as we say, mazel tov. i'm wolf blitzer. thanks very much for watching. you can follow me on twitter and instagram @wolfblitzer. tweet the show @cnnsitroom. erin burnett "outfront" starts right now. "outfront" next, deaths in the u.s. topping 70,000. the number of new cases growing every day. yet the white house is looking to phase out the coronavirus task force. why? plus some scientists say herd immunity is likely the only way to end the pandemic. herd immunity means a lot more people get this. how many more cases and deaths does that mean? two global experts on that subject out front. and a major pharmaceutical company thinks it can have millions of vaccine doses ready to go by the end of the year. find out from them why they're so optimistic. let's go "outfront." and good evening. i'm erin burnett. out front tonight, the breaking news. the death toll in this country from coronavirus is now at a

staggering 70,000 people. it is a staggering number no matter how you look at it. and think about it this way. it was just last week that the model used by the white house projected that we would have just over 70,000 deaths by august 4th. it is of course may 5th. and the number of cases continues to rise. now nearing 1.2 million. so if you take a look at this graph, this is the number of new cases a day. in the united states. you can see that that's not yet going down. the u.s. is still adding roughly 25,000 cases a day. that we know of. this does come as we learn the administration is having conversations about winding down the coronavirus task force. that's the group of people running the national response to the virus. the task force of obviously anthony fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country is on it. dr. deborah birx. director of the cdc dr. robert reld redfield. health and human services secretary alex easar. and the u.s. surgeon general dr.

jerome adams. and what they've really been doing is coordinating the response across the federal government. the administration says that medical xmts wiexperts will sti advise the president but they're going to leave it to the federal agencies to run the response apparently ziegd the meetings to coordinate the response isn't necessary anymore. cnn's nick watt live in los angeles. nick, as these indications continue to rise you have states opening up to varying degrees, some of them now new details on when they're going to reopen schools. >> interpreter: erin, that is the question at the forefront of every parent's mind. in montana we hear some small schools may reopen actually this week. but that state is an outlier. way out there. in fact, connecticut just became the 46th state in this country to say yeah, there's not going to be any more school this academic year. the governor in fact said in taking that decision, he said "it breaks my heart." and also what school kids will go back to in the fall we still don't know.

chances are it will be different. meantime, pretty much everything is, the doors are beginning to inch open. but erin, there is a price that we will have to pay. >> the faster we reopen the lower the economic cost. but the higher the human cost. >> reporter: at least 42 states have now taken steps toward reopening. today in washington state you can fish, hunt, and play golf again. in arizona barbers can open this weekend. restaurants with distancing can open their doors monday. >> you very shortly will be able to get your nails done here in arizona. that's not something i would do. i would encourage people if you can still stay home please do so. >> six feet of distance from each other. >> reporter: in texas a park ranger told people to social distance and was pushed into the

water for his trouble. >> ooh. >> reporter: in california governor gavin newsom says some retail can finally reopen friday after 50 days. but the state's two biggest cities say they might take it slower. >> reporter: our timing on opening may vary from other parts of the state. >> reporter: one national model has now nearly doubled our number of projected deaths to nearly 135,000. >> how many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept? to get back to what you want to be? form of normality. >> reporter: and we're still waiting on some much-needed tools. >> we can't resume normal life until we have a vaccine. >> reporter: some researchers also say we'll need 100,000 contact tracers as we reopen to keep track of the virus. >> if we don't do this i believe what we're going to see is large surges in cases, large epidemics that may send us back under social distancing measures. >> reporter: now, new case

counts are dropping in new york. >> there's no doubt that we're coming down the monday. >> reporter: but they're still putting new precautions in place. 1:00 a.m. wednesday morning the city's subway will stop. the first suspension of 24-hour service in 115 years. >> why? because they have to be disinfected. >> reporter: meatpacking plants across the country have also closed for cleaning after outbreaks. nearly 800 employees were sickened at smithfield's plant in sioux falls, south dakota. it's now reopening. >> that's what these plants are having to try and figure out, is where do they get to a point where they can say to their employees with confidence yes, it is safe for you to return to work. >> reporter: the president has order plants open. the supply chain is suffering. and according to one analyst, one in five wendy's is now oust fresh beef. no longer serving burgers. now, today it struck me as the

