♪ ♪ >> 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 of the pandemic.

the cases are still rising. they rose by at least 1,938 today, in fact, but they want to dissolve the task force. the president confirmed it while on a trip to a mask-making factory in arizona today. the vice president said this should happen around memorial day which is 20 days from now. asked why he would end the task force now, this is how the president responded. >> with the doctors saying there might be a recurrence of coronavirus in the fall, why, can you just explain why is now the time to wind down that task force? >> well, because we can't keep our country closed for the next five years, you know. you can say there might be a recurrence. there might be. most doctors or some doctors say it will happen and it will be a flaim and we' flaim a flame and we'll put the flame out. >> no one said close the country for five years. it is a complete exaggeration. the president is admitting the crisis is not going away, but he is certainly trying to downplay

the potential risk, saying it will be a flame, they've learned a lot and they can quickly put it out. why end the task force, the hub of the response? he embarrassed himself when he last took questions saying injecting disinfectant into people. he lied about saying that. but that's no reason to stop having the task force and its scientists brief the public. it seems like they don't want their fingerprints on this. it seems like the federal government, the administration is trying to pass the buck, pass the responsibility onto the states, onto mayors, onto governors to anyone other than themselves so that they won't take the blame come election time. so that's one story tonight where the white house is closing down the one place you can sort of rely on from the government for reliable information, at least from the scientists, interest dr. fauci and dr. birx. we mentioned there were multiple political angles that we're covering tonight. the other comes in the form of a

whistle-blower lawsuit which alleges a top official at the health and human services were fired. dr. bright's early warnings about the virus were mostly ignored. also he was removed because he fought against the use of an antimalarial drug. one the v.a. study has shown increases the likelihood of death ask has no benefits. at fox's town hall on sunday, president trump insiflts the drug saves lives again in the middle of a pandemic. bright apartments lawsuit said he was pressured to give pharmaceutical money to the buddy of jared kushner. there is no evidence kushner knew about this. the official white house one closes shop, the one who dropped the ball on procuring medical supplies largely because he promoted his friends and associates, many of whom have no experience. and these breaking stories are all taking place as new modelling projects deaths will almost double because we are beginning to reopen the country.

also as he's preventing officials like dr. anthony fauci from testifying before democratic-led committees in the house, again, the recurring theme here is that any information that's unfavorable to the president's reelection campaign is on lockdown tonight, which is not surprising coming from a president who once said this. >> dr. fauci said earlier this week that the lag in testing was, in fact, a failing. do you take responsibility for that? and when can you guarantee that every single american who needs a test will be able to have a test? what's the date of that? >> no, i don't take responsibility at all. >> joining me now with more on all this is cnn's white house correspondent kaitlan collins. what are you learning about the decision to essentially do away with the coronavirus task force? >> reporter: well, this is something they've been weighing for several weeks now. and if you look at the schedule actually of all the meetings they've been having, they started cutting them back.

it used to be daily they would have these meetings. they would last an hour, hour and a half if not long earth than that. now they started having fewer of them. you're seeing the vice president get on the road more. he's the one often leading those. the president himself is also trying to get on the road more even though he's not often at these meetings. so the question is going to be if the president is going to form some other kind of task force to take its place. we know with the economics task force the president constructed to help reopen the country, it was really large. it hasn't met in any kind of capacity like you've seen this task force meet. and so the vice president is now confirming that it could wind down by the end of this month, by early june, even though that seemed to be a surprise even to some members of the coronavirus task force who didn't seem aware it would be winding down that quickly. >> is it clear to you what exactly this means? assuming dr. fauci, you know, is he still going to be then

controlled by the vice president's office or the white house or the president is not wanting -- the white house isn't wanting him to testify on capitol hill in front of house committees, i guess because there's democrats on them, or they're controlled by democrats. does that mean, then, the cdc can hold press conferences every day talking about the latest scientific information or n.i.h. can do that? >> reporter: well, that will be the question if they do that. really, what this looks like, because the cdc has not held a briefing since march. of course, we know the cdc officials sometimes anger the president with their pretty blunt warnings to the public. also the question is one of the reasons before the president admitted today it was about politics of why dr. fauci couldn't go testify in front of the democratic-led house but he could go in front of the republican-led senate they said dr. fauci was too busy to be going up to capitol hill and testifying. there was a policy where none of the officials on the task force could testify on capitol hill in

