griff now, coronavirus has made your mullet great again, griff. we appreciate you sharing it with us. we want to thank all of the health care workers, we'll be back tomorrow morning. jillian: thank you, all. griff: thank you. neil: all right, the national lockdown continues and so does the widening protest going on across the country now as a lot of residents in states such as north carolina and virginia, minnesota, and michigan all saying the same thing. we want to get back to work, but we also want to protect lives, can we find a nice compromise? so far, that's proving very very difficult. welcome everybody i'm neil cavuto you're watching cavuto live happy saturday morning to you here. we've got some very good news overnight about sort of handicapping the number of cases this country will likely see as the president so often said a single death is one too

many, but fears that we would see up to 240 maybe 250,000 of them, in the earliest days fears that it could go into the millions and the latest on this and it's sort of a loosest it matt is that it will be around 60,000 and there's no way of knowing for sure, but some of the more alarming statistics we heard maybe thanks to all of these safety measures taking place have at least improved the odds and rather dramatically and we'll also update you on some alarmingly in a good way improving numbers on hospitalizations. remember, deaths sadly are a lagging indicator. hospitalizations are more forward-looking, and they are going down, in new york, in new jersey, in michigan, in minnesota, and that is a trend that could be the economy's friend, and pave the way to easing up on the stay-at-home provisions we'll get the latest from the governor of connecticut , and the governor of mississippi, a democrat and a republican, each facing his own battles in a state where

residents also want to get some clarity what's next, but right now, we're going to check in with steve herrigan with cdc latest and their estimates and what we're seeing across the country. to you, steve. >> neil you pointed out the projected deaths in the model used by the white house task force by the end of the summer stand at 60,000 now for the u.s. and keep in mind the projected deaths one day ago was 68,000 so that number certainly moving down and the deaths right now the total for the u.s. from the coronavirus stands at 37,000 , and in the meantime a number of states are pushing for an ease in economic restrictions trying to open the economy back up there have been demonstrations in at least six states so far, more scheduled for today including maryland, where now face masks are mandatory and the beach in jacksonville, florida are open there eight hours a day in the morning and in the afternoon officials there are trying to urge that people continue to

practice social distancing and texas too is beginning to ease restrictions on visiting national parks and pickup shopping here is the governor. >> we can both continue our efforts to contain the coronavirus, while also adopting safety standards that will allow us to begin the process of reopening business in texas. >> farmers are getting a huge bailout, $19 billion announced yesterday, many farmers have lost their main markets of schools and restaurants, 3 billion will be used for direct purchases of meat and produce to be given to food banks, neil back to you. neil: all right, steve thank you very much, my friend, in atlanta at the cdc headquarters so let's go to the white house right now, mark meredith is there. do we know, mark the president's plans today? >> neil, right now the white house schedule does not have the

president coming out for a briefing. the vice president is on his way to colorado springs for the air force academy graduation but we are not expecting to see the president today and also haven't seen a tweet that could change in the next little bit and also the white house continues to look at what the states are doing because they announced thursday those individual guidelines to allow businesses and states to return to somewhat of a new normal and giving states a better idea of what may be appropriate and it all starts on the health front where these states want to see fewer covid and flu-like cases over a two- week period hospitals need to be able to treat all patients without having to depend on crisis care, and they want to make sure there is a testing program for those healthcare workers to make sure they stay safe. if those states do that then we get over to phase i which would mean that vulnerable individuals would need to stay remaining shelter in place and they want to make sure people that do go out maximize physical distance in public and you'll see schools and bars remain closed but some businesses including some gyms may be able to reopen and you also want to avoid groups of more than 10 people and minimize non-essential travel.

president trump: i think you'll have a lot of news coming out about that over the next few days. i think certain states are going to come online, and they are going to start the early stages of the puzzle that we're putting together, and it's going to be together sooner rather than later. >> the president remaining optimistic about the economy being able to restart one question though the administration continues to face is about the amount of testing that's going to be available to states nationwide as they weigh their options going forward. dr. fauci talked a little bit about testing yesterday and defended all of the efforts the administration is looking at this is what he had to say last night. >> please don't anyone interpret that i'm downpaving testing but the emphasis that we've been hearing is essentially testing is everything, and it isn't. it's the kinds of things that we've been doing, the mitigation strategies that are important part of that. >> and neil as i mentioned right now we are note pecking a briefing from the white house coronavirus task force that could change, they have been

added to the schedule before late in the day. we'll let you know if and when that happens. neil? neil: thank you very very much. let's go to connecticut governor ned lamont right now and sadly he announced last night that the death count in connecticut crossed 1,000 and the governor joins me right now. very good to have you, sir, what's the latest? >> good morning, neil. i think as you pointed out, the key indicator for us is hospitalization and that gives you an idea of infections in the community and that unfortunately can be a precursor to fatalities as well but hospitalizations are flattening out and that means the capacity in our hospitals and we can start thinking about how we get our businesses back in business. neil: now, you are working in coordination with the governors of new york and new jersey, massachusetts, pennsylvania,

delaware. so agree on a plan to consider lifting some of these provisions , or stagger them, in the middle of next month, may 15 do you still see that as a realistic goal, or how would you update it? >> we're thinking in terms of testing, we're thinking in terms of other social distancing things that we have in common we can learn from each other. look we're all working our own timetable i think, neil but it doesn't make any sense for me to open up restaurants if andrew cuomo keeps them closed, because then we just have hundreds of people driving back and forth across-the-boarder, so there's some things that we're going to try and do together. neil: you know, governor it's always, the things can always go wrong i understand that, but i believe that there was a time might still be the case, sir, where new york's marinas were closed, yours were open so a lot of people in new york were going to your marinas.

has that been resolved just one of those little things that shows states close together can complicate things. >> yeah, we have a lot of states close together here, and if i keep marinas open and rhode island has them closed obviously , a lot of boats and traffic and people go across-the-boarder. that's the type of thing we are trying to avoid by working together. neil: governor, also, what would it take for you, i've been monitoring your press briefings, they are very substance filled, very very clear, no nonsense to them and you look at the need for more testing, you look at the need and improving trends in cases that i want to put words in your mouth mistakenly but you need to see those two things at a minimum to consider lifting some restrictions still in place in your state and i'm sure your other governors feel very similarly to this , especially those in the northeast but what be a sign that you would consider may 15

does indeed look good? would it be the decline and the increase in cases or the testing, or both? >> i think that the covid task force and the guidelines were actually helpful coming out of the federal government. 14 days of declining in sections and hospitalizations, and the other thing i'd add like dr. fauci said was in addition to more testing, so we get a better indication of what's going on, face masks, just give us more of the ppe we need to keep people safe because if i have more face masks that's not just for grocery store workers and for first responders, but maybe barber shops and nail salons, allow them to get back to work safely. neil: you're probably aware of the dust up between governor cuomo and the president, the back and forth that started with a tweet and the governor responded and it got a little hot and heavy. i could understand all of that on both sides, this is high pressure i'm sure many of you

