that's our broadcast for tonight. brian will be back on monday. you can join me tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. eastern on msnbc. thank you for being with us and good night from nbc news headquarters in new york. in the year 1996, i was 23 years old. go ahead, do the math. yes, i'm that old. i'm like dirt. but in 1996, i was 23 years old and honestly kind of a mess, but i did have a real mission in life. i was working as an aids activist, and i had been for the previous, like, six years or so. six or seven years or so. when you're 23, that's a pretty big chunk of your life. and in 1996, i went to the international aids conference that year. it was in a different city every year. that year was in vancouver, and i remember it like it was

yesterday because it was a turning point in my life. it was a landmark moment in my life. still at age 46 when i talk about, like, things that happened in my life and important moments in my biography, going to that conference was one of them. at that conference, i felt like the whole world started spinning in a different direction than it had been spinning before. there was before then, and there was after then because at that conference, which was then, you know, ten years into the aids epidemic with more than 360,000 americans dead from aids by then, with more than 6 million people worldwide dead from aids by then, by 1996, a scientist gave a talk at that conference in vancouver in 1996 that changed the way we understood everything about that virus and how it kills us. the scientist was a man named dr. david ho, a young scientist, even younger looking than he was

at the time. but the talk that he gave in vancouver changed the world because dr. david ho figured it out with literally hundreds of thousands of americans dead and dying at the time, dr. ho designed studies and led research that figured out the mystery of how hiv replicates inside the body. once you get infected, the virus starts to make copies of itself in almost unimaginably large numbers, and it does it from the instant that you get infected. that's what dr. david ho saw around corners and got out of the box in order to see happening when it came to hiv and aids, and that new understanding about how hiv worked, about how it did its viral business to destroy our bodies, that led to a new understanding about the whole life cycle, right? about how hiv led to aids, which led to opportunistic illnesses

that then killed hiv-positive people. i mean his research led to this crucial revelation in understanding the virus and in understanding how to treat the virus, how to treat hiv. and what we learned because of his research is that you need strong antiviral drugs to stop the virus from replicating inside the body out of control, to suppress basically the virus' rep lickation enough to give the immune system some relief. so the replication of the virus doesn't exhaust the immune system and leave you open to the opportunistic illnesses that are ready, willing, and able to kill you. dr. david ho is a molecular biologist. he trained at caltech and mit. he was a resident at internal medicine at cedars-sinai in los angeles in 1981 when he started seeing some of the very first cases of what would later be called aids. but as a researcher, it was his outside of the box thinking about how to understand the

virus' own work, how to understand the way the vars behaved inside the human body that led to these, at the time, heretical ideas about how to treat the virus, how to treat hiv-positive people well before they got sick. how to attack the virus early on, to undermine the work of the virus, to give the body the best chance of holding it at bay. that led to these revolutions in hiv treatment that started keeping people alive. that's why my life changed so much because people who had previously been dying stopped dying and started living for long enough to get them to the next treatment and ultimately to a long-term prognosis. that revelation about how to treat aids, about how the virus works, therefore how you should treat it, that is what changed hiv and aids profoundly from a disease that killed everybody to what it is today. it was that pivot point in 1996. if you are old enough to remember that time in u.s.

history, which granted is a long time ago, half my lifetime ago, you might remember that the "time" magazine man of the year in 1996 was dr. david ho. and i think most people across the country were like, wait, dr. david who? what is this? hmm? everybody anywhere related -- in any way related to the aids movement at the time was like, yes, exactly, david ho, man of the year, the man who made the world start spinning the other direction on its axis. today in 2020 dr. david ho is still a pretty young scientist. he heads up his own lab, which is still working hard to find the ultimate cure for aids. but he's also now working to find a cure for coronavirus. we called dr. ho today to ask him what he thinks people ought to know and ought to be thinking about in terms of the prospects of beating this virus, and one of the things he sent over to us was a short stack of three very

