from technology. so in hopes that you are taking care of yourselves and each other. that is for now our broadcast for this wednesday night. thank you so much for being here with us. good night. very happy to have you with us. our set may look a little different tonight. i may look a little different. we're trying out a remote studio option to see how it works. we're going to have some of our guests tonight joining us by skype. we're just trying out a whole bunch of different things to see what works, while we try to make this broadcast as resilient and as permanent and as safe as possible for everybody involved in producing it, including our crew of all different types, our staff, our guests, everyone. so if anything looks or sounds a

little hinky as we try out some new stuff, a, forgive me and please be patient, we will work it out. we are in this for the long haul and so we have to try to innovate. you are in this for the long haul as well. we all are. so let's jump right in. in italy they have crossed a new threshold today. the number of people who died in italy from the coronavirus over the last 24 hours hit an all-time high. 475 deaths reported in the last 24 hours. that's the highest one-day death toll in any country, including china, since the start of the pandemic. 475 deaths in one day. italy has reported more than 300 deaths per day in each of the last four days. that itself is a terrible new standard. china, when they were in the worst of it, they only once reported more than 200 deaths in a day. again, italy is at more than 300 deaths a day for four straight days and today 475. the situation in italy remains

the worst in the northern part of that country, particularly in the wealthy region of lombardy, which has now become basically the warning to the world of what will happen in countries all over the globe if they don't take serious steps to bring down the rate of infection as dramatically as possible and as quickly as possible. but it's worth knowing that the reason it's going so violently terribly wrong in italy, with more deaths per day than we have seen anywhere else, including china now, the reason it's going so badly wrong in italy is not because of something that is inherently wrong with italy and their health care system. quite the contrary. in 2017 the world health organization did a report on the health care system in italy, and they were critical of some stuff, they wanted them to, you know, up their spending on some stuff and realign their priorities in some ways, but honestly, by and large, the w.h.o. report card for the

italian health system was pretty good. here's part of that report. performance of the italian health system, quote, "the relatively low mortality rates in italy suggest that the italian health care system is effective in dealing with life-thrtening conditions. amenable mortality rates trended downward over the past decade. italy has a strong acute care sector. that's italy as a whole. northern italy itself is even better. northern italy, the richest part of italy, not some backwater when it comes to advanced medicine or advanced anything. i mean that's where they make the most expensive yachts in the world. that's literally where they make ferraris. and there are big modern hospitals there, full of lots of fully qualified doctors and world-class equipment. and there, that place, is where they're now losing more than 300 people a day. 475 deaths in the last 24 hours. reporter chico harlan wrote this up today for the "washington

post" with a last line that will put a -- put your heart in your throat. "even as lockdown measures have gradually slowed the number of new cases, the country's death toll has exploded, more than tripling in the span of a week." italy's death toll is tripling exponentially in a way that mirrors the growth total of cases earlier this month as people lose their battle with the disease after several weeks. today the government of the hardest hit lombardy region said that medical facilities there will soon be unable to help the sick. quote we will soon be unable to give a response to those who fall ill. we will be unable to give a response. what he means there is that the" hospitals in that region in italy are about to be unable to treat people. as hundreds of people are dying every day. the hospitals are at the point of collapse.

and that note there about the deaths in italy now mirroring the rise in new cases there earlier this month, that's really the whole ball game. if there is a relationship between two numbers or two things or two trends that you have to understand in order to know why all of the epidemiologists and public health people are so freaked out right now, as well as the political leaders who get it, it's the different between these two numbers, the new cases followed three weeks later by the intensive care demand. mark lipsich explained today in a piece for stats about what our options are as a country. he's an epidemiologist who runs the center for are as a country, an epidemiologist who runs the

center for communicable disease dynamics at hafrkd university. he said today very simply in a way that i think is actually memorable and therefore useful for all of us he said, "intensive care demand lags new infections by about three weeks." because it takes that long for a newly infected person to get critically ill. and again, not everybody who gets infected will become critically ill, but the people who need critical care will start showing up in icus about three weeks after they became infected. so if this is the past month, in italy, showing the rise, rise, rise, of infections in italy, we will add in a three-week lag time and that's where you see the rise, rise, rise in hospitalizations. a slice of those same new infections from three weeks ago are the people who are now critically ill and needing to be treated in hospital. and that is why their hospitals are collapsing. the steep rise in infections foretells by about three weeks the collapse in their hospitals that is happening today. that region's governor again saying that we will no longer be able to treat people in hospitals. that is the terrible news from italy. that's why you keep hearing

