and restaurants are shuttered, much like in Canada.
And the other hot spots are Illinois, Washington State, and California. Huge populations in those
places, but nothing as bad as New York. And New York has 10 times the number of cases in any other state in
the United States. Okay, and they're also on lockdown as well, right? Like, they're not allowed
to congregate in public areas? Yes. And even the police in New York have been now sort of patrolling
the streets and telling businesses who were reluctant to close to shut down. There's been a sort of mild enforcement of the governor's directive.
And there's nothing.
There's no Broadway shows.
There's no Stock Exchange open.
There are none of the wonderful restaurants in the Big Apple.
It's unprecedented.
It has effectively shut down.
And if it hasn't, these kinds of numbers are going to promote further further closing down locking down of that city and parts of that state.
This place used to have 30 employees and on Sunday we let go 90% of the staff.
A few days ago I had to watch a patient basically slowly die.
And now we're all at home wondering, can we make it another month?
I want to talk to you today about President Trump and how he has responded to this in his country. You know, I know early on in the coronavirus outbreak back in February,
he was comparing the virus to the common flu.
And the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that.
There's more people who get the flu, but this is spreading,
or it's going to spread maybe within communities.
That's the expectation.
By last week, though, he did seem to come around to taking the virus seriously.
We're at war. In a true sense, we're at war.
And we're fighting an invisible enemy. Think of that.
And I feel it, actually. I'm a wartime president. This is a war.
Especially in these press conferences, he was alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci,
an infectious disease expert who has been playing a really pivotal role at the White House.
And it certainly did seem like he was promoting social distancing, right?
There's no question, Jamie. I mean, if you look at the timeline,
everything has happened so fast. We're all, our heads are spinning.
March 13th, so just over 10 days ago, he declared a national emergency in the United States.
days ago, he declared a national emergency in the United States.
Two very big words. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion.
He shut the borders to European travel earlier than most.
This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.
He shut the borders to China before that. And then last Monday, so just eight days ago, he had this coronavirus briefing that for many people appeared like one of the few times that they'd seen sort of a standard president, if you will. discussing the issues, taking questions, not attacking the Democrats, not attacking the media,
taking this seriously with his doctor standing behind him.
By making shared sacrifices and temporary changes, we can protect the health of our people
and we can protect our economy because I think our economy will come back very rapidly.
And he said at that time that this was serious that the outbreak could last perhaps into
the summer as long as August. These were the president's words. People are talking about July,
August, something like that. And that he wouldn't rule out further quarantines or curfews in the
future and he launched this 15-day guideline which which they've been promoting every day, 15 days to stop the spread, telling Americans to do everything that Canadians are doing, you know, social distancing, stay in your home, practice hand washing.
This was a campaign that he was fully on board and promoting.
We're asking everyone to work at home if possible, postpone unnecessary travel,
and limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people. Yeah, it felt very much on par with what
we had been hearing here in Canada. And then this week, it felt like a whiplash, I don't know,
for lack of a better word. We seem to be hearing this completely different message from the US
president, starting with Monday's press conference. And what was he saying at the press conference at the beginning of this week?
Well, if you're a night owl, it actually started Sunday at midnight. So going into Monday morning,
he tweeted, the cure cannot be worse than the problem in capital letters with exclamation marks as the president does. This was midnight.
So that morning, just hours later, his own Surgeon General said,
I want America to understand this week it's going to get bad and we really need to come together as
a nation. At the same time, the president was starting this campaign that the cure cannot be
worse than the problem.
The tremendous size of what we've built and what we have
and the jobs involved, we can't turn that off
and think it's going to be wonderful.
There will be tremendous repercussions.
There will be a tremendous death from that.
Death. You know, you're talking about death.
Probably more death from that than anything that we're talking about with respect to
the virus. And that has just been continuing now for two days, where the president continues to say
that perhaps the restrictions could be eased sooner than he suggested and sooner, certainly,
than many of the medical experts would recommend. Don't forget the doctors, if it were up to the doctors, they may say, let's keep it shut down.
Let's shut down the entire world. Because again, you're up to almost 150 countries.
So let's shut down the entire world. And when we shut it down, that'd be wonderful.
Let's keep it shut for a couple of years. You know, we can't do that.
And give me a sense of like what else he's saying, what his reasoning is behind this.
Give me a sense of what else he's saying, what his reasoning is behind this.
Well, the latest is he is saying that he would love for the country to be open and raring to go business-wise by Easter, which is about two and a half weeks from now.
So I think Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country,
I think it would be a beautiful time.
And it's just about the timeline that I think is right.