simple graphs. there's just three of them. they're very easy to understand. i'll show you. here's the first one. you see the headline there, daily new confirmed cases, and in this graph there's two different lines, right? one's red and one's green. the red line is china. the green line, which is harder to see, it's on the right side there, lower on the screen. that's south korea. by daily new confirmed cases, what this means is this is the number of newly reported cases day by day. so it's not a graph of the total number of people who have the riers. it's the number of new infections per day. so this is a graph that basically shows you the rate at which people are being newly fected in those two countries or at least the rate which you can test it. in china, the red line, daily new infections goes very, very high up, almost 4,000 new cases per day at the height of it, and then they come down to a low level where they are now. south korea, the green line,

their epidemic starts a little bit later on in time, starting towards the end of february. their number of new cases follows a similar shape, right? at least they seem to hit their own peak and then start to come down from it, not quite as clearly as china did, but still. broadly speaking their number of new cases per day in south korea is heading down toward lower and lower numbers. one other thing you should notice on this graph. notice the time frame. look at what's on the "x" axis there. today is march 13th, so this basically ends yesterday or today. but it goes all the way back. it starts in january because that's when china started to see and document this rapid onset of new cases in this epidemic. that's the first graph. here's the second graph, same kind of graph measuring two things. here the green line is italy, red line is spain. and here the bad news is that the number of new infections per day is still trending up in both

of those places. it does not look like they have peaked. it's a very high number of new cases per day in italy, and it is trending up still quickly day by day. that's the number of new cases per day. again, this is not the total number of people with the infection. this is new cases reported per day. this is the rate at which people are getting newly infected in these countries. if you put those two side by side, that's the china and south korea one on the left, the italy and spain one on the right, you can see not only is the shape of the graphs different, in italy and spain, it is not yet coming down, but also the time frame's different, right? in order to see what happened in china and south korea, you've got to go back to january. the graph for italy and spain only goes back to late february, later onset. it's spreading, started in china, and it's now moving out around the country and people's epidemics in individual countries are starting at a different time. so the asia graph there goes back to january. the europe graph there goes back to february. here's now the third graph, and

this one is new york city, and look at the time line here first. this one only goes back to last week. and over the course of last week and this week, this is what's happened in new york city in terms of the rate of new infections being reported each day. this is a bad graph for new york city. this is a bad graph for any country that has this as its largest city. new york city is our largest city in this country. and new york is not the place that has the largest number of cases in the united states. that continues to be washington state, which as of today has reported 572 confirmed cases. but when it comes to the numbers here in the united states, we have learned to be shy about taking any comfort in any apparent smallness in the numbers because of the fact that we appear to be the worst industrialized country in the world when it comes to actually testing people to confirm cases. so nobody quite trusts our

numbers because we know they are artificially low because we're not doing very much testing at all. we're worst in the world among major industrialized countries who are facing this epidemic. when i spoke with washington state's governor, jay inslee at the beginning of this week on monday night's show, at that point they had 160 known cases in washington state. he said within washington state government they believed at the time as of monday, they probably had more like a thousand cases even though only 160 cases had been officially confirmed. he said he expected that number, even that number to rise rapidly and dramatically. he said that if they thought they had about 1,000 cases as of monday night, with the rate of -- the rate at which the infection is spreading, the number of infections are doubling every five or six days. the governor in washington suggesting that they thought that by the end of next month, they would go from 1,000 cases this week to more than 60,000

cases. that's just one state by the end of next month. that appears to be borne out. the governor's expectations appear to be borne out by the math others we've seen it this week. there's 160 known cases in washington monday night, tonight there's 572 cases. we're going to talk live with seattle's mayor in just a moment for an update on those front line's and america's part of this pandemic. just before we got on the air tonight, washington's governor ordered a statewide shutdown of all k through 12 schools and a statewide ban on all gatherings of 250 or more people. those measures were already in place in seattle in washington's largest city. as of tonight, as of hours ago, they are expanded statewide. but just look back at new york city for a second because although it's washington state that has the largest number of cases in the country, new york state is absolutely hot on its heels. new york city reported that the number of confirmed cases just in the city rose by more than