guys are getting much sleep and you're dealing with a lot but what did you think of that? essentially the governor was saying the president hasn't done enough, the presidents was essentially saying the governor should do less talking and more doing what did you think of all of that? >> whatever you hear about the tweets, what people should remember is that dr. fauci, dr. birx, the covid task force out of the white house has a good strong constructive relationship with the governor. it took a while coming to tell you the truth but nows it's working i think it's working pretty well and let the tweets take care of themselves they are just a distraction to me. neil: do you tweet? >> i do do a little bit of tweeting although they usually don't let me do it myself. neil: [laughter] okay. governor lamont, stay well and stay safe, best to your

residents, the beautiful state of connecticut. this was a beautiful week for the markets namely because some of the progress that is being seen and hoped for particularly drug made by a company that did very little talking about it, itself, that and some news out of boeing that it's going to resume production of jetliners as soon as this week it was a one-two po w that helped the markets susan li on that, susan? >> good morning to you, neil. that's right the best two week performance of the dow jones industrials going back to the great depression and we've lifted off those march 23 lows, the benchmarks up for us around 25-30% each and leave them only 11-15% off record highs, and an explosive turnaround surprising the u.s. president. listen. president trump: if you would have told me that we would have a virus, the likes of which this world has not seen since

1917, which was the spanish flu, where anywhere from 75 to 100 million people were killed, and that we would have a stock market that's not far below its all-time high, and it's starting to get a little low. >> now, most investors are hoping and betting for a quick recovery in the economy, with potentially 29 states set to reopen in the phase i reopening stage. also as you mentioned there might be a viable coronavirus treatment and we know that gilead is testing remdesivir which is showing promising signs in the first phase of testing and also the u.s. government has half a billion dollars is gilead advanced vaccine candidates and that's helping the sentiment as well and biotech really did a lot of the heavy lifting on friday, and also, we have seen the u.s. government plow some $2 trillion in stimulus, more money might be coming as well, but the federal reserve really deserves a lot of the credit cutting interest rates close to

zero and that's where we put in that potential march 23 bottom and backstopping the u.s. economy from potential depression levels close to $4 trillion in credit but for the small businesses and the average american, the day-to-day stresses and concerns still have not been alleviated we have 20 million americans filing for unemployment benefits over the past few weeks, and small businesses like this , here in new york city, still remain shut 1.6 million accessing small business owns but still, they're opening that the u.s. president is right that america is supposed to be open and hopefully that reopening happens sooner rather than later. neil? neil: susan li thank you very very much. there might be hope on that small business relief front. remember, republicans are pushing $250 billion in extra small business funding for the paycheck protection program, and we're going to get the latest on that, with senator tim scott, he is coming up stay with us. you are watching fox news.

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neil: all right, stocks were up yesterday as susan li said on the promise of a drug that might be out there to treat or at least address this coronavirus issue a few other biotech concerns were doing it but what really greased the skids and doubled the buying in the last half hour of trading was word that there might be a breakthrough on getting this $250 billion in small business relief out, including money for the paycheck protection program, which is sold out. it was such a hit and in such demand they ran out of dough. we don't know all of the details of this and what allowances have been made to provide more money, for healthcare workers and hospitals which was a big stick ing point with democrats. we do know that they're working this weekend to try to iron out whatever differences remain and get this out the door, as soon

as possible. south carolina senator tim scott with us right now. senator, always good to see you my friend. i do want to talk about your book opportunity, and actually, you telegraph a lot of these issues in that book, but the big thing i want to get an update on is this small business measure. where does it stand, how close are the two signs? >> i think we're moving in the right direction this week and it'll be a very important week. i'm hoping that by the end of next week we'll have funding secured. what will it take? democrats are currently holding hostage the $250 billion and the question is what's the ransom? the ransom is ubi, universal basic income or something like that is off the table but it's the signs we're hearing is that more hospital funding is what they need, that in my opinion, is an appropriate balance for us to move forward, kevin mccarthy and the house republicans are sincere, looking for a way to find that middle ground. i think hospital funding be helpful. neil i'll say this though.

as i talked to ceo's of hospital s around south carolina what they say they need is the ability to be go back to work. they aren't doing elective surgeries, procedures and about 80% of the hospital funding comes in those categories. hospitals are sitting empty and they're not able to do the work. if the ppe, the personal protection equipment, is not a concern we should allow hospital s to start reengaging and doing those thins that are profitable and then we can provide some additional funding on top of that. neil: do you worry that it's almost inevitable though, senator, that opening things up regardless how careful you do do it, how much you stagger it, there will be a spike in cases that it's almost unavoidable? >> neil i think you may have a point. the question really is the question of individual responsibility. we're starting to see around the country whether it's michigan and minnesota, virginia , north carolina and today in columbia, south carolina protests from the

american people saying they want the ability to move more freely, reestablished. that is going to be something we're going to russel with but there's no doubt we start re engaging the economy, allowing folks to flip freely flow throughout the cities and states , you're going to have at least more cases, not fewer cases when you have people interacting and that's why the presidents approach to making sure that we have new protocols in place as people start gathering whether it's more masks and being able to test people's temperature we'll have to do something to create a new normal before we get back to the old good days of having the kind of economic activity that we were used to, in february and january, that will have to become the case in june, july, and august, moving forward neil: but in the meantime, senator we're spending an awful lot of money and i know that it's a necessity but you do touch on it in your book not about the money issue but the

fact that in providing opportunities for those who had it tough and i didn't realize the degree to which you did growing up, in poverty to a single mom, but you talk about the welfare and the government programs but here we are with big the government programs in initiatives putting us trillions in debt. it's a weird situation. >> it's a tough situation to watch and i talk a lot about overcoming poverty and one of the things that i note there is that the government programs well-intended but they don't deliver you from poverty and frankly we need the private sector entrepreneurs to come back into neighborhoods to create opportunities that will lead to prosperity. the american dream is still alive, it is well, it is healthy it is not life support but what we have to do is make sure that we have temporary and targeted relief today so as not to spend tomorrow's paychecks trying to fight a virus that we can

overcome. neil: and i do want to get more on the book on that but you do telegraph a number of urgent issues with a country. senator tim scott very good see ing you thank you, continued good health. we have a lot more on what doctors are saying of what the senator just said after this tira gives us confidence... ...we can spend a bit now, knowing we're prepared for the future. surprise! we renovated the guest room, so you can live with us. i'm good at my condo. well planned, well invested, well protected. voya. be confident to and through retirement.