Which is sooner than many of the medical health,
public health experts suggest could even be a possibility.
And the reason for that is he is deeply worried about the economy,
which is contracting by 30% potentially in this quarter.
He's looking at that stock market, which has dove into unprecedented territory, and he's getting
swayed and lobbied by those in the business and finance community saying you cannot lock down the
national economy of this country for this virus. There are parts of the country, he is arguing,
that aren't as severe as New York City, for example, and that you can target the hot spots
and reopen the economy. And why would we close down 100% of the country? There are areas within
New York where New York will be open, but there are areas within New York.
Remember this, New York has the New York Stock Exchange.
But that leaves a whole lot of confusion for Americans, Jamie.
The real risk here is if the president of the country is suggesting that some of these measures can be loosened earlier than many public health experts advise,
then does it give license for people to say, well, we can go out, we can have a dinner party,
we can go to a game, have a football game in the park, these types of things. It's very hard to
run those two tracks at the same time, especially
after they've put so much effort into getting Americans on this plan, 50 days to stop the
spread. It leaves a lot of room for people to get off that track. So of course, the president's not
alone in this kind of messaging. You mentioned that he's being lobbied. And give me a sense of where else he's hearing
these messages. I mean, we're seeing tweets, for example, from the former chief executive of
Goldman Sachs, who said that extreme measures to flatten the virus curve is sensible for a time,
but crushing the economy, jobs and morale is a health issue and beyond.
This is the kind of debate that's going on sort of at a ground level.
We heard a lieutenant governor of Texas a day or so ago say saying that he'd actually risk death from coronavirus in order to help the economy for the future. No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen,
are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that's the exchange, I'm all in.
So this is a real tug of war between public health sensibilities and people's desire to get the economy going again.
Everybody would like to see business up and running.
But the real danger is if you open it up too quickly, you risk further spread or a second wave of contagion that public health officials are deeply worried about.
And if you look at the other countries where they've had similar curves,
it's taken six to eight weeks with severe restrictions on their citizens in order to flatten the curve.
So, you know, this debate is going on and the president is now firmly involved in
we are going to get the economy going as soon as we can and it's a lot sooner than you thought.
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So we talked about Dr. Anthony Fauci before and how he's had this incredibly important voice in this discussion. And, you know, you mentioned the one lieutenant governor who essentially said that he would die to help the economy.
You know, we heard from a Wisconsin senator last week compare coronavirus to car accidents,
saying we don't shut our economy down because
tens of thousands of people die on the highways. I know last week, Dr. Fauci responded to this.
I don't think with any moral conscience you could say, why don't we just let it rip and happen
and let X percent of the people die? I don't understand that reasoning at all. And how is Fauci reacting this week to this idea that the U.S. could be back up and running by Easter?
I know he was at a press conference earlier today with Donald Trump.
What an interesting character.
He has one of the most difficult jobs in the country right now, Jamie.
He is essentially the president's fact checker in real time. So he stands behind
the president at these hours and hours of coronavirus briefings and tempers the president's
riffing, it appears at times, about drugs efficacy, about timelines, about all kinds of things. So
when the president was cheerleading a particular combination of drugs
that's usually treating malaria last week,
Fauci's role was to come up to the podium right after that and say,
you know, the efficacy of those drugs is anecdotal,
that there haven't been enough real tests.
We're trying to strike a balance between
making something with a potential of an effect to the American people available at the same time
that we do it under the auspices of a protocol that would give us information to determine if
it's truly safe and truly effective. To sort of temper the president's enthusiasm and his message track. So today you watched him,
I watched him sort of tugging at his tie as he was asked to come and say, what do you think of
this Easter timeline? And it was clear, he said, actually, you know, we've just come from a meeting
with the president in the Oval Office this afternoon, and it's clear that you have to be
flexible. Literally day by day and week by week basis, you need to evaluate the feasibility
of what you're trying to do. When you look at the country, I mean, obviously no one is going to want
to tone down things when you see what's going on in a place like New York City. I mean, that's just,
you know, good public health practice and common sense.
And I think he's trying to say, without contradicting the
president directly, he's trying to say, look, we have to base this on data. And he has to convince
the president that that has to be based on data. So you have Donald Trump on the one side being
a cheerleader for the economy and trying to inject some hope, which everybody wants,
into this situation. And you have Anthony Fauci on the other and other medical experts saying, hold on, let's see the data. Let's wait. Let's test.
Let's find out where this contagion is in the rest of the country before we make any decisions
about a resurrection of the economy on Easter Sunday. Okay. And I know business leaders have
pushed back hard on this as well, right? On Tuesday,
Bill Gates called this very irresponsible. And it's very tough to say to people,
hey, keep going to restaurants, buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner.