the month of may unless mark meadows grants approval. the question is does that change after may and they are no longer having these briefings or does the white house continue to make that argument about their schedules. also i wonder what this will look like because dr. birx is someone -- she has an office inside the west wing, so is her office space going to remain? those kinds of questions, because often you've seen if you rely on the white house spokespeople or the president himself for information, it's often very different than what you get from the actual professionals looking at this data on a daily basis. >> yeah, and it's interesting that they're concerned about, you know, dr. birx's time and dr. fauci's time when they had no problem having dr. birx or dr. fauci sit there for sometimes more than an hour as the president mused about whatever came into his mind and, you know, tried to grab the spotlight of the very coronavirus task force. they had no problem with the doctors, the scientists sitting waiting for the president to

finish so they could present factual information to the american people. the whistle-blower complaint from rick bright, the president said he didn't know the guy. how damning is it for the white house? again, these are allegations that haven't been proven. >> reporter: no, they're only allegations. we should note that h.h.s. has been pretty buttoned up about this because they know it is leading to an investigation that he has filed a request for tonight. and we should note we're going to hear from him in person next thursday according to his attorneys because they say he's going to be testifying on capitol hill. so he may go into these allegations more. but also looking at this, initially we know in a statement he said he believed he was removed from his job because of retaliation because he wouldn't grant express approval to drugs the president had pushed. but if you read through this really lengthy complaint he filed, anderson, he also talks about the fact he says he raised concerns back in january with top officials like the h.h.s. secretary alex azar, about coronavirus, saying he was concerned it could already be in

the united states. he said that was greeted with skepticism. and also those officials he said, the top officials, azar and another, bob kadlek, were saying they could keep coronavirus out of the u.s. that hasn't happened. what were his interactions with other officials and whether that slowed down the administration's response even more overall to the coronavirus. >> kaitlan collins, appreciate it. thanks, kaitlan. joichbi joic joining us now is former assistant homeland security and dana bash and chief medical correspondent sanjay gupta. talking about the task force, obviously on the face of it, it seems surprising given this is an ongoing pandemic that will continue through the summer and very likely, you know, for -- until there is a vaccine or until enough people have become infected that there is a change in the spread of this.

what do you make of the idea of closing this down? >> well, i think it's a bad idea. i hope that the work is still going on even if there is not these briefings and actual task force. you remember there was back in 2014, there was an ebola czar, and there was this idea you need to create this whole government approach for something like this. i think that's still necessary. i think subjectively, anderson, there is a sense that the coronavirus task force is being disbanded. states are reopening. i think a lot of people, it sends the message this is over. we've gotten through this. it's very much the wrong message. anderson, i was just looking up on march 16 when they first announced the pause, there were some 4500 people who had been confirmed to have the infection and some 70 people who had died. now, you know, you can see this. at the time they were thinking about disbanded this task force, the deaths have gone up a thousandfold, which is startling. and obviously the rate of

infection. so how do you create it when you have those numbers and disband it when the numbers are what they are and continue to go up? >> yeah, dana, i guess you could perhaps make an argument that, okay, you disband it and that allows the doctors fauci and birx to focus more on their work, and there will still be a place where every day there's briefings and scientists get out important information and there is still a federal response. or this is just an attempt by the administration to distance themselves from this. say, look, we gave the best practice. we did all we could. we gave the best practices to the states. we gave them all the equipment they needed. and basically get some distance between the president and the deaths of so many americans. >> yeah, i think you just nailed it, anderson. you know, for the second time today when the president was taking questions from reporters in arizona, he said the quiet part out loud, and the quiet

part, you could see the wheels turning. and if you read the transcript, it's pretty clear, he wants this part of his history behind him. he wants to move on. he is, again, trying to talk all of the current situation and the crises that the governors and the local officials are still facing away, saying we did a really good job. we got the ventilators out. everybody's got testing, which obviously we know is not accurate, but he's trying to make it so with his words. the challenge that he has and the real, real political risk -- never mind the health and wellness of americans -- is if that doesn't happen, then it's closer to the election. then he has distanced himself. then people get even sicker as sanjay i know takes no pleasure in predicting is a real possibility. and then it really backfires. and that's the kind of the balance and he and more