people talk about italy like it is the bogeyman in this story. that's why new york officials in particular are sounding the alarm about the mirror between new york cases and italy, about how the steep rise in cases in new york now foretells a crush in hospitals here coming very, very soon, just as we have seen it play out in realtime in northern italy. there's some good news, though, from italy as well today. and it is smaller-scale good news but i will take good news where i can get it. the town in northern italy that recorded the first death from coronavirus is a town called vo. that i can remember. v-o is the name of the town. it's in the venetto region. forgive me, i don't speak italian. my pronunciation is terrible. but there are about 3,300 people in that town of vo where they had the first deaths. and they did a study with the local university, and they decided that what they were going to do in that town is that they were going to test every single resident of the town. 3,300 people. they tested everybody.

they got 90 positive tests. including at least half a dozen people who were completely asymptomatic and would never have been otherwise identified had they not done this experiment in which they tested everyone regardless of symptoms. but they tested everybody, everybody who tested positive, they isolated them, and then after the period of isolation they tested the whole town again. anybody newly positive again isolated. well, after having done, that after having done universal testing and universal isolation of all positive cases, they have now gone days with no new cases in that town. and you don't want to extrapolate globally from one experiment in one town. but as a matter of principle, mass testing does find asymptomatic people who are positive and therefore still infectious. and once you've identified positive people, isolation can

work to stop people who are positive from giving it to anyone else. and if those are the principles which which you can extrapolate from that experiment, that at least gives you a way to plan for moving ahead. if only we could get a test for the fricking virus in this country, maybe we could even start to think about the implications of that for our big country and the thousands of cases we've got here now. as our numbers really skyrocket. new york city had 814 cases as of yesterday. as of today, the number is 1,871. that is way more than doubling in a day in new york city. new york state has enough cases that if new york state were a country there would only be ten other countries on earth with more known cases. around the united states the worries about testing and our hospital capacity and how well we're taking care of our health workers, who after all, will be the people who run the hospitals and take care of the

sick, they are really screaming now as the american case numbers take off. tom bossert is one of the people who is supposed to coordinate the national response to a pandemic for our federal government before he and his colleagues were all fired by the trump administration and the trump administration then just never hired anybody else to take that job, here is tom bossert's take on what we need to be doing now as of today, and what in two weeks we will wish we had spent today working on. >> if we're like italy, and there's every reason to believe our numbers are going to grow along that line, we could see 2,500 dead in two weeks' time and we could see over 100,000 cases. and those are planning assumptions, not predictions. but if that's the case, in two weeks i'll look back on today and say i wish i had done three things and they'd be personal protective equipment, personal protective equipment, and personal protective equipment because these doctors that we just saw interviewed, in their absence they can't take care of

us and they can't use those ventilators. that's my fear today and that's where i think we should be focused. >> we're going to look back on this day two weeks from now and what we wish we would have focused on is three things, personal protective equipment, personal protective equipment, personal protective equipment. tom bossert was one of the officials who would have been in charge of coordinating this response for the u.s. federal government had the trump administration not fired all of the pandemic response teams from the federal government two years ago. this is from "the wall street journal" today, quote, administrators at renton, washington headquarters -- at the renton, washington headquarters of the providence health system are in conference rooms assembling makeshift face shields from vinyl elastic and two-sided tape because supplies are drying up. . providence, a system of 51 hospitals across seven states has less than a week's supply of face shields and medical masks at its seattle-area hospitals." literally, that's how we're

dealing with this in this country. in one of the places that had the earliest experience with large numbers of cases. at the hospital they are making face masks themselves. like the hr people and the accountants and the managers at the hospital are all sitting in conference rooms with stuff they got at hobby stores and hardware stores macgyvering face masks for the doctors and nurses to use to protect themselves in their hospital. that's our level of preparedness as a country. even though we got advanced notice of countries that had it worse than us before us so we can see how it's going to go. that's how we're coping. in massachusetts hospitals they are rationing testing for coronavirus as of today not only because of a shortage of test, which we still have all over the country, but because in massachusetts they've even got a shortage of just the swabs, just the big q-tip-like things they need to collect the samples for the test. they don't have those either.