50% just since yesterday, and it's hard to know if that 50% rise, 50% rise in confirmed cases in new york city in a day. it's hard to know if that 50% rise in one day is indicative of a huge spike in new infections in new york city or whether it just indicates that more testing is now happening in new york city and more cases are therefore being found. i will tell you from anecdotal experience from working in new york city and knowing tons of people who live here, i don't know anybody who actually knows how to get a test in new york city, including a bunch of people who are symptomatic and have indications they've been exposed to people who have the virus. it's almost impossible to get a test even now. the governor of new york state has been very aggressive about the need to get more testing done in new york and the plans to get more testing done in new york, but there's not much sign of it in real life other than one testing site that opened today for residents of westchester county only. still, i mean, put up that new

york city graph side by side with that graph of what's going on in italy. notice any similarities there? i mean, that's the same shape. even with almost no testing here our numbers don't look like spain, which is the red line under italy there. our numbers don't look like south korea. no, our numbers look like italy. italy where they've got a nationwide lockdown of 60 million people. 60 million people quarantined. the number of confirmed cases rising by thousands and thousands every day, hospitals in the worst hit areas of italy are overwhelmed. the doctors and the nurses at those facilities are themselves infected. the health care system is broken in the places where it is the worst in italy. it is feared that it will break all over that country with the thousands of new infections they're seeing every day, and 15% to 20% of everybody infected needing to be hospitalized for serious illness.

i mean, that's the devil in the data. all right. this is the statistical manifestation of what it means for us as americans to have had a slow, confused, poorly-led response to this pandemic with this only in america disaster at the core of our national response, which is the continuing lack of testing here. but you have to work with what you have, and we've only got one federal government, and that's all we've got. we're not getting another one. you've got to do what you can with what you've got. so should we be canceling events that bring people together in large numbers in any sort of face-to-face proximent where any respiratory illness could be spread? absolutely. all over the country we should be canceling events of that kind. should we be canceling travel? when it comes to air travel, if you're an older person or a person who's got underlying health issues, for you particularly, the answer is yes and at least that is now clear. otherwise the answer is probably

yes, yeah, if you have the option not to travel, don't travel. should businesses and different workplaces around the country be instituting rules now to have people working from home instead of working collectively in a single location alongside their colleagues? yes, that needs to be happening everywhere, everywhere it can happen. and that's what we can do. we don't have testing. so this whole idea of being disease detectives and tracing everybody's contacts and figuring out sources of infections and getting all those people tested and locking them down, you can't do that if you can't test. so we do what we can, which is mitigation, assuming that we're positive. the president today finally declared a national state of emergency, which he had been reluctant to do for days. that declaration will free up some federal funding, but it won't undo the mistakes and the bungling that has happened thus far. the emergency announcement did lead to a rally in the stock market, which we know is very important to the president.

i'm sure that felt great to him. the economic pain that is going to be inflicted by this pandemic is not going to be helped by that rally today. the economic pain that's going to be inflicted as a consequence of this pandemic is going to be severe. we should start preparing for that too. if you just want one little business snapshot of that today, take the announcement from delta airlines. did you see this? delta airlines today announced they're going to reduce their overall flying capacity by 40%. that's the largest reduction delta airlines has ever instituted including the period immediately following the attacks of 9/11. they're cutting capacity 40% effective immediately, grounding up to 300 planes, eliminating all flights to continental europe, which is a measure that the president forced on them with his announcement of a european travel ban, which is now going into effect. we learned just today that schools will be closed statewide