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>> testing is a part, an important part of a multi-faceted way that we are going to control and ultimately end this outbreak. so please, don't anyone interpret it that i'm downpaving testing, but the emphasis that we've been hearing is essentially testing is everything, and it isn't.

neil: all right, that surprised a lot of folks when they heard dr. fauci talking about testing being important, but not the be all and end all, what you hear out of the nations governors be they republican or democrat they need more testing more proof that this is what we're getting on top of this , and what he is saying is focus more on the type of behavior going on and whether you're getting the response from that, and anyway, it caused ripples and waves here. i want to go to our dr. nicole saphier has been helping us out with this , and so many of the issues around the virus doctor always good to see you. what do you make of what dr. fauci was saying? it's important, it's very good guide and gauge, but it isn't everything. >> well of course and we want to remind people that it is, there's not going to be just like i was saying about vaccine. we're not just leading on one thing to get over the covid-19 crisis. there's going to be a lot of things that need to be institut ed to actually get back to our "new normal" and the

truth is the best economic package is the best public health package because the only way we're actually going to get people out there to start spending money again is to make them feel safer to do so and that's going to be through yes, we do want to increase testing and we need the ability to test on an outpatient basis, we also need to make sure that our physicians have these shackles removed from them and they are allowed to prescribe without having the regulations placed by our state legislators but we're also going to need to maintain some level of social distancing measures until there's a proven treatment or vaccine for the virus with covid-19 and we may look to our private sector, our businesses to lead the way for that, instill in us that confidence that you were taking every appropriate measure to make sure that you're keeping us safe again because if restaurants and business owners start doing that, you're going to see people going out again as soon as the stay-at-home orders are lifted. neil: well is he saying that

testing could provide a false negative here? in other words you might not have the virus or let's say you might test positive for the virus but you are not a danger to anyone, unless you are doing things violating social distancing rules in effect where you make it worse. if you're gordon changes are depending on testing alone, i know they're looking at a decline in cases what have you, is that naive or what would you say? >> we can't just keep looking at these testing numbers because one of the problems with looking at the concerns of positive cases is that means that it's directly dependent on the amount of tests being performed so some of the areas in the united states that have reported lower numbers of infection we don't actually know how many tests are being performed so it might not be that accurate. if you look into the small study that was just put out in santa clara, california, what they did was they looked at the sterile prevalence data and took about 3,300 patient volunteers and

they weren't necessarily symptomatic or presumed positive and these were just random sampling and add up those 3,300 patients they looked to see who tested positive for antibodies to get an idea of really how prevalent is this infection amongst our communities, and those numbers are showing about 50-85 times the amount of infection that we're actually calculating, and now mind you this is not a peer review study. this is just some data, but that is what's really important to look at this random sampling and i would bet that about 2-5% of the population has already been infected with this viral infection, and at that point, we start looking at the antibodies and do those actually have immunity because the truth is we don't know at this point that if you've already had the viral infection and now have antibod ies, if that means you're immune in the future, we're guessing that's the case but we don't actually know at this point so looking forward to the future, we need the ability to test people and do contact tracing, that is one thing that we have lapped on, so when we

start continuing to see decreasing of cases, when people, if we potentially are going out again and we're starting to see viral infections again, we need that person to be able to call up their primary care doctor, get a test and then have that doctor help facilitate contact tracing, and then put those people back in their home and have self-isolation and that's how we'll mitigate the spread of the disease but if we don't have widely available testing and an ability to contact trace, then we'll see ourselves exactly where we are right now again so we have to be very smart about this as we are slowly starting to reopen the economy. neil: all right, thank you very very much i much appreciate it, well regardless if people are getting a little hot under the collar we saw of course the situation with new york governor cuomo and the president going at it yesterday but we're also see ing it play out in one state after another where protesters are coming out of the woodwork saying enough already with these restrictions that in some cases governors piling on, some more

restrictions. what to do and how far can you go legally after this.

neil: all right some very sad news to pass along to you the former treasury secretary of the united states, he was a ceo at alcoa has died, he was 84 years old paul o'neal made waves because he was concerned about

spending at a time we were spending and under president bush, he even winced at tax cuts at the tame saying it wouldn't be paid for and later on became a very very big budget hawk and he had only been that way but he would always say tax cuts were fine but without spending cuts, they don't do much good to address our longer term spending issues. one would only wonder now what he thinks being spent to sure up the economy and keep it going through this whole coronavirus, and he was apolitical on this issue he would say spending is spending and whatever its intention longer term you still have to pay for it. dead at 84 and in the meantime we are still focusing on the coronavirus, and still focusing on a lot of the money we're spending to address it and to find ways of getting it contained. jacqui heinrich now with the latest in new york. jackie? reporter: neil, top of mind is how we're going to reopen the economy. here in new york state, we've witnessed 235,000 cases and

17,000 coronavirus deaths so far , and governor andrew cuomo has been lobbying the federal government for assistance in conducting widespread testing and he can't reopen the economy, until he gets help from the federal government, and that was the basis of a spar between him and the president yesterday. cuomo added president trump's expectations for states to reopen without federal help amounts to passing the buck without passing the bucks, president trump apparently watching the briefing tweeted governor cuomo should spend more time doing and less time complaining. get out there and get the job done. stop talking. we've built you thousands of hospital beds that you didn't need or use. gave large numbers of ventilator s that you should have had and helped you with testing you should be doing. we've given new york far more money help in equipment than any other state by far and these great men and women who did the job never hear you say thanks, your numbers are not good less talk more action. and he fired back saying he requested the beds in response to high projections from the cdc

which predicted a best case scenario of 100,000 american deaths and he also said he thanked the president plenty. >> i've said a number of times i don't know what am i supposed to do send a bouquet of flowers? thank you, again, mr. president, for the javits, thank you for the coronavirus, for the u.s. navy ship comfort, which by the way is just doing your job as president, it's not really thank you like you wrote a check yourself but thank you for that. we're not out of the woods. we have to go forward. >> earlier this week the two butted heads over president trump's initial claim that he has total authorities to tell the states when they are to reopen, we expect to hear next from governor cuomo at 11:30 this morning, neil? neil: you know i notice in the

shot behind you i see more vehicular traffic in new york and i saw a little bit yesterday , nothing like it was before i grant you but are you noticing that? again, i'm not acting like it's rush hour in manhattan in the old days but it is noticeable. reporter: it's hard to tell what it's for. i certainly see a lot of ambulances and police cars going by, fewer people on the streets, obviously it's raining out today but we do often see on the weekends so going to the grocery store and getting their essentials not too much of that right now. more people in cars making taking an uber is my only guess. neil? neil: that could actually, that's a smarter explanation, jacqui heinrich thank you very very much. in the meantime, you probably have seen these protests popping up around the country people are as i said getting a little hot under the collar it's not just reserve for governors and presidents, but a lot of folks in a lot of states with the lockdown provisions have been in effect even when loosen ed by the governor like in

minnesota where he allowed fishing and that kind of stuff that people had been demanding, wasn't enough, and they're saying enough is enough. and these are popping up in cities and states showing you four right now, in the likes of virginia and minnesota, michigan , also north carolina and you see these as well, and expect them to increase the longer this goes on. now, many states are pushing back any talk of reopening until at least the middle of may but these protests themselves get some focus because they're violating provisions and the like, andrew mccabe joins us right now, fox contributor, more importantly the former u.s. assistant attorney would know the legality of this. always good to have you, andrew. i'm just wondering when people have had enough, our constitution does grant them the right to assemble, but when the governor says no, these are the distance provisions, which wins? >> well you know, neil i think

the most important thing that you said in the intro leading up to this was that the public had made demands in some of these states and the governors had backed off and loosened the restrictions and i think the lesson there and we're going to see a lot more of that i imagine is that we can talk law school sense of what the competing claims are here. the government has legitimate interest protecting public safety from an infectious disease as a legitimate government concern and the public has fundamental rights, bill of rights provision s about free assembly, free speech, free religious exercise, and there are core tests that apply to these, and we could probably for hours parse over them, but i would suggest that the more important thing is the political legitimaticy of the restrictions than how they deal in terms of legal muster under the constitution, because if you think about it, if you take the