a new study of the nursing home clusters of coronavirus in kirkland, washington shows part of the way the virus spread to nine different nursing homes there was this chain reaction that led to 129 new cases in 11 days. they've done an epidemiological study now of how that happened, how it spread to those nine nursing homes. they found that part of what happened is that staff spread it from facility to facility in part because they had a lack of access to personal protective equipment. because we haven't prioritized that. even for staff who are working in cases, in places where there are known clusters, and with patients who are known to have been exposed. so things are moving very fast now. obviously. the response, obviously, is nowhere near the size of the task. the first member of congress to test positive for the virus is marie diaz-balart, florida republican congressman. he announced tonight that he is the first member of congress known to have tested positive

for the virus. if his name is familiar to you, that maybe because mario diaz-balart is the brother of our own beloved colleague jose diaz-balart whom you know from msnbc and telemundo. just in the last hour a second member of congress, ben mcadams from utah, has announced he too has tested positive for the virus. the federal government announced today that they will deploy hospital ship, u.s. navy hospital ships to try to provide hospital overflow capacity, one in new york, one in some undetermined location on the west coast. while that seems good, it should be noted that that will take a number of weeks to get up and running. and all major u.s. automakers announced the shutdown of their plants in the u.s. and canada and mexico today. there's been some nonspecific murmurs from the administration that u.s. manufacturing facilities, including potentially auto facilities might be rerepurposed to start building ventilators instead for

intensive care units, since we're going to need tens of thousands more of those than we have. again that seems more aspirational or brainstormy at the moment but you may have seen headlines about that today as the administration tries to advance that concept at least. tonight ford motor put out a statement confirming they have had preliminary discussions with the federal government about the possibility of producing ventilators and other equipment. palm springs, california today adopted a shelter in place order that's like the one that is in effect now for seven million people in the san francisco bay area but so far those shelter in place orders are just in california. the u.s.-canada border is closed for nonessential travel in both directions now. the economy's crash continues unabated with another 1,300-point loss in the dow today even as the federal government unveiled new proposals for big stimulus spending to try to shore things up. we're going to get expert advice on those proposals coming up later this hour.

delta airlines announced today that they're cutting 70% of their flights. the nation's airports announced today that without their own bailout, they may start defaulting on the bonds that were sold to pay for their construction. the largest shopping mall operator in the country announced that it is shutting all of its properties nationwide after a four-state consortium of new york, new jersey, pennsylvania, connecticut order ed the closin of all indoor retail shopping mall spaces along with amusement parks and bowling alleys. but even as there is more and more focus on what states are pioneering new ideas, about what they can do to shut down and slow the spread of the virus, it's also worth noting, we spend all of this time saying california is trying, this the bay is trying this, this city is trying this, schools are shut down here, we've been talking about the places where new stuff is being tried, where new strictures are being announced, look at it from the other side,

too. it is worth noting that there are a bunch of states in this country that really aren't doing much at all. we checked with the national governors association today which is tracking state by state responses. i was honestly shocked to find that there are seven states as of right now where there are no mandated bans on gatherings of any size, there are no state mandates ordering restaurants or bars or any other businesses to close. there's no state mandate for school closures. none of those things. in idaho, mississippi, missouri, oklahoma, tennessee, texas, wyoming. no state-mandated school closures. no state-mandated limits on large gatherings. no state mandates on the operations of businesses like bars and restaurants. now, in some of these cases there are, you know, nonbinding recommendations, urgings, strong feelings expressed by leaders, and within these states some schools and some businesses have followed their own lead, or followed

those urgings and non-binding recommendations. you know, local school districts having to make those calls themselves. but in all seven of those states no statewide rules. because sure, why not, make it up yourself. see how it goes. now, no reason to panic, right? no reason to hustle. let's see how this plays out. joining us now is donald nic mcneill. he's a veteran science and health reporter at "the new york times." he has covered aids, ebola, swine flu, bird flu, sars for the "times" and mr. mcneil did some of the pioneering reporting on the pandemic at its inception. he's not a bit of a voice in the wilderness from those early days warning of how bad this could wo get and how quickly. thank you, mr. mcneil for coming back. i appreciate your time. i'm going to start by asking you what i ask you every time, which is have i said anything since the show started that strikes you as wrong or wrongheaded? i know you felt like those of us in the media have sometimes put the emphasis in the wrong place here. >> no, everything you said is correct.