in virginia, west virginia, rhode island, maryland, pennsylvania, michigan, washington state, new mexico, louisiana, florida, some of the biggest school districts in the country, l.a., boston, san diego, miami, all announced full closures today. interestingly, new york city schools are not closing even though there's been a state of emergency declared in new york city, and even as we're seeing what the city itself is reporting in terms of numbers. the boston marathon was postponed today. the louisiana democratic presidential primary was postponed today, moved from early next month to late june instead. mt. everest is now closed to climbers. the eiffel tower is now closed to visitors. denmark is closed to everyone. denmark has closed its borders to everyone. kuwait has closed its main airport. ireland has closed all schools, all colleges, all child care facilities. in iraq where there are nearly 200,000 people in displaced

persons camps, which alongside prisons and jails are the absolute nightmare scenario for pandemic spread. in northern iraq they have identified their first coronavirus case in a displaced person's camp in nineveh province. in canada there was a unanimous vote to suspend parliament. all members of parliament sent home. canada's first lady, the prime minister's wife has tested positive for coronavirus. she's ill. she's in quarantine. her husband, the prime minister is quarantined as well, although he is reportedly not symptomatic. but as we thunder into another day of this wondering if this was another day when american hospital capacity should have noticeably increased, as we thunder into another day of this with americans still being given wildly contradictory and inconsistent advice about whether and when to self-quarantine and what it means to isolate or self-quarantine and whether you should seek testing and with more government happy talk about

the availability of testing when in real life by and large people still can't get it, even if they seek it out aggressively and even if they have reason to. as we thunder through another day of this, i'm at the point where i want to know about the replication of this virus inside our system, and where we really are on the epidemiological curve here, and what that says about how worried we should be about our hospital capacity, our intensive care beds. the safety of our doctors and nurses and health care workers, our ability to prevent them from being overwhelmed despite the way that we are seeing these numbers grow in the united states. i know there's been a lot of talk about vaccines. i think that's in part because the president for a long time while facing this seemed to have no idea what a vaccine was, so he frequently said things that made no sense about vaccines and that led to news coverage of vaccines.

in reality, best case scenario for a vaccine is we're talking about a year and a half from now. if you set aside the talk about what might happen with vaccines a year and a half from now, what about treatment? what about potential treatment for this, for people who have got it? is there outside the box thinking right now that might hold the potential for a moment like we had in 1996 in vancouver? is there outside the box thinking right now that has the potential of turning this thing in the other direction, for making us understand this and see this in a different way, for making us see how this might conceivably veer off the course that it seems to be on now toward the worst disaster we're all now capable of imagining? dr. david ho, that same dr. david ho is now working on coronavirus, and he's going to join us live in studio here next.

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"time" magazine describes it as a first of its kind library of potential coronavirus drugs. quote, with a $2.1 million starting grant from chinese technology mogul, jack ma,

dr. david ho will oversee four research teams at columbia university whose goal is to find an effective treatment against covid-19 and other coronaviruses. if you're pursuing a project like this, dr. david ho might be exactly the person you want overseeing it. his groundbreaking hiv research changed the course of the aids epidemic worldwide in the 1990s. he's been researching and fighting viruses ever since. dr. ho is scientific director and ceo of the aaron diamond aids research center, and i'm very pleased to say he joins us now here onset. dr. ho, you are far away from me at this desk, but that's on purpose. thank you for being here. >> a pleasure. >> i know that you were able to hear my introduction, but when i was talking about you and your research and questions about the coronavirus, i just want to ask you if i said anything that was -- that seemed wrong or wrong-headed to you? >> no, you got it right. >> okay. we asked you today about things that we might -- you might want to convey to the american people to help people understand

better about where we're at with this coronavirus problem. and you sent us these graphs, fairly simple graphs, and i walked through them a little bit. but can you describe what's important? we can put them up on the screen again. what's important about the shape that's evident in these graphs and what you see as a scientist looking at these? >> well, the first graph involved what happened in china and in south korea, and you could see the epidemic just took off based on those daily case numbers and peaked around february 4th with 4,000 cases a day. but with the draconian measures implemented within central china, it got controlled, and it was dropping every week by half. so very steadily, and this past week i think there are only a handful of cases outside the