disney corporation is kind of looking like a microcosm of this entire situation. they just announced their first quarter profits fell 91%. tens of thousands of workers furlou furloughed. executives have taken pay cuts. but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. they just announced that next week disneyland shanghai, their first park to reopen, will reopen. but guests must wear masks. they will have their temperature taken. and employees are right now being trained in what they're calling contactless guest interactions. sounds like fun. erin? >> all right. thank you very much, nick. out front now, dr. sanjay gupta and dr. asis shah, director of the harvard global health institute. so let me start with you, sanjay, when we hear about the coronavirus task force being phased out and they want to do that over the next few weeks and vice president pence says we're going to transition this back to the federal agencies. is the task force useful in terms of getting them all in a room to do that in one place?

>> yeah, i think it is useful. and you know, you thought about during ebola, for example, there was a czar to sort of coordinate that federal response. i think it is important here. objective rly i think it is important. subjectively it also sent a message of seriousness, of gravity around this, and helped translate some of these more difficult medical concepts for the public which is important. keep in mind, erin, on march 16th when they started the pause and these briefings in more earnest there were some 4500 people roughly with a confirmed infection at that point and around 70 people had died. you see the numbers. it's a thousandfold now in terms of deaths. states are reopening. i worry this is all sending the wrong message. disbanding the task force, states reopening. it feels to many people like it's reopening and it's not. >> do we still need to hear from the doctors on a regular basis? i'm wonder field goal the reason

we're not hearing from them is they would maybe be saying what you're going to say or what sanjay just said and that's not the message that the white house wants out there. >> yeah. so i think abandoning the task force at this moment is a terrible idea. what most people need to know is i think we're sort of at the top of the third inning of a nine-inning baseball game. we have a long way to go. and this is not when the coach walks out and says we're done. and that's basically what we're seeing at this point. i think it's not going to be useful. yes, states will have to continue to play a big role but we have a long way to go in this pan demmic and a lot of people are going to get sick and a lot of people are going to die and we need a very effective federal response helping working with states and i'm deeply worried if we stop hearing from dr. birx and dr. fauci and we stop having a coordinated federal response things are going get worse, not better. >> sanjay, look, at least 20 states are seeing a growth in case numbers and as you pointed out, i remember asking you ten days ago when we -- you know, was there any way that we would

be at 74,000 deaths as they were projecting, the white house task force, by august. and it was obvious that wasn't the case. and now we passed their number by august today. we're right there. i'm sorry, we're a couple thousand short. but states are moving ahead with those plans to reopen. dr. fauci summed it all up this way, sanjay. >> how many deaths and how much suffering are you willing to accept to get back to what you want to be some form of normality sooner rather than later? >> what will americans accept? two months ago if you had said 70,000 americans are going to zi die of infection in the next nine weebz would you be okay with that nobody would have said yes and now people are opening up and it seems saying yes. >> this is a really challenging question, erin. i don't know.

i think you're absolutely right. i think it depends in terms of how it's presented. i've taken a very strong stance in not sort of creating these equivalences like to say that's two 747s a day, maybe three a day of passengers who would be dying. that's what the coronavirus is doing. and i don't like to present things in those stark terms because people should just sort of recognize that this is serious and that there's something that can be done about it. i mean, you know, i think it's probably the same for ashish as it is for me. i've known people who've died of this, erin. i've been in hospitals and i've seen people struggling to breathe because of this. and i think for a lot of people who've not seen that this still feels like it's something they're immune from, they don't have to pay attention to, they don't think -- it's not a risk to them. thankfully there will be a lot of people who won't get sick. and that's obviously a very good thing. but right now i think not only are people's health potentially at risk but how i behave could potentially put other people at risk. how they behave could put me at risk.

people talk about taking -- being risky and be being -- taking a sacrifice and starting to get things open again. you're not just risking it for yourself, you're risking it for me as well and for you erin and a ashish. it's a different metric we have to think about this. >> dr. j ha the number of new cases in the united states has largely plateaued albeit as sanjay points out at a level we are makes the 747s comparison. you're having a 9/11 a day. and you think about the response in this country to that. but when you compare the plateau of where we are to other countries like italy, spain, and france, they have these huge outbreaks but then their curves did sharply drop. why isn't that happening here? do you think it could happen with the reopenings that are about to go on or not? >> yeah, so one thing to dr. fauci's comment about how much suffering are we living to live with, let me make one quick comment on that. i think it's a false choice between do we want our economy open or do we want to save