importantly his aides are trying to find here. but it's very clear that this push is coming from the president, and that's what i mean by him saying the quiet part out loud. it started to bubble up through reporting today and it was the president himself who was obviously driving that train. >> you know, julia, i hate to be -- sound cynical on this, but he loved the task force when he saw it as something he could ride and ride the wave of. once birx and fauci started to become respect and had popular by the daily briefings, the president jumped in on them, took them over, used them to, i guess in his mind, to great effect. he talked about his ratings and how high they were and how great things were going. and then he embarrasses himself by talking about injecting human beings with disinfectant, widely ridiculed, lies about it, the task force is no longer important. if it can be din disbanded in the middle of the pandemic, what was the point of creating it in the first place and who handles

the response to the virus now from the federal government? >> well, i think there will be some federal response but for the fact there is going to be a vaccine hopefully at some stage and it will take the federal government to respond. you're exactly right. the numbers got too big for trump to be able to manage. we sort of swept by all of the sort of rosy assessments of how many would die. i think once it passed 60,000, which was his original number, it's very hard to manage that. so what you're looking at is i think essentially a crisis response, a homeland security response and three failures. the first one is, of course, ignoring the intelligence as it was coming from china. that's the step richard bright is talking about. we knew it was coming. the second is the failure to deliver things to the states and to get them ready as sort of a failure of execution. and now i think you're just going to see sort of a failure of counting. i think that this is about ignoring the dead. i do at this stage. i think that the numbers are

going to be too big and instead of honoring them and learning from them, how did they die, can we protect vulnerable populations, he's going to ignore them which is not only morally shocking, it is also scary. because as sanjay keeps saying, we've got this thing for a long time. we could actually save lives if we took a better accounting of what's going on. so this is his homeland security apparatus. fortunately we do have states that may be able to try to pick up the slack. >> well, i mean, sanjay, to julia's point, it was former h.h.s. secretary kathleen sebelius who pointed this out to me. when president trump went to the cdc early on and he now said the infamous anybody wants they can get a test, he also at that point said something to the effect of, you know, he was talking about the 15 patients that had already gotten coronavirus at that point. it was that low number.

and he was basically saying that he didn't want those numbers or more numbers on him. the idea that he doesn't want even more testing -- again, this is now just more theory because you can't say what's in his head. but all the evidence points to him claiming there's widespread testing when, in fact, a lot of people -- there are still issues with testing and he's never been a big proponent of getting out huge amounts of tests. one way to look at it is he doesn't want those numbers on his record just as julia was saying he doesn't want those deaths on his record. what do you make -- once of the purpose of the task force was to communicate to the american people what's happening, what we should be doing by eliminating that kind of communication, what message does it send? >> well, i mean, that's one of the great tragedies i think in all this. i think about this whole issue. i've been immersed in it three

or four months now. there were so many opportunities for the united states with an amazing medical system, you know, public health system that had been under funded but is still pretty remarkable public health system, to really step up and do something remarkable here. i mean, it's clear that we got -- we were late in terms of testing. we were late in terms of recognizing. but there are still so many opportunities along the way to dramatically reduce the numbers of people who got infected and obviously the numbers of people who died as a result of this. and there are still opportunities. the idea that it's become some sort of, i don't want to test because i don't really want to know the numbers, i mean, there's just no excuse at this point because the number of people who could die from this still, i mean, the ihme models, we talk to chris on a regular basis, those may below. they've always been low frankly. and even with this updated estimate, i think be it's still low. and we're still not doing something -- we're not doing the things we should do about it. i mean, they gave clear

guidelines, 14-day downward trend. have testing in place. what happened to that conversation? i mean, it just sort of disappeared. the states now just say we're going to reopen without following very clear easy to understand guidelines. >> i mean, what happened was the president suggested that the government look into injecting human beings with disinfectant and then got mortified, embarrassed about it -- not mortified, embarrassed and ridiculed and lied about it. starting with the protesters right. >> people in michigan and elsewhere saying we need to reopen our lives and reopen government. saying this is oppressive. he sided with them and that was a signal to the governors despite what happened early on with the georgia governor, he decided that he was going to side with them and that changed the whole narrative across the country.