central province of hubei in a country of 1.2 billion. so that control is remarkable, and what was not on the graph is what's happening in various provinces and cities in china. they were held under pretty tight control with no city or province over 1,500 cases. and so what was done in china is quite remarkable. in south korea there was also a rather explosive epidemic that followed a few weeks later, and without implementing harsh measures but by social distancing and good hygiene, they were able to bring it down, albeit with a slope that's not as sharp. >> very aggressive testing was also characteristic of the south korean response. >> yes, testing obviously is central. without testing you're blind, and if you have no tests, you have no cases. so the other graphs that show what happened in italy and spain

occur weeks later, and it's following the same trend. it's an exponential growth with italy taking off first, but now spain is following and germany and many western european countries are going through the same thing. and then in new york, what we're seeing is just the beginning. so we're lagging behind another couple weeks, and if we think back 11 days ago, we had the first case in new york city. and then there were a handful of cases every day for about a week. and then three days ago, we're seeing cases in the teens. that's the inflection point. >> part of the -- part of what we're seeing here is as this moves through time, we see different countries deal with it as it arrives and then takes off. >> right. >> but part of what we're seeing here is that even when the raw numbers are different between individual -- like between us

and italy, the raw numbers that you're talking about here in terms of measuring on these graphs are different. the shape of the curve being the same implies that we are heading in the same direction? >> right. we're just lagging behind by a certain period of time. china started over two months ago. italy about six weeks ago, and we're just catching up. and this implies the same wave of epidemic could sweep through let's say middle america, which is lagging behind the new york area and the west coast. >> with the sort of scattershot mitigation measures that are starting to be implemented now in the united states, new york city schools, for example, are still open. with the lack of testing that we've got, which as you say leaves us blind in terms of how to target these sorts of measures, do you think that the united states holds any hope of bending that curve down at this point, or are we looking at explosive growth for the

foreseeable future until we can do something radically different as a country? >> what we have to remember, the cases that were found yesterday in new york city represent what happened about a week ago. >> right. >> when transmission occurred. so what we're seeing is about a week behind, and of course the virus could go through several rounds of spread and expand at least tenfold and maybe twentyfold. so what we see from yesterday is just the tip of the iceberg and that there's a huge mass that we cannot see. >> we need a treatment then. we can't wait a year and a half for a vaccine and pin all of our hopes on some sort of pharmaceutical intervention, on a vaccine. we need a therapy that cures people of this virus when they've been infected. >> we need some intervention that works. vaccine, if it works, great. drugs or antibodies all could be

utilized to treat infection as well as to block infection. >> that's what you're working on now? >> we are, as you mentioned, we were funded initially by jack ma's foundation to begin to search for drugs that could target this coronavirus. in particular, we're looking at two targets of the coronavirus. one is called the protease and one is called the polymerase. these are important enzymes that the virus uses to replicate itself and to make progeny viruses. if you block either one, you would interrupt the replication cycle and therefore kill the virus, in essence, and importantly these are two areas that are well investigated in the context of hiv drug development and hepatitis c drug development. so there's a wealth of

knowledge, and there's a very rich library of chemicals that are designed already to target protease and polymerase, it's an area where we could move very fast to see if we could find a hit. a hit means it may have some activity against one of those two enzymes and then optimize that hit into what we think a candidate drug. but this, too, is a prolonged process. we could perhaps find a hit in a couple months, but the optimization process would take several more months, and then you then have to do all the manufacturing and safety testing, so nothing is going to come really fast, and certainly for this coming year we're going to have to fight the virus without any effective drug or vaccine. >> dr. david ho, hearing it from you makes me understand it in a way that i didn't before. it's stark, but it is good to know. sir, thank you for being here.

thanks. now go back to work. >> thank you. >> we'll be right back. thank you very much. ♪ all around the wind blows ♪ we would only hold on to let go ♪ ♪ blow a kiss into the sun ♪ we need someone to lean on ♪ blow a kiss into the sun ♪ all we needed somebody to lean on ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ all we need is someone to lean on ♪ t-mobile has the first and only nationwide 5g network. experience it on a samsung galaxy s20 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get one free. plus get 2 lines of unlimited and 5g access included, for only $90 bucks a month.