federal government all the state government, all the municipal government, combined all their police forces , there's no way conceivably that they cohen force as a practical matter social distancing and shelter in place throughout the united states. if they don't have public buy-in , if this is indeed to be legitimate because it's rational ly related to keeping people safe, people are not going to tolerate it regardless of what the law is saying. neil: meanwhile it gets to be a delicate balance between protecting people, and their economic livelihood, and there's got to be that balance here but it looks like in more of these protest cases, they're saying enough already. >> well i think, neil, the thing is that as you get more remote from the beginning of a crisis, what people begin to do is ask, well, how bad are things, and sometimes part of the problem that you have is if you put in

sensible precautions, it's almost self-defeating in a way because the more the precautions work the more people get what could be a false sense the threat wasn't that bad in the first place, but you have to keep people convinced that the actions that you're taking as a government are not overwrou ght, that they aren't draconian enforcement that's unnecessary and particularly they aren't politicized enforcement and we seen for example, in san francisco where they can't empty the jails fast enough. they decided to cite one guy for violating the stay in place provision, and turned out to be an 86-year-old man who was protesting out in front of planned parenthood. you know, if people start to think that you're not really trying to keep them safe, you're trying to advance an ideological agenda, that's the kind of thing that makes people go out on the street and protest because they don't think that's legitimate. neil: yeah, the times in which we live, my friend, andrew

mccarthy, thank you very very much. so, for all of these governors dealing with various stay-at-home provisions and most of them are enforcing one way, shape, or form such provisions, about 44 of the states i believe , even when they're doing it some have even other issues to contend with including the governor of mississippi now dealing with tornadoeses one week after another, talk about a lot to handle we'll talk to him, next.

neil: all right, you probably know all of this ted-bits, of the lifetime fitness, you know, the stuff that makes you healthy and smart and all of that stuff he has been advising the president at getting the economy going, and then just let this economy do what it can do. he joins me right now on where things stand right now, very good to have you my friend.

where do you see things right now? there's this three-phase plan the president has to slowly reopen the economy, a 14-day period between each phase, so he's not rushing into anything, but i'm just curious to get your sense of where this stands. >> sounds great. first, our president has the right instinct that we need to get the country started but we need to do it correctly. the advice that is coming from all the ceo's is exactly the same, protecting our workforce, protecting our customers, our country, our communities, and everything is consistent, so we have gotten into this social isolation, social distancing for a good reason. we wanted to give time to understand the virus, get the hospitals ready, get the medical community going and collect more facts. however, during this time, there has been so much fear that has been built into the population and even if we open the economy and that fear hasn't been

logically and based on pure data hasn't been lifted, the economy isn't going to really come back correctly so what i've been trying to did is to help every party that i can help with, the local government here, with government or the president' office, is to lay out a plan that basically allows people to think rationally about how we can go back to work and feel safe and comfortable, and that's based on data. one of the things that everybody suggested was hey, more testing and that's totally correct. the more testing we do it'll basically reveal that there is a much much much bigger portion of the population that already has been affected by the virus and has not had a big symptom or light cold and that really is going to change the fear factor, and the next piece is they are

doing this in the next two or three weeks we hope to find some drugs, some therapies, that will make those cases that could have been more severe become less potent, and all of that will also eliminate the pressure on the hospitals and icu. neil: some good ideas, thank you very much i apologize with all of the breaking news but well worth heeding and keeping in mind it's a delicate balance. so we talk about the light at the end of the tunnel, on all of this. what if that light proves ton an ultraviolet one? how that particular strategy just could beat this problem, after this. for many of our members, being prepared... won't be a new thing. and it won't be their first experience with social distancing. overcoming challenges

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neil: you know, we talk a lot about gilead sciences that may be having a treatment for this virus and others like s anofi that say they can mass-produce a vaccine that if it works to the tune of 600 million doses early next year, then moderna is doing something else already getting about $483 million in federal funding over a vaccine that could be in development and very very quickly, but sometimes, there are some practical solutions that pass people by including my next guest, his name is fred maxic, the health founder and cto, he's a former scientist but he found something with ultraviolet light, a uv lighting system that could certainly contain the spread of the virus and he can explain it far better than i. fred it's very good to have you, i know this is called "cleans" but can you tell me how it works

>> yes, neil, good morning. the idea behind it is we've known for some years now that uv light in general is very very good at cleaning and dis infecting sterilizing environments and people see these robots essentially that go into surgeries we turn them on, they blast the environment and it's one- time clean, but what we're doing differently now is we've started thinking about the environment in the future and what the new normal is going to be and in doing so we've discovered a different type of u v light, a far uv light and this is safe for humans to co- habitat and instead of having that one one-time static clean, this is something that the could dynamically, would in realtime as we co-habitat that environment and keep our surfaces and air clean and that's what actually is cleansing is doing is theres a portal behind me you can see a corner where people can walk threw and get cleaned by, and there's other items too, things like this , which can be mounted into an automobile, or a police car or ambulance, and in realtime, it can clean that environment while they're in

there. neil: so, how long does that cleaning process take, and how long does it hold? >> well it's actually continuous, so it can take several seconds or several minutes depending on the distance it is from the light source and how it's being utilized but the fact is it could be on intermittently through the day or on all of the day depending on how the space is being utilized so that we're always coming into a clean environment and we don't have to worry about whose the last one in the back seat of a car, whose the last one to sit at this desk or touch a door knob, it could be something continuously being cleaned as we're living in that environment. neil: are there portable versions of this? >> there certainly can be. the technology can be applied that way but there are versions today that are made for transportation, and there's another version that came out that can mount to a ceiling, just like you'd mount a light, you'd unscrew a bulb and this is another one that replaces a light you can put in your

ceiling that has that already built into it. neil: amazing. fred maxik, you could come up with something that's a game changer we wish you well thank you very much for joining us. >> thank you very much. neil: you never know folks by the way i want to update, thank you, doctor, very much. i do want to update you now a majority of schools in this country will be closed for the rest of the year, the 26 states announced that overnight, so that means more than half of the united states and about 60% of the kids in this country will not be returning to school this year. more states are expected to follow, seven are seriously thinking it, but right now, closed through at least the middle of may. that is a big turning point here , and kids don't go back-to-school depending on their perspective, they might be fine with that. i don't know about how parents feel about that and how governor s are sorting out this situation. we're going to be hearing from new york governor cuomo and also hearing from mississippi governor, after this.

...