>> yeah, all these weekend warriors are siding with -- are protesting the president's own guidelines and the president sides with them against the guidelines he allegedly was supporting. >> there you go again using logic, anderson. >> yeah. >> the problem is there's responsible opening up and irresponsible opening up. and donald trump is sort of like we're going to do one or the other. we can have debates and we can try to manage this in a responsible fashion. we open up critical infrastructure or supply chains. >> right. >> instead of him just saying it's open. that's the scary part. >> right. instead of saying it's five years, close down or nothing. julia, dana bash, thank you. dr. sanjay gupta stay with us. still to come an award-winning journalist who saw a pandemic coming like this years ago. laurie garrett is her name. she joins me. she's a really fascinating person to talk to. we look forward to that. also the new york police

department taking a hit. thousands in its ranks have fallen sick. 38 employees have died. we'll talk to the deputy commissioner from the n.y.p.d. who himself has recovered from coronavirus. we stress out and s. well, we used 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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is what's most becaimportant to all of us. at bayer, this is why we science. ed more break news. the white house disbanding the coronavirus task force on a day when 2100 people died from the coronavirus. 2100. quoting the president, will some people be affected badly?

yes. but we have to get our country open. joining me is peabody writer and journalist, who warned of emerging diseases like the coronavirus. thank you for being with us. does it make sense to you that the coronavirus task force would wind down at the end of this month in the middle of this pandemic? >> of course not, anderson. it's insane. it's absolutely dumb founding. how when our epidemic is still on the a scent could you shutdown all the leadership? makes no sense at all. >> when you say it's on the ascent, the president says it's not a big deal, it's not really an issue. >> look, from the very beginning -- let me back up a minute. after i wrote "the coming plague" which was quite a number of years ago, one of the criticisms was that i hadn't

offered solutions. what could people do to not get a plague. my second book, "betrayal of trust," i look at how is public health organized. around the world how does it respond when outbreaks happen. one of the things that's note worthy about the united states, we're the only country in the world where public health is completely fragments. by the way it originated in this country, the authorities are down at the local level. in some states there is a difference between one county and another county in terms of regulations and rules and how public health -- >> it's a hodgepodge approach you called t. >> absolutely hodgepodge. now when you put a big stress on like this pandemic and it's going to affect places differently because that's the nature of how things move around in an epidemic. well, each place is going to react differently unless at the federal level, at the cdc and the white house, there's strong

leadership that sets guidelines and all the states adhere to. we've had exactly the opposite. now we have the white house saying, by the way, pretty soon we're walking away entirely. we're going to leave this totally up to the local level. and each one of you with your different jurisdictions and your different rules of the road, you can compete against each other for n95 masks. you can compete against each other for solutions necessary to extract dna and rna from samples in order to do your testing. you can compete like heck. we're just going to sit back here and watch. >> it does seem as if the president made or the people around the president made a political calculation, you don't want to be the face of this any longer. you rode those task force briefings well, your ratings were high, then you talked about injecting people with disinfectant. suddenly they were no longer valuable. it was a waste of the scientists' times.

don't let these deaths be on your record. put it on the states, say you gave them all the information, the p.p.e., did the comfort, you ask did what everybody asked you to do. don't talk about it. it may bubble up, but it's not going to be on the administration. i know that's a cynical way of looking at it, but it's hard to see it in other ways. >> well, certainly that is the way, for example, governor andrew cuomo sees it. i happen to be in new york so i take a new york perspective on it. as you go around the country, certain governors are feeling fine going along with the trump program or lack of program, and others are clearly very distressed and feel very much that they've been pressured to pick up a burden and a mantle that has far exceeded the capacity of any locality. and i would say, anderson, the