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pd-l1 transformed, revolutionized, immunotherapy. pd-l1 saved my life. saved my life. saved my life. what we do here at dana-faber, changes lives everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. everywhere. the first coronavirus case in the u.s. was reported january 20th. it was a 35-year-old man who had a cough and a fever. he just returned from wuhan, china. when he got back to the u.s., he took himself to his local urgent care clinic in snohomish county, washington, just north of seattle. on february 29th the first death from the coronavirus was

confirmed. it was also in washington state, and now of course corona cases are everywhere. alaska reported their first case yesterday. idaho joined this afternoon. it's everywhere. as of today, it is new york state that is fast closing in on washington state as potentially ending up with the most cases in the nation, but washington's been the bull's-eye from day one. and nowhere has felt that more acutely than the great american city of seattle, where they have been living this crisis from the front and without a compass, without much advice on what to do, certainly not from the federal government or from the rest of the country. james ross gardner writes for the new yorker but he lives in seattle. today he wrote that everyday life in seattle right now is, quote, like living in a kind of laboratory of the country's future. i think that's right. seattle public schools all closed as of yesterday. today washington's governor ordered that schools all over that state join them. officials in seattle pioneered the move to buy modular housing units to house people who don't necessarily need to be

hospitalized. they bought a motel to quarantine sick patients. gatherings of over 250 people are banned statewide. state and local officials have been leading on this crisis from the beginning while the federal government has dithered and offered very little guidance, but now the rest of us all over the country have the opportunity to learn from the experience of the states and the cities that have had to go first and have had to deal with this hardest and without other examples of what to do from inside this country. joining us now is jenny durkan, mayor of seattle. she signed a proclamation of civil emergency in her city on march 3rd. mayor, thank you so much for being with us. i appreciate you taking the time. >> thank you, rachel. thanks for having me on. >> is it fair to say that you have been leading without a compass here in some ways, that there haven't been many examples from other places in the u.s. and much leadership from the federal government in terms of how to do what needed to be done in seattle given how early you had to face this and on such

stark terms? >> no question about it, rachel. i mean, i heard your previous guest, and when he said, you know, without testing you're blind, that absolutely was the case for us. by the time we had our first positive cases, which seems unbelievable it was only 13 days ago. >> wow. >> we knew already there was a bigger problem, and we could not get enough testing. fortunately, we're the home to some of the best scientists and researchers and nonprofits, and so we put our scientist to work on it. they were able to type the genome for the virus and do some genetic calculations. from that, the governor, the county executive and i got really sobering news. as of last monday, their calculations were we had at least 1,000 cases, and those cases would be doubling at least weekly, and that if we didn't take some big, grave actions, that by early april, april 7th, we'd have over 40,000 cases and

400 deaths. so we have been really grounding our decisions based on the science and what the scientists tell us to do to flatten out that curve that you just showed all of your viewers, and really making sure how do we -- it's one of the most complex things i've ever been involved in. to have to make decisions on such a rapid pace, looking at first how do you protect the health care system? how do you protect those people most vulnerable in the health care system? and how do you protect the people most vulnerable in the economic system, and having to do that simultaneously with no compass has been challenging. but i can't say enough about the work i've done with governor inslee and our county executive. we're speaking with one voice, and our front line health care workers have been astonishingly amazing through this whole thing. >> how do you protect the health care system? if that modeling that you just described is correct, if by less than a month from now, you're