>> all right. we will be hearing from the governor of new york. we will be hearing from the governor of mississippi, and we will be hearing from protesters across the country who really don't like lockdowns or anything that hints to the continued slowdown and sheltering in their homes, whether those are initiated by democratic or republican governors, but the drill is the same right now. the protests continue because a lot of people say we think we can balance this out and the provisions that many states have been for a bet are part of a month. and rich, where they're also getting agitated. >> we're a couple of blocks from the maryland state house here where protest organizers say

they want folks to fill up their gas tanks, stay in their cars, stay the distance and make some noise. protesters trying to open some of the state of maryland. they've got 1600 signatures and quote, marylanders are struggling daily to pay bills, maintain family unity, ensure their children's welcome being and remain connected. we call upon governor hogan to hear his constituents and immediately begin the responsible reopening of our state. they say they appreciate the significant health concerns here, but the governor has just been too heavyhanded. meanwhile, larry hogan says he understands what the protesters are going through, but he says now is just not the time to reopen maryland. >> right now we have climbing numbers. we're watching them every single day. i'm a lifelong small business guy, nothing more important to me than getting our economy back and people back to work. and we have advice from federal partners making sh sure we've

got things flattening out rather than going up. >> the governor recently announced that schools will be closed in maryland through may 15th. he says the state is working on a plan to reopen the government gradually and they hope to announce more details on that next week. neil. neil: all right, rich edson, thank you very, very much. we know governors who are dealing now with the stay-at-home provisions and even though it's enacted recently and how would you like that and dealing with mother nature and tornados and all sorts of other messes like that. imagine then being the governor of mississippi. the governor joins me on that. i know last week, the horrific tornados, 34 were killed in the region, i believe, more than a dozen in your beautiful state. how are things there now? >> we're up to 14 fatalities now and several other people in critical condition in the hospital. it's been a very challenging

week, as you can imagine. what we've found out is from the national weather service that the two tornados hit basically the same path an hour apart, one was now confirmed to have been the widest tornado in mississippi history, the third widest tornado in the history of the united states, and they stayed on the ground for approximately 89 miles so significant damage on top of dealing with this coronavirus cris crisis. >> how did you juggle both at the time? well, the reality is, we knew that with the tornados coming in, we had to put the protection of our people first and foremost. we did allow people to go to safe rooms. we did it in a responsible way. we made sure that we handed out masks, made sure that we had hand sanitizer and made sure we had the individuals to the extent possible in the safe rooms and we felt it was the

right thing we had to do. neil: now on the virus, governor. the latest figures, you've just had 3800 cases in your state, 140 deaths. how is the so-called arc looking on this or whether hospitalizations are improving or the trend there? what's the latest? >> well, i will tell you, we've been very-- we've been watching very closely and what we're seeing now, we're not going to have a major spike it doesn't appear. ours is going to be a plateau, a relatively long plateau we had 270 cases one day this week, 270 the next day, 170 cases the day after that and 170 cases the day after that. what we as a country have to understand is that every single model and every single analysis is not the same. as you move from state to state, and quite frankly, from region to region with any state, things are very different. when we talk about reopening our economy, reopening our country, we have to understand that in america, there is not a one size

fits all. yesterday i took the action to begin the process of reopening small businesses. we are going to allow our small business owners that can take phone calls and internet orders and deliver them curbside service like many of our restaurants are doing now, we're going to let them open back up and that's something that's critically important because in this country, you have a lot of conversation about nonessential versus essential. what i can tell you in mississippi if you're a small business owner and you have five, six, seven employees, that business may not be essential to you and me, but it's pretty doggone essential to the work who works there. so we're going to do everything we can to protect mississippians and we've got to get our economy moving again. neil: i believe you noted there was a 14% increase to unemployment. that's not unique to your fine state, but you've opened up lakes and beaches to individual

use. there are still a number of residents who are chasing at any of the sheltering provisions and you were one of the later entrants to that. better than 22 million americans have applied for unemployment benefits and that's likely to continue jumping. are you worried that in keeping these provisions in place, and even limiting some of them, it's just going to make that jobless situation worse? >> well, there's no question that i'm worried about this current economic polite of our land and of mississippians. we have approximately 140,000 mississippians that filed for unemployment insurance over the last four weeks alone. we've had 140 times more people file in the last four weeks than filed the week before this all started and so, i'm extremely concerned about it and i know that every single day that we

don't get our economy rolling again, it's going to be more and more painful on the back end. we believe very strongly that we also have a challenge in this state and in this country. you cannot ask people to shelter in place for weeks and weeks and months and months on end. there has to be a short period of time where you flatten that curve where you ensure that your hospitalization rates are adequate and you have the adequate resources you need to protect every single person that can get quality care and make sure they get that quality care. neil: well, all the quality testing, right. governor cuomo, your counterpart in new york was saying that the state can't just whip up these tests, that the federal government has to help, back and forth who is responsible for those tests? do you have the resources yourself to have the testing crucial deciding in one state after another, when to open up?

>> testing is definitely important. in mississippi we're not waiting for the federal government to solve the problems. in our state we worked with the researchers, we worked at university of mississippi medical center and science in southern mississippi and if you look at our numbers, if you take away those states that the federal government have come in and spent significant resources helping them test, mississippi is actually in the top third of actually number of tests done per one million population, we've tested three times more, for instance, than south korea did, in terms, we've tested almost 50,000 mississippians. we're taking it upon ourselves to do everything we can to expand testing and we continue to do that. we know the innovation of the american people and innovation of our pharmaceutical companies, how much time, money, efforts and resources are going into putting more tests in the marketplace. we need that and we'll do everything we can, but we can't

wait until there's a cure to this. we can't wait until every single person can get tested every single day to open up our economy. we have serious mental health issues going on in this country right now and we also have serious economic crisis going on in this country right now. neil: you're quite right. it is a heck of a balance and it's a tough job. governor, thank you very much for taking the time today. be well. >> thank you, neil. appreciate you having me on. neil: all right. same here, sir. in the meantime, a lot of focus on sports and when we get back to it. you know about baseball and delays, whenever it comes back, they hope even a truncated season happens. football starts in the fall and it looks like that's still happening, but even dr. anthony fauci they might every there be playing to empty stadiums. is that really the case? joe theismann, the former washington redskins great, i consider one of the best of all

time. joe, good to see you. how do you think that would work, we're a long way away from the start-- actually not too long a start from the start of the football season. that might go and they might get it revved up in the stands. without fans in the stands, i can't see that. what about you? >> you know, neil, it's interesting. i'm glad you're safe and everybody listening and watching is safe as well. oddly enough in 1974 during a strike, i was a rookie with the washington redskins and we played at rfk stadium. the stadium capacity was 55,000, there were 3,000 people there. it felt like an empty stadium. it's an entirely different feeling, but the television networks also have a great say in what they want to try and do. you're going to have players in the locker room, not just the people in the stand next to one another, but players interacted with one other, teams interacting on the field and i'm hoping that we're going to be able to get football started. i think that everybody is sort of holding out. i know baseball is on hold.