lives. i think there is a third path. right? if we had spent the last three months building up a fabulous testing, tracing, isolation infrastructure where we were doing testing all the time, we could open up our economy and not have 3,000 americans, 2,000 americans dying every day. so we have just chosen not to do the thing that gets us out of this bind, and now we've presented this ziefgs which of these two horrible choices do you want. you know, in terms of what other countries have done and how italy and spain have brought their numbers down, they went into full lockdown. i mean, in italy everybody was shut inside for four weeks. you could only go out for the bare essentials. you know, we kind of did it halfway. we still had spring break and you had those spring breakers partying on the beaches. you had some states that never really fully shut down at all. so we've had this very mixed approach. and not much testing. or not enough testing. and no surprise, we made some progress but we didn't make as much progress as we wanted. we kind of did this halfway. >> sanjay, final word?

>> yeah, i mean, the other thing is there is a plan, there is criteria, you know, that has been put forth that states should follow. i think that's gotten lost in this conversation. seeing this 14-day downward trend, like ashish was saying, making sure testing is in place. there are countries that have had success. i mean, new zealand i think yesterday got down to basically no cases. it's obviously a much smaller country. these downward trends in countries in europe. it is possible. this doesn't have to be the way that it is. but it has to be the way that it islonger. i think that's the point that these public health officials are making. >> all right. thanks to both very much as always. and "outfront" next, trump's ousted top vaccine official dr. rick bright now says that he warned about the pandemic repeatedly and was ignored. what else is he alleging tonight? plus, sweden saying its capital could reach herd immunity in weeks. is mass infection possibly the best weapon against coronavirus? and pfizer at the front of

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trump administration. dr. rick bright, who will now testify before congress next week, filing a whistle-blower dplant. a complaint. and one of the things it says, "it was obvious that dr. bright's persistent demands for urgent action to respond to the pandemic had called an s storm and a commotion and were unwelcome in the office of the hhs secretary." jeremy diamond is out front at the white house. jeremy, how worried is president trump and the white house about dr. bright testifying? again, he was the top official in charge of vaccines until he was removed from that position days ago. >> he was. and at a time when president trump is trying to portray his administration's response to this crisis as a great success and as a time when he is also barring members of his coronavirus task force from testifying before house democrats on capitol hill this is certainly not something that president trump or the white house would like to see. dr. bright coming forward on capitol hill as he is expected to do next week now. and testing not only because he is alleging that he was fired in retaliation for objecting to that hydroxychloroquine

treatment which we know the president repeatedly promoted from the white house, but also because frankly he paints a picture of a chaotic response to this coronavirus in its early days. dr. bright in his complaint filed with the office of the special counsel talks about the fact that he raised concerns and sent up flares essentially of potential shortages of everything from masks to syringes to testing swabs and all of those things of course ended up coming true because there were indeed shortages. so that's certainly not something that president trump or the white house wants to be reminded about. certainly not in a public forum like a hearing room on capitol hill. erin? >> which is just what they're going to get. jeremy, thank you very much. i want to go to our political analyst david gregory and gloria borger. so gloria, president trump has repeatedly touted, you know, the administration's response to coronavirus, what a success it is. dr. bright, though, is coming out and in this report, whistle-blower report, saying this is not at all how it was,

that these warnings were ignored among other things. i mean, how damaging could this testimony be? >> well, as jeremy was saying, i think it could be incredibly damaging. i think the white house and hhs will come up with some way to discredit dr. bright. but he is a professional. he was the man in charge of developing the vaccine. and what he is saying effectively is that this is an administration that was asleep at the switch, that it was driven by politics, that it refused to listen to the scientis scientists, that it was willing to approve or fast track drugs lao like hydroxychloroquine for the wrong purposes. and he also in a conference call with reporters today, he said something that really struck me, erin, which is he said, "the past few years have been beyond challenging. i was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over opinions of the best scientists in government."