i'm shocked at those states that are doing nothing. there is just -- i mean they're asking for it. when donald trump uses the expression, you know, the virus is going to wash through the country and he does it with this hand motion like it's washing through like a gentle breeze, that is a very common expression among epipeople doll gists that the virus is going to wash through the population. they mean it as it's going to wash through the population like a tidal wave. nothing stands in its way because there's no immunity. and that's what we're facing in this country. it's not some gentle breeze blowing through the country. it's a tidal wave. and they're doing nothing to hide behind a barrier to protect themselves. >> the surgeon general is now admitting something that you have been saying for a while, which is we're now on a point, on our own epidemiological curve where you can basically see our future by looking at the timeline of where italy was about ten days or two weeks ago.

if that is where we're heading, with the death rates spiking now in italy, with the lombardy government, the governor saying we are about to not be able to offer care in hospitals anymore, if that's where we are, what priorities should derive from that? what are the single -- what are the most important things our medical system should be doing right now to prepare for that happening to us within two weeks? >> okay. i will predict that we, since we are going down the path of italy and we are a much bigger country than italy, that we will surpass italy in the number of dead in a few weeks because we are following the italian model, not the asian model. i don't understand why we're looking at a small town like vo in italy when that same lesson, that you have to test and isolate as many people as possible, was a lesson learned

in cities all over asia months ago. and we have been paying very little attention to what they're doing. i think i talked before about doing fever checks at every building and doing testing as much as possible. and how you do the safe testing. but on hospital preparation there's -- we're doing things like ending elective surgery in our hospitals, which is great. that's step number one. fine. but in china and in other places they segregated the hospitals. they said okay, you three hospitals are going to be designated to do nothing but covid patients. and the others are going to handle the heart attacks and the babies that need to be born and the car crashes and everything else, because we don't want the coronavirus patients infecting the regular emergency patients. if they couldn't do that, they would create separate wings in the hospital. it was basically known as the dirty wing and the clean wing. the wing of the hospital had nothing but coronavirus patients, and the other side had nothing but other emergency

patients. and the two staffs never crossed the zone. it was assumed that like those nursing home employees, they would carry the virus from one side to the other. inside those hospitals, inside those hospitals they would build walls in the wings with windows in them so that a ward became an isolation ward and you went into it basically like you do into an ebola treatment center. you had a gray area where you put on your personal protective gear under the eyes of a nurse who saw that you were doing it perfectly. you would go through the ward in one direction only and come out at the other end when you finished treating patients and you would then take off your gear under the eyes of a nurse. you don't have to dot kind of advanced crazy disinfection they do in ebola wards with chlorine showers and everything but you have to take it off carefully because it can contaminate you. the other thing they did all over asia is for the mild cases, the mild to moderate cases, in other words, people who did not need to be hospitalized, they

didn't go home. they went into isolation centers. they went into -- you know, we have all sorts of empty buildings around now. madison square garden is empty. the barclay's center is empty. high school gymnasiums all over the city are empty. those become sort of miniature hospitals for the people who are infected but don't need to be put into a hospital. because that way they don't infect their own families. 80% of the -- 75% to 80% of the clusters there were spreads within families. and it's important to stop that. and these were -- you know, there were beds, oxygen tents, basic care but that's how you brought people through. they were in there for two to three weeks and most of them recovered and were able to go home and they were survivors. and they were able to donate blood to help other people survive. they were able to walk the streets. they're okay. they've recovered. and they're thrilled. we're not planning that here as far as i can tell. >> my guest is donald mcneil,

science and health reporter with "the new york times," who has incredible international experience with these things. mr. mcneill, i would like to ask you to stay with us a bit longer in part because i want to ask you about your piece which just posted tonight at "the new york times" which actually offers some of the first hopeful signs i've seen about a potential sort of out of the box surveillance tool for getting a handle on how big this is and where clusters are arising. if you don't mind sticking with us, we'll be right back with donald mcneil from the "new york times." stay with us. thank you. (whistling) (whistling)