hockey is on hold. basketball is on hold, but football may have that opportunity to be that one bright spot that everybody is looking forward to three, four months down the road. neil: a lot of people were-- whether it's baseball or whether you see something in football that you don't want to endanger the players and those who work with them and around them as well, but do you feel from the people you talked to, joe, that they feel comfortable that we're past the medical emergency right now? >> i don't think -- i don't think we're past the medical emergency. it seems like every day we're sort of learning something new about the virus. we're learning about the vaccines, we're learning about something that can test people in a very short period of time. i mean, for anybody to sit and say that they have any definitive answers for what's going on, i think, would be foolish. as far as football goes, i really believe everybody is planning now. the draft is coming up this

week. so this sort of starts football season. when the draft gets going, people start thinking about it and coaches preparing and last week, teams were able to basically meet with the players and now they can only do it virtually so it's a different type of environment. to me, a month from now, we are going to have a whole lot better idea of what the picture will look like in late august and even september and what do you do with the pre-season games and how much time could you have to get guys ready? there will be interaction and i was listening to the governor of mississippi and people are anxious to get out and they understand the risk. i think as americans we've done an unbelievable job to try and do everything we can to flatten this curve and have it even decline, but now you're-- now everybody's frustrated, neil, everybody is frustrated. now we want to get outside and go do things and now for at least the next couple of weeks, i think we have to be smart and see exactly what's going on. every day we get to buy one more day for somebody to come up with something that can help a person

that has it or maybe even prevent it. neil: well said. joe theismann, thank you very, very much. at least i have my joe theismann highlight reels to get me through that. [laughter] >> they're short, neil. neil: joe theismann, exactly-- not quite. in the meantime, eventually this draft, the nfl draft, that's virtually, that's going to be weird, but people are coming up with inventive ways to keep this going. in the meantime, china. you heard about how they sharply revised up the number of deaths in wuhan and yet the total death count there a little more than 80,000, some wondering, that can't be, that can't be at all after this.

>> we've just gotten word that eight sailors on the u.s.s.

theodore roosevelt are hospitalized on guam. and one in the icu. and the u.s. is expanding the travel ban for u.s. military personnel until june 30th. i believe it was to expire on may 15th. all this have occurs at a time when we are reexamining our relationship with china, the source of the virus and whether it was deliberate or deliberately misleading. right now the read on all that have with retired brigadier general. good to have you. you've heard the stories and back and forth, they recently-- that is the chinese upped the number of deaths out of wuhan to a little over 3,000. the total death count is remarkably low when you consider a little more than 8800 compared to where we are, it isn't and doesn't seem realistic. even now, are you trusting the numbers you're getting out of

china? >> i would not trust anything that comes out of china right now. you know, what happened, it's really-- whether it was a deliberate manufactured virus or something that happened, an accident in the wuhan testing center there, the chinese government deliberately withheld information, deliberately manipulated information and the numbers you just articulated are an example of that. they suppressed whistleblowers talking about how bad this was and the human-to-human aspect of this. at china said -- and the who was a puppet for china and said the same thing and so, it was a deliberate act of misinformation by the chinese government and it is tauntamount to detonating a

bomb in my view. we need to step back and i think the president and his team and general milley and his team, they're focused on the accurate information so we can assess and respond. of course the priority right now is to save americans lives and that's what the president is doing. neil: if the chinese did duped people, they duped the president of the united states as well who said as you know, general, back in january that they were working hard on this, that they were being very transparent. so was he fooled by them as well? >> no, i don't think so. i think what happened is, you know, intelligence, you read intelligence every single day and make the best assessments that you get from the folks that you have in-country and in the region and make assessments.

the assessments, this was not hume human-to-human and the president made a decision that was unpopular to shut down china, based on instinct to shut down travel and that directly has saved tens of thousands of lives from my point of view. and then to shut down travel from europe. as we got more clarity on the information on what i would call the enemy situation from my military days, you gain a better picture. it's like a movement to contact as we use today call it and you get more information every day as you go, as you get further into the situation, your information clarifies and then you have better and better responses and you're able to overcome it and then take over the situation as the president has done with his task force. and standing up that task force and doing the daily press briefings, and getting the accurate information out there despite, quite frankly, what the

much in the mainstream media has sided with china on this thing inexplicably. it's because the virus and the damage to the economy and to the health of americans, you know, works against the president and so the media wants that to happen more, to further that narrative, but the president has been very strong on this in my opinion. neil: but there is still, general, there's still some culpability. it's easy to play monday morning quarterback. but if peter navarro was warning him, but it's not exclusively on china and the world health organization? >> i would say this is exclusively within the realm of china and china lies and china misinformation. we should give no quarter, neil, to china. there should be nothing spared. this is a communist dictatorship that hid the information. they should down travel within their own country, but they

allowed the virus to go to other countries. they intentionally allowed this to happen and they shut down the centers, they shut down the whistleblowers and they shut down travel, and they allowed it, and killed 150,000 people. neil: you raise an issue, if we can't trust them on a medical, can we trust them on trade? that's an issue we'll get into. thank you, general, very much. >> thank you, neil. usaa has been standing with them for nearly a hundred years. and we'll be here to serve you for a hundred more. ♪

>> all right. you know, this is times square and never ceases to amaze me

that i think we're looking at a snapshot. this is a live look at times square, one of the busiest cross sections of america, of the world and nothing. the idea is when you slowly get people back to work that that will fill up and then the question becomes, what happens? where do we go from here? will those who have expensive office space in manhattan start saying do we need as much office space? will people even want to come in? we know about the hit on residential real estate and we know that home instruction just came off the worst month since 1984. we know as well that a home index closely monitored just registered its weakest performance ever in history, never got so low and we do know in the commercial real estate arena, suddenly, customers are canceling contracts, anecdotally, it doesn't look good. statistics to come. don peebles here to follow it.

a big real estate developer as well, a big democratic fundraisor as well. he joins us. when you look at it, it's really sweeping and i'm just wondering whether you see it improving anytime soon? what do you think? >> i see, obviously, some moderate. kristin: i see moderate improvement and i think it shows how to consume the second largest expense, housing the employees. number one is the employees and number two, housing them. i was talking to a friend of mine who runs a multi-million dollar private equity and hedge fund and private investment management firm. if i told him two months ago every employee he had was working from home and they wouldn't miss a beat he would think i was crazy. now he's contemplating what to do with the many tens of thousands of square feet of office space that he's leased. neil: right. >> i'm hearing that around the country, actually. so, i think that that is going to change the commercial office

market permanently. neil: and you know what? and maybe it started with cheesecake factory, remember very early on in this process they had telegraphed to the world we're not paying our april rent, they're in shopping malls and the rest and we heard others follow suit and i wonder, you know, these real estate companies that could control these operations, et cetera, that's got to be a whammy as well. >> that's true. and i found it ironic one developer on tv said everybody should pay their rent, but a subsidiary of theirs decided not to pay rent across the board. the reality, this is nobody's fault other than the chinese. the fact is the tenants did nothing wrong and the office building owners and retail owners and mall owners didn't do anything wrong. tenants shouldn't have to pay rent for space they can't get to.