really big, big explosion of this that's coming down the road that americans are going to have to face up to -- it might not be needily. you might not notice it for many months, but it is that already we are now sending new york city out competing against houston and new orleans, but we're also sending new york city out competing against rome and hong kong and, you know, djibouti and cape town, south africa, for supplies. so we are the bully of the planet out there saying, hey, get out of the way. we want these n95 masks. you guys move aside here. we're taking all the syringes. we're going to get all the medicine. and if there's a vaccine, we're taking it first. and so we're going to face huge blowback from the whole planet over our, you know, sharp elbow behavior. and it didn't need to be this way if we'd had federal

leadership all along. then we could have been negotiating as a nation for supplies, gotten them cheaper -- >> you pointed out polio was eradicated only after a huge effort and only after the soviet union in the height of the cold war and the united states both agreed we're arguing over nuclear weapons, but we agree polio needs to be eradicated. it was a joint effort. in terms of -- >> anderson, it wasn't polio. we haven't yet eradicated polio. it was small pox. >> small pox. i'm sorry, i misspoke. you're right. bill gates has come close on polio, but you said, i've been telling everybody my event horizon is about 36 months and that's my best case scenario. so, okay, best case/worst case, your best case scenario is 36 months. what does that 36 months look

like? >> the way it would look is this. we have tremendous luck on the vaccine front. something turns out to really work, work well in the next, oh, ten months. it goes into large-scale clinical trials before the end of this year so that by early next year we know, yeah, it's a home run, it really works. we manage to come up with a vaccine that only requires one dose, no booster, that does not require refrigeration so it's easy to transport around the world, and that it does not have to be injected. so we don't have to have a whole supply chain of syringes and syringe disposal. it can be taken orally or perhaps a nasal injection or even an intramuscular patch that goes on your skin. one way or another, that miracle all transpires, and then there is a next miraculous step. nobody files for a patent or they waive patent rights so it

can be globally produced, not just made by one company in one set of manufacturing sites at high profit. and then that they release everyone to go ahead and mass manufacture for the whole planet. let's save the world instead of making a huge amount of money. and then that we come up with an army of volunteers, literally ten, 20 million people deployed across the entire planet to get to the most remote places in the himalayas and in the rain forests and so on to vaccinate 7.5 billion people. >> that's the best case scenario? >> that's the best case scenario. and i don't see that happening. i mean, i just described so many steps that to me in this political environment look impossible. the reason, anderson, i brought up small pox is this. the only reason we were able to get rid of small pox so that no

one watching us tonight faces this once major killer on planet earth that in the 20th century killed more human beings than all the wars of the century combined. the only reason we got rid of it was not because we had a vaccine, because we had had the vaccine for decades. and not because we had a will, but because the soviet union and the united states at the height of the cold ouwar agreed to wor together and got the whole w.h.o. community behind them and off we went. well, today would be the equivalent if china and the united states could work together, the two super powers. guess what, instead, we're saying this is your fault. no, no, it's your fault. no, it came out of your lab. no, it came out of your lab. eh to you. instead of working together to help save the planet in this pandemic, we have exactly the opposite going on. and, you know, i don't see any optimistic scenario where we end

up with a global solution unless we can force xi jinping and donald trump to start behaving decently with each other. >> well, laurie garrett, i admire your writing and -- well, yeah, i admire your writing a lot. i really appreciate talking to you. thank you. >> thank you. >> laurie garrett. as distressing as the news can be, i'll talk with a former acting director of the centers for disease control coming up. ♪ it's the easiest because it's the cheesiest. kraft. for the win win.

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of the white house coronavirus task force. the whistle-blower complaint was some heartening news today. new york's governor andrew cuomo said total numbers are down. drug maker pfizer said it is starting human trials of its experimental vaccine. 40 states have started to open or plan to do so in the next few days, the nationwide death toll is 71,000, 71 no,000 people. just to get your reaction to laurie garrett, the former acting director of the cdc, i wonder what you make of the role the cdc has played so far in the pandemic. >> you know, anderson, with the years i spent at cdc, before those years i was in charge of emergency preparedness and response. and one of the most important tools that i had in that role was the ability to talk to the public about what we were doing. and we're not getting that now.