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we may not have a lot of coronavirus testing in this country, but we do have a lot of people all over the country who are realizing that they have fevers. fever is one of the most consistent symptoms for the onset of coronavirus. this company called kinsa health, k-i-n-s-a, that makes thermometers. and what makes the company different and what thakz their product different is that their thermometers not only take your

temperature they connect to an app on your smartphone. and when you take your temperature with that thermometer and you load it into the app, you connect to the app, that reading is saved for you so you can track your temperature over time on the app but it's also uploaded and sent off to the company. you consent to do that when you use this thermometer. the company in turn tracks that data. and they map that data. and that has made the company uncannily good in the past at predicting upticks in the flu around the country. "for the last few years kinsa's interactive maps have accurately predicted the spread of flu around the united states about two weeks before the centers for disease control's own surveillance tool." so the cdc maps flu outbreaks as they happen every year. this app that tells you where people in the country have fevers turns out to be even better at it than the cdc. the smart thermometer appears to be useful for spotting fevers,

and in this case it may be very useful for spotting more than just the ordinary flu. there's brand new reporting on this just out tonight from donald mcneil at "the new york times" and it's fascinating. according to mcneil's reporting kinsa health is already "tracking the coronavirus in real time, something that had been impossible given the lack of testing for the disease." literallit interactive maps from this company, from these thermometers that they have sold all over the country, are providing data about where coronavirus case clusters may be emerging. this reporting tonight is a big deal. and this technology could make a difference in identifying new epicenters of the coronavirus as they start to pop up all around the country. the story broke tonight, we had donald mcneil booked to talk on the show tonight, while i got that news i was looking at my own, one of these thermometers, because i own one, i have been using it about, to be honest,

five times a day to take my temperature, as i have been trying out various work environments and dispersing our staff around the country, to try and get this show produced in as resilient a way as possible. back with the reporter who broke the story tonight, mr. mcneil, science and health reporter at "the new york times," donald, thank you very much for sticking with us. first, let me ask you if i hit the high points there and accurately summarized what's so enticing or potentially really useful about this technology. >> yes, you have explained it incredibly well for somebody who has never seen it before, and i think the company owes me a giant finder's fee. i'm kidding. but yeah. it's -- i mean, i've been watching this company for about 2 1/2 years now, since the guy who started it, inder singh, came to visit me in the "times" and he showed me this notion of hey, i have these thermometers scattered all over the country, people buy them in stores but they also hand them out to school children in health education programs.

and they now have more than a million thermometers with more than 2 million data points and they can produce maps of where fevers are popping up all over the country that same morning as people get up and take their temperature and their kids' temperatures. and they know what's flu by the algorithm that says if it's a high temperature for three days in a row we assume that's flu rather than a -- rather than a regular cold. so now they've taken this data, and working with a professor at oregon state they've mapped the -- basically the complete history, the typical range of flu in every zip code in the country for years past. they know the high and the low of the range. and so they know once the season starts and they're tracking it where you might expect flu to be in brooklyn at this point now, mid-march, as the flu season is winding up. and literally, in my neighborhood in brooklyn they showed me, look, there are many, many more fevers being reported

from brooklyn than we would have predicted with our flu model. and we don't know what those fevers are, but the obvious explanation is, those might be the coronavirus. and sure enough, just last week, they were seeing a big spike of extra fevers, if you want to call them, they basically subtract the flu data out and what's left looks like the coronavirus data. they saw that in florida. florida, south florida was not reporting a lot of covid cases. now it is. now it's an epicenter. they predicted it several days in advance. so what's great about that is you know where to bring your testing kits, you know where to bring your personnel, you know where to look for the virus if you can use this tool instead of blindly testing people in every walmart parking lot in the country because they're coming in in a panic and causing traffic jams. >> obviously, for all of these things more data is always better, but with the kind of sample size that they've got and in your report you say about a million of the thermometers in

use around the country, does that give you an accurate sample size for national surveillance? i guess it gives you a place to start, if there isn't any other form of widespread testing or monitoring going on that could direct public health testing methods by any other means. >> well, a million data points is a lot more than the cdc has, and it's getting weekly frorts doctor's offices and emergency rooms and things like that. these things have started selling at the rate of 10,000 a day. so they're running into production problems. but they're getting a whole heck of a lot more data as a result of it. and you know, this means their algorithm is just going to get better at predicting this stuff. unfortunately, the cdc has basically ignored them for three years when they've come to them and said hey we think you've got something. because typically the cdc grabs your intellectual property. if you bring something and the cdc wants to cooperate with you they want the rights to the data

so they can publish it in the mmwr. and this is a mistake. i talked to an expert said who says why is a private company running a foot race against the cdc? you know, and possibly beating it when they ought to be cooperating and we could use this to predict. they were very excited, the person i talked to, said this is 21st century, you know, data gathering and we're stuck with a mid 20th century very labor-intensive system where, you know, a nurse at every doctor's office in the country writes down a report and sends it off to the cdc at the end of the week. this is real time. like the minute you take your child's temperature they have the data. >> fascinating. donald mcneil, a reporter for "the new york times," i really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us tonight. i know you're in the middle of all of your own work. this is a real public service for you to talk to us about these emerging stories. thank you. all right. we will have much more ahead tonight. there's some actual positive breaking news out of china tonight. since we've been on the air, for the first time since the