i say that as a real estate developer and owner. and i don't think it's share to carry to burden. the question is what to do about it? i think that's the bigger question. look at new york city, looking down the barrel of $10 billion budget deficit and loss when this stabilizes. that's going to have an impact on commercial office space and how government start doing business and what they can and can't do going forward. neil: you know a lot of people hope for a v-shaped recovery and bounceback from this, but you've already outlined some of the problems that might make that difficult. for example, if we have to continue practicing distancing measures in a lot of places, that could apply as well. and that's where people are tacked quite close together and i'm wondering that on top of people who might be leary going

to movies and restaurants. it might be a slow trudge, what do you think? >> oh, i think it's going to be much more of a u-shaped, but a flat u-shape with a slight incline when things are opening again. i think that companies are going to have to rebound. many businesses, small businesses are not going to be able to come back from this and they're going to have closed, unfortunately. i think this new committee that the president put together, i think it's a great idea, 200 business leaders from around the country. unfortunately though, i would have liked to have seen more women. he put 20 women out of 200. seven african-americans out of 200. and i think these committees need to be reflective of what business business is in america today and the future of business and it looks like it's kind of a rerun of that committee, a lot of people who have had their day. i think in order to get out of this, we're going to have to engage young people and new entrepreneurs in technology, how we live and how we create jobs

in an era of where technology is constantly eliminating them. many of these industries that we talk about have already been disrupted by technology, retail, office space. air bnb disrupted hospitality. we haven't talked about that. the hospitality industry is devastated and probably take a decade for it to come back from this. neil: okay. don, thank you very, very much. we appreciate it. we will be hearing by the way from new york governor cuomo and we'll also be speaking with arizona senator mcsally on all of these developments. i want to pass this along before we go to break. the canadians and united states have agreed to keep their borders close today nonessential travel for another 30 days, another 30 days on nonessential travel to and from our countries. stay with us.

>> all right. new york governor andrew cuomo addressing the media, more than 17,000 deaths in new york. >> hit the plateau and are we now on the way off the plateau and on the descent? if you look at the past three days, you could argue that we are past the plateau and we're starting to descend which would

be very good news. again, it's only three days, but that's what the numbers would start to suggest and you see that basically across the board, hospitals will tell you that, also. the emergency rooms have fewer people in them. remember, they were at manic, max capacity for a very long period of time. remember, we increased the hospital capacity by 50%, so every hospital had 50% more and that capacity was overwhelmed, which just reminds us of the job the hospitals have been doing. but we see that in the numbers as well as what the hospitals are saying to us. the three-day average, which is more accurate, that is down. the icu admissions, i don't think is reflective of anything anymore, but we continue to include it for some unknown reason, are also down. the intubations are down, which is very good news.

again, intubation means you've been put on a ventilator, probability is about 80% you won't come off the ventilator once you're put on a ventilator. so that's very good news. but sobering news on the other hand, happy days are not here again. we still have about 2000 people yesterday who were new admissions to a hospital or new covid diagnosis. that is still an overwhelming number every day, 2000 new. if it wasn't for the relative context that we've been in, this would be devastating news, 2000 people coming into the hospital system or testing positive. and if you notice, 2000, we're not at the peak, but this is about where we were in late march when it started to go up, so we're not at the plateau

anymore, but we're still not in a good position. and the worst news, still tragic news, number of deaths 540. it's not as high as it was, still 540 people died yesterday. 540 people, 540 families, 504 in hospitals, 36 in nursing homes. nursing homes are the biggest fear in this, vulnerable people in one place, it is the feeding frenzy for this virus. despite everything we can do and the best efforts of people who are working in those nursing homes, who are doing just a fantastic job. testing, testing is the single most important topic for us to understand, i think, and it's

important that we understand it. i spoke to one of my daughters last night who shall go nameless and she asked me what are they talking about testing? which is sobering, i think i'm communicating facts and my daughters are probably some of the most informed people on the situation given the hardship they endure being my daughters this period of time. she was like, i don't understand all of this about testing, which is, again, it's a wakeup call to me. i think we're communicating, i think we're putting out this information, but people have lives to live, even in this crazy time, but for me, the best thing i can do in my position is to communicate facts to people so they have the information to make decisions. that's what i've been trying to do since day one. here is the information, here are the facts, you decide and

i'll tell you what i think the course of conduct should be given these facts, but here are the facts, right? before you tell me what you think, just tell me the facts, and then we'll get to your personal interpretation of the facts. so facts on testing. because it is granular and it is a little boring, but it's also vitally important. testing is how you monitor the rate of infection and you control for it. and that is the whole tension in reopening. everybody wants to reopen. you don't need to hold up a placard saying we want to reopen. nobody wants to reopen more than me. nobody wants to get the economy going more than me and nobody wants to get on with life more than me, and everybody else. we're all in the same boat. we all have the same feelings. the tension on reopening is, how fast can you reopen and what can

you reopen without raising that infection rate so you go right back to where we were overwhelming the hospitals? the infection rate now is one person infects .9 other people. you can't infect .9, but it's basically one person is infecting one person, a tad less and i don't know if it's a tad less, i don't know that the statistics are that accurate, frankly. let's say one person now infects one person, that's where we are now. when that is happening, the virus is basically stable. where we were was one person was infecting 1.4 people and that's when you have outbreak, widespread epidemic. we brought it down from 1.4 to .9. how did you do that? those were the new york policies, close down businesses, close down schools, everybody

has to social distance, masks, et cetera, but it worked and we went from 1.4 to .9. wuhan says at one point they got down to .3, which is where you really start to see the numbers drop, but that's where we are. the tension is, when you start to open business, you start to have gatherings, you put people on a bus, you put people on a subway, you put people in a retail store, then you're going to see more infections, you're going to see that infection rate rise and then you're going to be back to where we were. so how do you gauge this, right? how do you calibrate it? that is all about the testing and you have a very tight window. you're at .9 now, you can only go up to 1.2 before you see those hospitalization numbers start taking off again. you're talking about a very, very tight window that you have

to calibrate and this is all without precedent, so how do you actually do that intelligently? well, you have to test. and testing informs the calibration. what is testing? testing is you test, you test the person to see whether they're positive or negative for the coronavirus, there's also something called antibody testing, but let's put that aside for a second. on the diagnostic testing, positive or negative, you test the person. when you find the person who is positive, you then trace. trace they call them detectives. you find the person and then you interview that person and find out who they came in contact and you follow that tree down. that testing and then tracing. when they talk about tracing. trace all of those contacts. and then you find the people who are positive, you isolate the positive people, so they can't continue to spread.

tracing requires an army. literally an army. you would need thousands of people who just traced in the state of new york, right? because any one person then leads to 10, 20 possible people who were infected. and you have to trace all through those people, you find the positive person, you isolate them. the trick with testing is not that we don't know how to do it, we've done it better in this state than almost any other state, almost any other country. it's bringing this up to scale. and these are private sector companies that are doing this. but we have done a very good job in testing. and the state has played a pivotal role in testing. you look at how new york-- the number of tests we do. it's more than california, it's more than any other state. it's more than any other

country. so we've had great success in ramping up testing. so we know how to do it. we know how important it is. we had that hot spot in new rochelle, westchester. it was the hottest cluster in the united states of america, and we jumped on it and we jumped on it with intense testing and it worked. you know, we still have an issue, but it's no longer a hot spot cluster because you do a lot of testing, you take the positives and you isolate them. this is now-- the challenge is now bringing this up to scale, okay? we did 500,000 tests in a month. that's great news. bad news is, it's only a fraction of what you need. the more you test, the more information, the more you can reopen society. how does testing actually work? and this, again, you have to

know the facts, otherwise this is all a blur and it becomes a he said/she said. there are about 30 private companies, large private companies in the country that are even international. 30 large companies make equipment to test. and they all have their own test, okay? so you have the acme test, the this test, this test, this test. those 30 companies have been selling their machines to local laboratories. and that's their business. they make the machine, roche makes a machine and you have to buy the machine and they sell the local labs their testing protocol because their test works on their machine.