going to have 40,000 cases and we know that 15% to 20% of people get seriously ill and need potentially hospitalization, how do you protect the health care system to avoid overtopping the number of icu beds and actually hospital beds that you need? how do you protect the health care system to avoid over topping the number of icu beds and actually hospital beds that you need? how do you protect the capacity and the people who provide the care within the system? >> so i think you have to do a range of things. first, we had to take those really significant interventions to really reduce the amount of public gatherings because all the scientists say you want to change that point of inflection to flatten that curve because if it grows so steeply, that's what really overwhelming the system. that's what's happening in italy. so the governor and us taking those interventions to have people work from home, to cancel public gatherings, to really tell people what they need to do to keep themselves safe. but the other thing we have to do -- and this is where we still need help from the federal government, and i'm hoping the

federal emergency today helps us -- is they need to have the basic equipment that they need to do their jobs. for example, right now our hospital workers and our first responders like our firefighters and our police are running out of the protective equipment like goggles and masks and gowns that they need to deliver the care safely. so each one of those things can become a fail point, and you're really trying to work to avoid those fail points in any one of your systems because then you get the cascading events. so you work on the health care side, and you also have to work on the economic side to make sure that those people who are going to suffer most from the huge economic impacts we're going to see from this as a region and as a country, that you build in as much resiliency as you can. i will say this, rachel. we will get through this, seattle will get through it. washington state and our country. it will be a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. but if we all act together and

do the best we can, our goal needs to be to come out together and to be as strong and resilient at the end of this. but there's a lot of tough suffering that's going to happen between now and then. tough decisions that other people have to make. today i was on a call with over 100 mayors giving them some of the lessons we've learned. and i think that's how we really move forward. it's been hard not having that clear voice from the top so that all of america knew about the seriousness of the threat that we face and what we can do to protect ourselves. >> major jenny durkan of seattle. you are in a unique place in this country and a lot of people are going to be learning from your example and watching how things unfold there. thank you for taking time to help us understand it. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> all right. we've got much more ahead tonight. stay with us.

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this is wuhan, china, on january 23rd of this year. you see an empty plot of land. it became a 24/7 around the clock construction site, live

streamed by the chinese government as that site was transformed into a fully functional 1,000 bed hospital that began accepting patients ten days after they broke ground on building it. ten days, a whole hospital up and running. here in the u.s. we looked on with amazement at this incredible feat that just seems completely unimaginable maybe anywhere other than china. but now we're belatedly starting to realize why the chinese government might have taken measures that extreme. in washington state, as i just mentioned, king county recently bought an 84-bed motel to help combat what's expected to be an impending hospital bed shortage in washington state. it will be a place to house people who need to be isolated but not yet hospitalized. the state also set up rvs as a temporary set of quarantine sites. again, trying to preserve critical hospital beds for the expected crush. yesterday the governor of california issued an executive order that allows the state to

take over hotels and medical facilities. the state now has the power to commandeer those places if need be if it wants to use them for california's response to the pandemic. now, as the u.s. braces for the inevitable surge of new patients into our already rather full hospitals, we're also confronting the fact that we probably should have made plans for this a long time ago, and that right now is probably the golden hour at which we ought to be doing our last-minute shoring up of these kinds of facilities. one of the people who's been warning about this fast-approaching reality is jeremy konyndyk. who led the obama administration's response to the national disasters and played a key role in the response to the ebola epidemic. thank you very much for being here tonight.

you have a lot of y's in your name, and i've been practicing all day, but is that right? >> you nailed it. >> first thing i've definitely nailed all week, thank you very much. you just kept me alive for another three years. the president today announced a national emergency in response to the coronavirus outbreak, a lot of people said that was overdue. a lot of people were happy to hear him announce it. do you think that was the right move to make here? what do you think of its timing and its scope? >> yeah, it was the right move to make several weeks ago, and a number of the other things that they announced today would have been the right move to make several weeks ago. you know, they're finally announcing measures to help shore up hospitals, taking the reins off the federal government processes, sale -- saying it's no longer time for business as usual. the full measure of the federal government will be thrown at this problem. that's great. you know, we saw what happened in wuhan in mid-january, the lockdown of wuhan started on january 23. we've had ample warning, and it's amazing to me that it's only now they're really beginning to act. >> when the president gave his sort of ill-fated oval office address, you said at the time that if you were making such an