Just, you know, we want you to keep spending because there's some,
maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is what really counts.
He basically says you can't have the best of both worlds here.
Well, I think that's absolutely accurate.
As I said, it's very hard to say on the one hand, you know, stay home,
you know, don't go out in any more than a group of two. Please don't go to work. And on the other hand,
say, well, maybe some of you can go to work in 10 days from now or 19 days as Easter Sunday is 19
days from Tuesday. That's a very thin line to walk. What Dr. Fauci and many others are saying
is we're too early to know what's going to happen on Easter.
We don't have enough data. The curve is still going straight up in the United States.
It's absolutely too early to even predict that you're going to be loosening the restrictions
that you've tried so hard to encourage 19 days from now.
I think Dr. Fauci is trying to say, look, we have to get more data.
We have to see where this virus is circulating.
We have to see how bad it gets, essentially, before we can talk about opening up wide swaths
of the economy.
Flexibility is what the medical people are trying to convince the president of, and he's
trying to get things
going. And Jamie, I think we can't ignore the politics in this, but also the economic politics.
The stock market on Tuesday, when we're talking, had one of its best days ever since this whole
crisis began and it started plunging. On hopes of a stimulus deal out of Washington,
the Dow notching its biggest point gain ever,
more than 2,100 points.
And that's 11% rise, its best since 1933.
And the president took credit for that in the briefing,
saying, I think they were watching
and they liked the fact that we're saying
we're going to open up business again.
watching and they like the fact that we're saying we're going to open up business again.
So for him, the actual idea, the prospect of business opening up worked in that the economy felt better, that the stock market responded. And that's what he wants.
And of course, we can't ignore the fact that we're in an election year in the United States, too.
We're seven months away.
And what you heard his chief economic advisor say today is, you know, if we do things right now and if we get our economy going again, we are going to have a rebound later in the year.
We're heading for a rough period, but it's only going to be weeks, we think.
Weeks, months, now it's going to be years, that's for sure.
And hopefully pave the way for continued economic recovery.
Which does correspond with the U.S. federal election.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that that is the only reason,
but you can't take the political equation out of this by any stretch.
So one thing I wanted to ask you today,
on the one hand we have the president who's very much touting this Easter deadline.
He's sort of gone back to comparing this to the flu.
He is now comparing this to automobile accidents as well.
Which are far greater than any numbers we're talking about.
That doesn't mean we're going to tell everybody no more driving of cars.
On the other hand, we have public health officials
that are trying to put the brakes on this.
They're touting flexibility like Anthony Fauci.
Some are actually issuing very dire warnings.
You know, this could completely crush the U.S. health care system.
Can Donald Trump unilaterally open the country back up?
Could he just send everybody back to work on Easter?
No, because like in Canada,
the governors, the state governors have a lot of power over what happens. The lockdowns,
like in Ontario, for example, come from the state level. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York,
has been on television as much as Donald Trump has trying to get a handle on the crisis facing his state.
And he's the one who has said, close the businesses, don't go out. So it's state by state.
But what the president is doing and can do is set a broad campaign, a broad perspective that will put pressure on governors to respond. And governors are only
too happy to want to open up the economy, but not at the risk of their own citizens,
their state citizens. I mean, I think it's a very fluid situation. The next timeline is, okay,
what does the president tell Americans the beginning the beginning of next week, when the 15 days to stop the spread runs out?
Does he extend it or does he start to open things up?
I mean, I think that's a really big strategic question right now.
So there's lots to keep tabs on.
I know that the situation is really fluid.
keep tabs on. I know that the situation is really fluid. And of course, what happened in the United States has really grave consequences here in Canada, considering we're neighbours, obviously.
Yes, and I can tell you that as this news was coming out today, him setting this Easter timeline
for relaxing the restrictions in parts of the United States, I mean, Twitter is no real audience, but lots of
Canadians, I presume, were responding to my tweets saying, good luck to you. Keep the borders closed.
Don't come up here. We don't want you. Good luck. Okay, Susan Ormiston, thank you so much for
taking the time. You're welcome.
So Susan and I talked about how the decision the U.S. makes in the coming weeks could affect Canada.
Well, at his daily press conference, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about this exactly. And how such a move would impact the Canada-U.S. border agreement. We'll continue to ensure that essential supplies of medication, of industrial equipment,
of food continue to flow. At the same time, we are continuing in Canada to base our decisions and
our recommendations and guidelines to Canadians on science. That's all for today. Thanks so much
for listening to FrontBurner and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.