so you buy the roche machine, you then have to buy the roche test from the roche corporation. you buy the acme test, you have to buy the acme test from the acme corporation and they sell these tests to local labs. we have about 300 local labs in our state who have bought these 30 types of manufacturers and 30 types of tests, okay? and then every time the lab goes to run that test, if i'm running the acme test, i have to have the acme equipment and the acme vile and the acme swab and the acme reagents. what are reagents? when you take the swab, nasal swab, throat swab, you then test it with other chemicals. the other chemicals are reagents. depending on what test you

bought, they have their own reagent for every test. so the acme test has one set of reagents. the roche test has another set of reagents and you have to go back to them to buy these reagents. so that is the basic chain and it gets very complicated very quickly because you have the national manufacturers who sold their machines to local labs. the local labs then need to go back to that manufacturer to run their tests, and there's very litt little uniformity among the tests. so you're trying to coordinate this whole private sector system. we have some public labs, the state has wadsworth lab, but the real capacity is in these private labs. so how do you bring this up to scale? and how do you cut to the chase

on this one? we called the top 50 producing labs in the state and said, tell us what it takes to double your output. okay? and this is literally what they said. so there's no interpretation here. most of people come back, sometimes they talk about the equipment, nasal swab, vial, but most of them are talking about we can't get the reagents. we can't get these other chemicals that we need to test. where do they get the reagents from? their manufacturer who made the machine in the first place, okay? and they all say, with the machines we bought, we could actually be doing more if they would give us the reagents. that's the logjam that we are in. they bought the machine, they have the machine, they have the

test, but they need the reagents to do a higher volume of tests. when you go back to the manufacturer and say, why don't you distribute more reagents, they say one of two things, i can't get more reagents because they come from china, they come from here, they come from here. we don't make them in the united states, or they say the federal government is telling me who to distribute it to. and this is why i say you have the federal government involved in this situation, rightfully so because the federal government is saying to acme pharmaceutical, give x to california, give y to chicago, give z to new york. these manufacturers are regulated by the federal government and the federal government clearly has a role in addressing this crisis, but we need two things from the federal government. we need help on that supply

cha chain, especially when it becomes international, and we need coordination and basic partnership. i get the state's role. we've been testing, i get that it's hard, i get that it's difficult, i get that it's never going to be perfect, i get in this society that there's going to be a blame game, everyone says why don't we have enough testing, it's the fed, it's the state. that's going to happen anyway. that's the world that we live in. and i'm not asking for the federal government to come in and do any more than they need to do, but we do need their coordination and we do need their partnership and we also need from the federal government, we need funding. i get that we have to fund airlines, we have to fund this business, we have to fund small business. yeah, i agree 100%, but you also have to fund the state government. when you fund the state government, you're not funding a private business, okay? we're not an airline. so you don't have an issue of

should government really be giving tax dollars to this private entity. when you fund the state government, you're funding a state government to perform the functions that you want us to perform, which is the reopening function, i get it, i'll do it. you need funding. when you fund the state government, you're funding state business anyway and hospitals anyway, and you're funding schools anyway and you know, the republican doctrine used to be limited government and state's rights. i'm a good distribution mechanism to small businesses and hospitals and schools because i know what's going on in the state, but if you want us to reopen, we need funding. national governor's association is highly relevant because this is now all up to the governors. the national governors' association so bipartisan, the chairman is a republican, i'm the vice-chairman, i'm a democrat. i'm the incoming chairperson.

we did a press release yesterday saying we need funding in in next bill. we need $500 billion for the state so we can do this reopening. the federal government yesterday sent 1.5 million cloth masks to new york state and i want to thank them for that. these are cloth masks we can distribute to people to help implement our policy where if you're in public you have to wear a mask, it's not a surgical mask, it's a cloth mask manufactured by the hanes corporation, i believe. but we're asking people to wear masks and this is going to be very helpful because we're going to have additional masks to distribute to the public. last point, personal opinion is not a fact. that's just my opinion. you can throw it in the garbage. the emotion in this country is

as high as i can recall. people are frustrated. we're anxious, we're scared, we're angry. we've never been through this before and on every level this is a terrible experience. it's disorienting, it threatens you to your core. it makes you reflect on your whole life and it really has-- its mentally they difficult, it's emotionally difficult, economically it's disastrous. the market goes down, your retirement funds go down. you're not getting a paycheck. it is as tumultuous a time as we've ever seen, but in the midst of this, there is no time for politics. how does the situation get worse? and get worse quickly?

if you politicize all that emotion. we cannot go there. that's why i worked so hard, when anyone raises any political agenda to me, i work so hard to distance myself from it. i'm not running for anything, i'm not going anywhere. i'm going to be governor of the state of new york until the people kick me out. and nen i'm going to go spend time with my family and that's th that. i have no political agenda and i've stayed 100 miles away from politics just so people know that there is no possibility of a political distortion here because it's no time for politics. and look, if you have partisan division splitting this nation now, it going-- it's going to make it worse. abraham lincoln, a house divided

against itself cannot stand, 1858. where did abraham lincoln get it from? if a house is divided against itself the house cannot stand, mark 3:25. so this is an accepted wisdom, let us say. >> a house cannot stand, not to mention a house cannot rise up from the greatest challenge it has seen since world war ii. this is no time and no place for division. we are-- have our hands full as it is. let's just stay together and let's work it through, and that's why we're called the united states, right? and the unity was key. going back to abraham lincoln, it was always about the unity, going back to the frame errs constitution. it was balance of power and we

need that unity more than ever before. questions. >> governor-- last night, mentioned it the other day. you're not wearing a mask. do you fear that there's-- so, we're here with financial strength, stability and experience you can depend on and the online tools you need because you have always set the highest standard and reaching that standard is what we're made for ♪

>> and wear a mask, and my daughter wears a mask, the dog doesn't wear a mask. i've not heard any data that suggests pets should wear a mask. so captain is not violating anything, but we'll walk the dog, i wear a mask, it's not as

attractive as your mask, by the way, you have very stylish, fashion forward. >> governor, president trump has been encouraging implicitly and explicitly some republican states to kind of move ahead with reopening plans. beaches are reopening in florida today. there have been protests at state houses around the country. what do you make of that sort of peace piecemeal approach? >> we're continuing to cover governor cuomo, sorry for the technical matter earlier. the governor is ratcheted down some of the heated rhetoric where he and the president were going blow for blow, he says that states like new york still need help and the anger that he and other governors-- chooep

>> we begin with an update on the latest coronavirus case count here in the united states. there are now more than 700,000 confirmed cases across the country, new york, new jersey, and massachusetts are now leading the nation,s at three states with the highest number of confirmed infections. welcome to america's news headquarters from washington, i'm kristin fisher just across the street from the u.s. capitol. leland: nice to be with you, you've had a busy week at the white house. i'll get to that later. and down in