address, one of the things that you would announce is that you had assigned the army corps of engineers to literally get out there and start building additional hospital capacity in places where we expect to have the first crush. was that hyperbolic or do you beev the u.s. should be building facilities or commandeering existing facilities to try and save the hospitals? >> i think we need outside the box ideas. china built this 1,000-bed hospital as you talked about. i don't think we have the ability to do that, but we have other ways to be creative. it could be the army corps building or expanding facilities, setting up triage tents outside hospitals. it could be reactivating old hospitals. we have a lot of shuttered hospitals now in this country. there's one just down the street from me outside washington, d.c. we need that sort of creative thinking and what's so shocking and saddening is that we really have had two months to be thinking about this and planning for this, and now instead we're

scrambling. >> you, as i mentioned, helped oversee the obama administration's response to the ebola outbreak in 2014. there's been a lot of lamentation over the fact that the president just did away with so much of the pandemic preparedness that existed in the federal government, that was created in part in response to the ebola epidemic so we wouldn't be starting from zero when the next one came. what can you tell us specifically about what the federal government did in dealing with ebola, what the federal government did right that is missing from this administration's response? >> you know, there's a lot that we did right. there are things that we did wrong, but i think what was fundamentally different was a check your math mentality. we were looking for the weak points in our plan, the things that could derail us and undermin undermine us and building backups to that. that's what so problematic with the testing issue. it's a little bit like the military going to war and all

their comms linked through one satellite. if that satellite goes down, you're toast. is that the fault of the satellite or the fault of you putting all your eggs in that basket? that's kind of what's happened here with the testing issue. the first crush. >> i want to thank you for what you've been doing as a public expert on this subject. >> thank you. >> in terms of putting out critical questions at this time. but thanks also for making time to be here tonight. i appreciate it. >> my pleasure. thank you. >> we'll be right back. >> we'll. the only one to combine a safe sleep aid. and the 12-hour pain relieving strength of aleve. so...magic mornings happen. there's a better choice. aleve pm. for people with heart failure taking entresto, it may lead to a world of possibilities. entresto helps improve your heart's ability to pump blood to the body. don't take entresto if pregnant; it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. don't take entresto with an ace inhibitor or aliskiren,

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so heads up. one more thing to watch out for tonight, we are expecting a late-night vote tonight in the house of representatives. we got word late tonight that lawmakers have struck a deal with the white house maybe for a coronavirus relief package. among other things, it would provide free of charge testing for the virus as well as emergency leave for all americans, which, my god, that's the least they can do, right? the house is expected to vote on this bill sometime tonight. again, it is supposedly been worked out with the white house. the bill after it gets voted on in the house is supposed to get right over to the senate. there a vote is expected as early as monday? yeah, monday. the senate got sent home for the weekend, so they won't get around to it until at the earliest monday. keep in mind the number of new infections, scientists believe, is doubling every five or six days now. so time is of the essence and taking three days off doesn't

make much sense. but i guess time isn't of the essence in the united states senate. here's a thing you should know and stick around for. up next here live, our colleagues at the last word are going to offer a special edition of their show on coronavirus where a team of doctors and other experts will be answering your live questions. tweet your questions to #msnbcanswers or email them to talk@msnbc.com. so that's going to do it for me. stick around for that live special. have an excellent weekend. get your rest. stay strong. do what you love. we'll get through this. i'll see you monday.

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♪ we need someone to lean on ♪ blow a kiss into the sun ♪ all we needed somebody to lean on ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ all we need is someone to lean on ♪ good friday evening. i'm joy reid. this is a special edition of "the last word." donald trump says he takes no responsibility for the testing failures and the spread of the coronavirus in the united states because of course he doesn't. we'll be joined by who challenged trump at his news conference asking him to explain to the american people why he disbanded the pandemic office and of course, trump attacked her question as nasty. plus, breaking news, donald trump fully supports the coronavirus legislation that nancy pelosi negotiated and