coronavirus crisis began, china tomorrow, so the time zone difference, china will report no new local infections for the first day, for the first time since this crisis started, they will have no new local infections for the first time, which is a point of hope for every country in the world, who is still on the upswing, most especially us. stay with us. (woman) somebody would ask her something and she would just walk right past them because she didn't know they were talking to her. (deborah) i just could not hear. i was hesitant to get the hearing aids because of my short hair, but nobody

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we are all about to find out what it feels like when the american economy grinds to a halt. plenty of americans are already experiencing it. this week, today, this was the end of a "wall street journal" report this afternoon on the wave of job losses sweeping across the country right now, "when jenny johnson received word a week ago that her hours at a seattle staffing firm were cut in half, she focused on the positive, more time to focus on her 17-month-old son and her fiance. then her husband to be, a prep

cook and dishwasher, saw all his shifts evaporate. her hours were further curbed late last week, leaving miss johnson to worry about affording food and paying her electricity bill. the 25-year-old said, i'm just feeling really terrified." on tuesday she was laid off entirely. multiply that story by a thousand, by a million, by many millions. new data today already shows thousands of americans being laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic. those new numbers explicitly do not include all the job cuts at bars and restaurants that have been forced to shut down all across the country. there are nearly 3 million waiters and waitresses alone in america. there are as many jobs in food service in america as there are in manufacturing. and manufacturing is shutting down, too. ford, gm, and fiat chrysler shuttering u.s. factories at least through the end of this month. unemployment claims have skyrocketed so fast this week, it's straining the computer networks of state unemployment systems. the state of kentucky, for example, they usually process 2,000 unemployment claims a

week, and they got 9,000 unemployment claims yesterday alone. the stock market continued its collapse today. now we're in this pattern where it does swing wildly around every once in a while, but 1,000-point-plus drops in the dow are just a day that ends in y now. there appeared to be something of a consensus emerging today across the economic and political worlds that the coronavirus pandemic has the potential to cause not just a recession but the worst economic collapse since the great depression. is that possible? is it possible to avert it? is it literally humanly possible for us to do anything as a society to stop that from happening? today the senate finally got around to approving, and tonight president trump signed legislation that the house passed last week to spend $100 billion on paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, and free coronavirus testing. although a compromise forced by

house republicans means the paid sick leave part of it applies to only about 20% of american workers. thanks. now the white house and congressional republicans are reportedly working on a trillion-dollar measure that may send a couple of $1,000 checks directly to many americans and also infuse cash into businesses large and small to try to keep them alive, to try to keep them afloat, try to keep workers paid. are those the kind of measures that we need? are they enough? how do we know? and what's the smartest way to go about deciding whether or not we have confidence? that's true. and i have just the person to ask. here with us next. stay with us. (avo male) welcome to the most adventurous outback ever. the all-new 2020 subaru outback. go where love takes you. (avo female) get 0.9% apr financing on the

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missions in iraq as aand afghanistan.89 combat as a national security advisor, i worked to keep our country safe. i'm amy mcgrath. now i'm running for senate in kentucky against mitch mcconnell. i can win, but i need your help. with your contribution, we can finally remove mitch mcconnell from office and start repairing the damage he's done to our country. i approved this message... because this is gonna take all of us.

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crisis in '08. i was here during the fiscal cliff. we occasionally have these great crises, and when they occur we're able to rise above our normal partisanship and many times our normal positions. because these are not ordinary times. this is not an ordinary situation. and so it requires extraordinary measures. >> extraordinary times mean extraordinary measures. details are still being hammered out but the ideas for a new stimulus include two rounds of checks sent directly to individual americans, loans to small businesses, $50 billion just for the airline industry, more than a trillion total. are there right and wrong ways to do this sort of thing? what more will need to be done if this is done? will this stimulus of this amount be enough to stave off what is being described as an imminent economic collapse? joining us now is jared

bernstein, the former top economic adviser to vice president biden. he's now with the center of budget and policy priorities. i asked mr. bernstein to be here tonight because he is good at explaining things to us to those of us who are not economists. jared, great to see you tonight. thanks for making time for us tonight. >> of course. my pleasure. >> if they are willing to spend this kind of money, if this is size that we're talking about and you could design what the the federal government was going to do, what would be the most effective most necessary thing to do with an amount of money that large? >> well, a great place to start is to think precisely about the type of folks that are most vulnerable to the type of economic shock we're seeing unfold in real time. and in the segment before our discussion here you talked about exactly that type of person. someone who is facing a cut in their hours or a layoff, who doesn't have paid leave, who almost certainly has almost no savings to fall back on.