it's been almost two months since there was a press conference from cdc and it can leave a feeling that the cdc isn't doing anything. as i talk to colleagues at cdc, i know they're working with state and local health departments. i know they're working to learn from what's happening in other countries and what different states are trying. but without them coming to the public and explaining what they're learning, explaining why guidance changes over time, it doesn't lead to the kind of trust that you need, especially now as we're seeing all kinds of things taking place in different states around the country. >> yeah, i mean, it does seem that they've been knee capped or hobbled. the cdc director had to come out and walk back something he admits himself he said about the potential for this reoccurring. laurie garrett paints a pretty -- her best case scenario involved a lot of miraculous things all lining up in perfect

order. >> yeah. you know, i think there's still so much we don't know about this virus, i'm not a big one for scenario planning and best case/worst case scenarios. right now there are some critical science questions scientists are working on we need answers to. the big one is if you get this infection once, do you get some immunity, are you protected from getting it again? that's important -- >> and we don't know the answer to that still. >> we don't know the answer to that, no. and it's critical because if you don't get any immunity from natural infection, the likelihood that a vaccine will give you the kind of protection you need really goes away. so it's something being worked on. but until that's answered, the use of antibody tests around the country really doesn't give you the kind of assurance governors and others want to have. >> you're the former acting director of the cdc. could you ever have imagined a scenario in which the leader of the country who has put out

guidelines about -- to keep people safe and back those guidelines is now encouraging people to violate those guidelines and backing protesters who are protesting against the very guidelines that person put out? >> you know, back in 2009 during the swine flu pandemic, when i went to brief the president and the cabinet, what president obama said to me at the time was, we want everything that you do to be based on the best public health science. and i took that message back to the cdc. the emergency operations center broke out in cheers. it was just what people wanted to hear. it's what the public needs to hear now, that everything that we're being told to do is based on the best science. without that, there's no way of knowing what things are being told for political reasons and what things are being done for good science reasons. you know, as we're seeing different populations around the country being affected in different ways, black americans,

latinos, native americans, just getting devastated by this, we need to understand what the government is doing to address those issues and protecting all front-line workers. >> dr. fauci has asked the question how much suffering are you willing to accept. how much suffering is acceptable? and that is kind of the key question moving forward. is there an answer to that? >> well, you see, i don't think you can ask that question until you are taking every step possible to protect and preserve and save every life that you can. every life -- >> and that's not being done. >> what's not being done, we don't have the testing capacity now to know where this disease is. we haven't scaled up the thousands and thousands of contact tracers that we need. we don't provide safe places for people to isolate or quarantine if they're identified as either having an infection or being

contact. we're saying if you have money and you're white, you can do well here. if you're not, good luck to you. >> that is what it boils down to. i mean, if all the inequities that existed before are exponentially higher in a pandemic like this. >> yeah, i don't think you can say, well, how much suffering are you willing to bear in order to restart the economy. until you've done everything possible to ensure that every single person in america can take measures to protect their own health, the health of their families and the health of their communities, and that's just not the case right now. so it's a false question until we are ensuring that every workplace has protective equipment. the front-line workers we consider essential, we didn't consider them essential before this began. most of them weren't being paid a living wage. now they're being forced to bear the brunt of this. we can't accept that as a

society. it's not the america we believe we should have. >> yeah, a lot of the essential workers, a number of them, are actually still vulnerable to deportation because they are undocumented and they're working in the fields and working in these processing plants which the administration says they are essential. appreciate it. new york city police department has been especially hard hit with the virus. thousands in its ranks falling sick. that includes john miller. what he went through and how the department is faring as a whole. as homes become schools.

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here in new york more than 5,000 members of the new york city police department have tested positive for coronavirus. one of them is john miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism who was hit hard by the virus. went to the hospital. he's recovered. he joins me tonight. so, john, first of all, how are you feeling? >> i'm feeling great. a little stir crazy after, you know, five weeks either in the hospital or at home. but i got to watch a lot of tv, so i can tell you two things. congratulations on the baby. wyatt looks great. that must be wonderful. >> thanks. >> and two, from all that tv, you've been doing a great job and i wanted to pass that on. >> well, i appreciate that. i appreciate that. you don't strike me as the kind