so i think it's not only going to be about this point in time but he may peel this onion back and talk about what's been going on in this government when it comes to science for years. >> and david, to the point that gloria's making, he does claim in the complaint that hh leaders were doling out favors to people close to trump for a long time. he says they pressured him to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism. and he goes on, david, to specifically say that that includes efforts to give a contract to a drug company whose ceo he was told was friends with jared kushner. could that be true? >> it could. and it could be really damning. but we have to put this into some perspective. this is an impeached president who faced down a whistle-blower before. who brought similar complaints about a president who was only thinking about his political fortunes and not about the

welfare of the country. and we saw how that turned out. he was acquitted. the country is incredibly polarized. and you know, what's going to be different? the president saying he doesn't want anthony fauci to testify in the house because he his the house is full of trump haters and there's a lot of people who support trump who agree with that. we're in a political stalemate. around really important questions, which is did the government do enough to put us on a kind of war footing the president says we're on to fight this virus at the earliest possible point. that's the question we have to get to the answer. we have to get the answer for. and it's going to probably take some time. we'll probably have goat through this before we get into a 9/11 style commission about what was done, what wasn't done and what the federal response was like. >> i do want to note just so everyone knows the hhs has responded to the complaint from dr. bright now. spokeswoman kaitlyn ewkley says dr. bright was transferred to

nih to work on diagnostic test where he's been entrusted to spend upwards of a billion dollars to spend that effort. we're disappointed he has not shown up to work on behalf of the american people. they are certainly fighting back. gloria, you also have here the whole issue with dr. fauci. the president defending his decision to block dr. fauci from testifying before the democratic-led house but allowing him to go before the gop. the president literally said today the house is a bunch of trump haters. so he's just admitting here he doesn't -- he just doesn't want it to be there, he only wants it -- it's political to him. >> well, look, this is a president -- this shouldn't surprise us in many ways, unfortunately. this is a president who's fired multiple inspectors general, whose job it is to oversee parts of the government. he doesn't want oversight unless the oversight comes from his friends or his own political party. so while tony fauci undoubtedly would have been treated well by

the democrats as well as republicans, remember, in this country he is trusted more than donald trump by a nearly 2-1 margin. remember that. so fauci would have done very well. but trump just didn't want to see some of those difficult questions being asked of fauci, who would undoubtedly answer them honestly, as you know. he hasn't been afraid to disagree "president. >> and of course earlier when the president was downplaying the virus fauci testified in front of congress that the death rate was ten times that of the flu. and you know, what david? that's not the only time, even on that podium of the coronavirus task force where he just directly contradicted the president. here's a few. >> it might not come back at all, jeff. it may not come back at all. >> we will have coronavirus in the fall. >> ultimately we're doing more testing i think than probably any of the governors even want. >> we absolutely need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests but the

capacity to actually perform them. i am not overly confident right now at all. >> reporter: that's what you're going to hear in testimony, david. >> yeah, but i just want to disagree with this premise a little bit. the notion that anthony fauci as you've just displayed has not been heard from is wrong. he has been honest and he has been out there. thank god we see tony fauci all the time. informing the american people. and the president has not stepped in front of that. so yeah, you can criticize him for saying the house wants to do some oversight overt federal preparedness for this and how the administration's handled this that tony fauci ought to be able to do that. it's not the same thing as him briefing a senate committee on the way forward and how to reopen states. it's fair to prioritize that. so i think this is being conflated a little bit, like somehow the president's trying to silence tony fauci. dr. fauci has been heard from. whether he agrees with the president or not, no one has gotten in the way of that. >> all right. thank you both very much -- >> he just doesn't want to give

him a platform. >> right. which of course he would have, to your point, gloria. thank you both. >> sure. >> and next, can herd immunity fully stop the coronavirus? sweden is betting on it. and officials there say they can achieve it by the end of the month. and the president's economic adviser says we could see 20% employment. that could be the number coming out at the end of the week. that is like the great depression. ime a struggle? introducing ore-ida potato pay. where ore-ida golden crinkles are your crispy currency to pay for bites of this... ...with this. when kids won't eat dinner, potato pay them to. ore-ida. win at mealtime. especially lately. at farmers we've seen a thing or two. potato pay them to. 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,

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there they are! everyone's got a show to recommend. get ready to watch the best for free during watchathon week. tonight, is herd immunity the only way to stop the pandemic? swedish officials say yes and they say stockholm could reach herd immunity sometime this month. that would mean enough of the population has been exposed to the virus to slow it down or even stop transmission. "outfront" now, natalie dean, assistant professor of biostatistics at the university of florida. and dr. anskar losa the chairman of the department of medicine at the university medical center in hamburg, germany. dr. losa, let me start with you. you've looked at this and you believe there may be some benefits to exposing low-risk groups to the virus, right? younger people. people who are at lower risk of getting extremely sick. how many people in the united states would need to be exposed in order to reach some sort of

immunity in the population overall? >> we don't really know that everybody can get infected. the basic presumption is that you need a population of at least 70% if you want to stop an infection, but it may well be that this virus can't really infect everybody. there's some hint that up to 30% to 40% of the population do not actually get sick. so the thub may actually be lower. that may be one reason why in stockholm they're hoping with a 25% to 30% immunity they may be closer. >> that's interesting. i know for some that may gave lot of hope that when you're talking about asymptomatic people included that you could be looking at 25% to 30% to get to that immunity. natalie, when you've looked at it you're looking at it that we would need closer to 60% to achieve herd immunity, which would be 200 million people in

the ults. so why do you think that strategy would not work? >> right. and even if it was something closer to 30%, that's still something like 100 million being infected. it's not a prevention strategy, what we're discussing. what with re preventing when people are getting sick? so the idea is to prioritize the younger people getting infected as a way to protect the older people. but i don't see how that actually is going to protect the older people when there are lots of younger people moving around who can infect them. >> what do you say to that, dr. lohse? does that give you pause, this idea that she's saying segment's the population won be so effective? >> i think you have to be careful when you do it. but the young people will not carry the virus for a long time. and once they've gone through the infection they won't infect any of the elderly anymore.

so yes, there will have to be and you have to differentiate regionally, there will have to be a transient phase when you really have to protect the elderly people from the young people, which is what we're doing now anyway. once the young people have gone through the infection, they could safely care for the elderly. >> natalie, what do you think? >> but there's a big interim period which i don't quite understand how that works. i mean, we have young people work in nursing homes. we have young people that live with older parents. i just don't think it's very realistic to think about segmenting the population. i really feel like the best way to protect everyone is to include protecting young people from infection using proactive strategies like testing, tracing and isolating. >> so dr. lohse, let me ask you, in sweden where they've been trying this as opposed to other countries, they stayed open, right? there's been social distancing,

people have complied on some level but things were not shut down, bars, restaurants are open. the death rate there is higher than neighboring countries which have tougher restrictions. they have about 27 deaths per 100,000 people. denmark well. norway and finland with around 4. but i guess the question is that may not be a sign of sweden's failure. is it possible sweden is experiencing everything just more quickly in terms of the cases and the deaths so that eventually those other countries may match? or no? >> i think that is very likely. it's difficult to compare deaths rates between countries as you know because the testing rate is different, as you said, the demography is different and if you look to belgium they had a very straight lockdown and a very high mortality rate. so it's not that simple. but i agree that the death rate may rise earlier if you have a more open concept for the younger population.

but let me remind again sweden does what i also recommend, you have to protect the elderly population, care homes, et cetera, especially early on, and sweden wasn't that good in this. most countries weren't very good in this. we should have been better. we should still be better in protecting that population. eventually, however, once we have immunity in the younger population, that protection will be much easier, and with what they just said you will have to continue this protection indefinitely until we have a very good vaccine, which could be much, much longer than we are expecting right now. >> natalie, dr. lohse had the first word. i'll give you the last. >> yeah. so i think we need to think about why is it better to be infected now than it is to be infected later? if we really think we can contain this, which i'm not fully convinced of because we're seeing a lot of other countries that have having success and

very low death rates, but if you need to be infected now versus later, later we're going to have better treatments. i mean, i'm optimistic about artificial antibodies. there are a lot of other scientific discoveries which could help us, you know, in the future. >> all right. thank you both very much. dr. lohse, natalie, thank you very much. and next, the president tonight backing off his claim that a vaccine will be ready by the end of the year. but a company wrking with pfizer does say they could have millions of doses by the end of the year. and they're warning, trump's top economic adviser saying america's unemployment rate this week may clock in at a level not seen since the great depression. tonight a special report on some of the americans who are getting hit the hardest. sed to. new ortho home defense max indoor insect barrier kills and prevents bugs for up to a year without odors, stains or fuss. new ortho home defense max. bugs gone. stress gone.