of guy who wants to rush to a hospital. >> so, i am the kind of guy who doesn doesn't want to rush to a doctor, a band aid, anything. it was like a cold, like a flu, a little like pneumonia. my wife emily said, you know, your temperature is climbing to 103. your oxygen levels are down. and i'm calling the doctor and the doctor is calling the ambulance. so i just ran out to the car and took myself to lenox hill. from that night on, it was 10:00 at night, that team took great care of me. >> and 38 employees at the n.y.p.d. have not survived. >> that's right. we lost 38 people, and it was from all walks of the department. school safety agents, tow truck drivers, traffic enforcement

agents, police officers, detectives, pcts or communications technicians, the it was a terrible impact and made worse by the fact that we couldn't honor them in a way we as an organization usually would. memorials had to be put off, funerals had to be done minute mystically. >> few jobs are as tough as being a police officer, but especially in a time like this when social distancing is not something you have much control over necessarily as a police officer. people get in your face. people -- you know you have to interact with people, and obviously you try to do as much as you can, but that's just got to be incredibly stressful to have that added burden of this virus in the middle of any interaction with citizens and police. >> well, it is. and, you know, this is something

we've never done before. it's not like we can look back to the last pandemic and say, what lessons for policing did we pick up there? the last thing we dealt with was ebola, which was very serious, but very small here, very contained and didn't offer us lessons. the police officers have been told, use extreme discretion. you know, try and talk your bay through these things with people. because they haven't been through it before either. start we a warning and some advice. if that doesn't work, you can go to a summons if that is persistent. and if that doesn't work, arrest. in a city of 8.6 million people with that kind of activity, i think we have been very judicious. i know there's video tape of an arrest out there that's controversial. you see these things -- and that's under investigation,

obviously. trying to be as transparent about that as possible. but then there are things that are much vaguer if you're in central park and there's four people on a blanket and they're too close together but they're all in the same family and live in a same apartment and they're six feet or more away from other blankets, do you tell them to move six feet apart, move their blanket? cops are doing the best they can. i know that because we have had complaints in the religious sects in the jewish community where we have had to reduce the number of people at funerals, houses of worship and other ethnic neighborhoods in the city. we have had complaints in the newspaper from upper west side who didn't like being approached. usually if you're making everybody unhappy you're being unfair. it's something we're learning as we go. people are learning with us.

>> yeah. well, i certainly appreciate all the efforts made by so many of the folks who keep this city running. and police are certainly high on that list. john miller great to talk to you. i'm really glad you're doing well. >> you too, anderson. up next, honoring the hospital hero on the eve of national nurse's day.

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it was nice to take the time to remember lives that have been lost during this pandemic, and we do not remember them, but we also want to talk about those saving lives during the crisis. tomorrow is nurse's day. so tonight we wanted to honor them. nurses working around the clock without protective equipment. nurses left their families behind in to come here. chose to come here and do this work. jim mullen is a nurse who left to become a lawyer. he when it hit he told us -- they have a beautiful daughter there. despite the risks to himself they decided to fly to new york with the number of cases overwhelming the hospitals. he arrived to say it was unlike anything he imagined. he's now safely at home in

texas, still quarantined still waiting to see his family. tara campbell left her home in rhode island. she posted about one of her patients on a ventilator when taylor began treating her. for 15 days she cared for this patient. she held her hand extubating her. a few moments later the patient mouthed to her, i love you. ben cayor and mindy brock have been married for five years. this picture of them became a symbol of love and hope and so many things in the middle of this crisis. they're both vol tiering at tampa hospital. they say they found themselves between surgeries one day and that's when this poet was taken. there are so many stories of sacrifices that nurses are making every single day. if you know a nurse, whether or not you have been treated for

the virus, say thank you. i want to hand it over for "cuomo primetime". i'm chris cuomo. welcome to primetime. one day they tell us, deaths soon may be doubling. the next day they say, the coronavirus task force may be shut down at about the same time. more mixed madness. then you have the president acknowledging that re-opening our country will likely kill more of us, but we got to get our country back. how can he accept that when he hasn't even come close to doing what he can to avoid more main and death. our big guest? the governor of new york. he's trying to hold back time the president is surfing. he says there's a safer and better way. he says he even has a plan. the question is, will he be able to execute it? and remember the ousted vaccine jake who said he was retaliated for going again