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many millions of vaccine doses by the end of 2020. that is the optimistic view of the company partnering with pfizer on a trial that the world is watching closely. and today participants in the u.s. trial got hetheir first injections. fred pleitgen is out front. >> reporter: a simple injection that some hope could help bring an end to a global pandemic. pfizer and its german partner

biontech announcing today they dosed the first participants in the u.s. with a vaccine candidate in a clinical trial. 12 study participatants in germany received doses last month. biontech's ceo saying preclinical data showed good results. >> we've seen vaccine responses, strong vaccine response at even low dose. and we believe that this vaccine response is in different animal models and will also translate to vaccine response in human subjects. >> reporter: the program is called bnt 162. and it's actually a group of four trial vaccines using what's called an mrna, or messenger rna approach which causes the body to produce a protein that triggers an immune response. pfizer and biontech claim if the certification process goes smoothly they could have millions of doses ready by the end of this year. hundreds of millions in 2021. biontech's ceo saying he believes regulators will move

fast. >> the benefit of a vaccine in a pandemic situation is much, much greater. and therefore, therefore approval and authorization of a vaccine in a pandemic situation has to follow other rules than what you have seen in the past. >> reporter: but there is a long way to go and a lot that can go wrong. pfizer and biontech are only two of a flurry of companies and institutes trying to develop a coronavirus vaccine asap. the world health organization says there are currently more than 100 vaccine candidates under development, though only have been approved for clinical trials. the first was an experimental trial vaccine spearheaded by the national institutes of health. in the uk researchers at the university of oxford are also in clinical trials with their own vaccine candidate. the chief researcher telling "outfront" they're hoping to make the vaccine ready for use by fall. >> we'll probably enroll as many

as 1,000 people into this trial. partly because we've used this type of vaccine before for other indications. and partly because we believe the safety should be very good. >> reporter: some encouraging signs there. but of course experts will always tell you that there is a ward of warning, these are still the early stages and there's still much that can go wrong and of the many vaccines being developed around the world a lot won't see the market at all. the folks at pfizer and biontech say they are very encouraged by what they're seeing so far and of course one of the reasons they are so encouraged is they are now able to start these trials with humans which they say will expand very soon, erin. >> all right, fred, thank you very much. and i want to go now to dr. jonathan reiner, who of course advised the white house medical team under president george w. bush. dr. reiner, what do you make -- obviously the timeline here, pfizer saying you know, look, if the certification process goes smoothly they've got millions of

doses ready by the end of the year. the president seemed very gung ho about that but now is sounding more cautious. do you read anything into that? >> no, not really. look, these vaccine programs are really ambitious. but to create a vaccine by the fall is a pretty heavy lift. it's not undoundoable. it doesn't violate any of the rules of physics. but it's a heavy lift. it's going to require an enormous financial investment, a lot of hard work, and also some luck to find the right vaccine that creates the most durable, best, and safest immune response. but the challenges go beyond that. once the vaccine is safe and effective we have to have enough of it to start vaccinating the population. and we can't wait until we have safety and efficacy data. so we're going to have to do something that's never been done before, which is pick a vaccine that is likely or possible to succeed and start producing it to scale before we know the

final results. and that's going to require a public, private, and probably philanthropic collaboration to really protect the companies that will need to make an enormous risk to create vaccine. we need 329 million doses of that vaccine. in our best influenza year we only vaccinate about 140 million people. >> right, right. and these are new plants. this is everything. you know, and you can truncate the process for fda aprofproval right is this you can get rid of all that. efficacy and safety. you can get through safety pretty quickly. but efficacy is a bigger question. does it risk someone getting it, how effective is it? these are only things you can know over time and real exposure. and that we just don't control, do we? >> no, we don't. and also to understand efficacy we're going to have to see whether the people who were vaccinated actually have true

immunity. and some of that is going to depend on how active the virus is. when we get to fall. so there are a lot of really unknowables right now. but it's not unreasonable to think that if everything went well one of these many vaccines which are being investigated in parallel might show safety and efficacy and then there's the challenge to produce it. >> all right. dr. reiner, thank you. >> sure. and next, the coronavirus is decimating businesses owned by asian-americans. jobless claims up nearly 7,000% from last year and that is in one state, new york, alone. and jeanne moos on how professional musicians are putting on bedside concerts for patients with coronavirus. ♪ ♪

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depression which, of course, maxed out at 24.9. asian americans are getting particularly hard hit by the downturn. they are seeing a thousand percent increase. vanessa yerkevich is "out front." >> reporter: for more than a year it's been selling dim sum. it's staring down a different reality. >> the future looks bleak. >> reporter: that's because restaurants in chinatown have closed due to covid-19 leading to thousands of laid off or furloughed workers including 40 from wilson teng's restaurant. >> the main hub in chinatown are

all pretty empty. >> reporter: the service industry is the hardest hit by covid-19. >> this is the fifth weekend since my last paycheck. >> reporter: ed chan works several jobs in the industry as a school lunch caterer, wine vendor, guest at sports arenas and does marketing for trade shows. in march he lost all four jobs and is still waiting for unemployment. >> day after day, it's one more day. you go onto the system, it's still pending. >> reporter: he's more than one of 30 million americans who applied for unemployment since mid-march. more than 150,000 asian americans who filed in new york state in the past four weeks, it's a staggering 6900% increase from one year ago, the largest among any one racial group in the state. >> this particular virus affects severely front-line workers, basically the restaurant and retail workers and the service industry.

so when this thing hit, we were the first ones to go down. >> reporter: teng closed the parlor before the state order in mid-march and told his employees to file for unemployment, a move he says goes against a proud asian american culture. >> it takes really a pandemic to -- for chinese people to really go seek out additional help. >> reporter: racial discrimination against asian americans has also forced some workers to make a tough choice. staying at home to avoid potential racism or fear confrontation going to work. >> there was that brief reference, you know, about the chinese virus or the wuhan virus, that term for at least a short period of time. they have since corrected that. the damage has been done. >> reporter: meanwhile, wilson tang is preparing for an uncertain future. >> i'm going to continue to a be a voice for my community and a

voice for my staff. i'm going to do my best to keep them safe. >> reporter: now, that dramatic increase in unemployment in asian americans here in new york state may not even tell the full picture, erin. and that is because there are some 250,000 undocumented asian immigrants here in new york. and those individuals cannot apply for unemployment. they cannot be counted, so that number, that unemployment number amongst asians here in new york could actually be much, much higher, erin. >> wow, all right. vanessa, thank you. and next, jeanne on the professional musicians who are trading in concert halls for more personal performances. noit ♪ o respond. first to put others' lives before your own. and in an emergency, you need a network that puts you first. firstnet. the only officially authorized wireless network for first responders.

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concerts for covid patients over phones placed by hospital beds. >> and all i could hear were the beeps of their machines, which is a scary sound to be hearing. ♪ ♪ >> reporter: they don't expect applause for these performances. many patients are unconscious, on ventilators. >> the ego is left behind and what is left is, i want to be here for this person. >> reporter: the play list ranges from beethoven to what a wonderful world and almost always bach. this trio has played several dozen private concerts at new york presbyterian hospital. the program was the brain child of i.c.u. doctor rachel easter wood who was a trained musician before studying medicine. she told "the new york times" how it felt when she helped stream a live concert. >> i was standing there next to this covid patient. it was so surreal. i thought to myself at that time, if i don't make it through

this, then i've done what i'm supposed to do. >> reporter: she recruited some musicians from a nonprofit called project music heals us. musicians call in. most of the time they never see the patient, but still -- >> i felt like i was in the room emotionally. i felt so, so close. sometimes this might be the last thing that they hear. >> all right. so we're going to play some music for you. >> reporter: sometimes they play for staff as well. ♪ ♪ but what sticks with the musicians is the beeping. ♪ ♪ the chiming. sometimes overpowering the music. >> that beeping actually starts to react to the music that we play in a way that we feel their breathing gets calmer. ♪ ♪

>> reporter: as if the patient had joined the trio. jeanne moos, cnn, new york. >> incredible. thank you for joining us. anderson starts now. >> erin, thanks very much. good evening, everybody. typically we try to start the program with the latest medical and health information about the coronavirus. its spread, the promise of therapies, the information you need to know in the middle of a pandemic. we still will do that tonight. we'll have all the information. tonight we want to start with the information you aren't getting now and won't soon get about the pandemic. multiple reports tonight, once again, showed this administration's attempt to resist lawful oversight and its contempt for whistle-blowers and independent inspector generals. first, regarding the coronavirus task force it appears the president wants to end it. they're talking about ending the task force in the middle