if this person in their family misses a paycheck for a week or two, they're facing a fundamental problem, existential problems meeting their basic needs for food and rent. and they could be facing both hunger and eviction. and so we have to design measures that target those folks and get out the door very quickly. now, i'm very glad to finally see some of the urgency that many of us have been talking about for a while now reflected in congress. you heard that from mitch mcconnell. but there is still yet a dollar to go out the door in terms of economic stimulus. and so therefore they're behind the curve that i'm describing. >> what do you think the government is capable of in terms of speed here? it's not unprecedented to literally send people money away through one way or another to immediately stimulate the economy and stem off a collapse? we did something like this in

2008 in the middle of the financial collapse there, too. but i remember it taking months. they're talking about trying to get the first of these payments out in a couple of weeks. does that seem feasible to you? >> i think it might be on the edge of feasible. you're right. it took three months last time in 2008. i think the check or tax rebate was passed in february and it got out in may. i've never seen anything like this get out in two weeks and i should say that the folks who are saying that don't have the credibility track record need i tell you that leaves one with a lot of confidence and in fact, while i think there are positive attributes to their plan, a number of us have been arguing that precisely these types of checks, targeted at low and middle income people are the probably one of the best first ways out of the door to help folks who are soon going to be without paychecks or already in that situation. it could take longer than a few weeks but i'm quite certain we can do it in less than three months. something that was missing, though, from the package

discussed today, this $1 trillion package, is significantly strengthen the unemployment insurance system. there is a bit of that in the bill that the senate passed but it was really quite marginal. it's essential that we stand up our state level unemployment insurance system so that they can meet what is really going to be an onslaught of layoffs in the coming weeks. >> jared, what do you say to people who wonder where a trillion dollars comes from for something like this? we have fights in washington all the time both ideologically driven fights and real policy fights and priority fights about amounts of money that are many orders of magnitude smaller than this. what do you say to people who look at something like this and say where will they throw a trillion dollars to do something on this with zero notice and why couldn't we have had that money for other things? >> in fact, the zero notice part is really an easy question to answer. one thing that is kind of working in our favor now is

because of the flight to safety meaning that as investors got out of the stocks, they get into bonds, and that lowers the interest rates that the government has to pay on the borrowing it does. and so interest rates are extremely low right now on government borrowing. but here's the thing, rachel. and i have a feeling you and i have discussed this maybe going on over a decade now, which is the right time to ask the question where are you going to get the trillions is when you're contemplating a deeply wasteful tax cut that isn't necessary to help the economy get out of a recession. so what we're talking about now is what economists call countercyclical spending, or spending in order to meet the shock, this negative economic shock that is caused by the economic impact of the virus. that kind of deficit spending is not just legitimate but it's essential. now, what makes life difficult sometimes when you're in this

fiscal condition is if you've already spent your sort of fiscal outlet with wasteful tax cuts, but the point is that the treasury markets, the borrowing markets are saying to the government you have all the fiscal space you need to do what it takes. so we should not hesitate taitd at all. remember, what messes up your fiscal account in the long term is not temporary measures to offset a recession, it's permanent tax cuts. >> jared bernstein, senior fellow at the center for policy and budget priorities. former economic adviser to vice president biden. thank you for your time and helping us understand this. stay well. >> my pleasure. >> we've got one more bit of news to get to tonight. we will be right back. stay with us. stay with us you could say align puts the pro in probiotic. so where you go, the pro goes. go with align, the pros in digestive health.

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ohio was supposed to hold its democratic presidential primary last night along with three other states. ohio did not. they postponed their election on orders of the state health officer just hours before the polls were due to open. in the three states that did vote last night, vice president joe biden won by really big margins. in florida he won all 67 counties en route to an almost 40-point victory. in illinois, which was the state where senator sanders actually kept it close to hillary clinton in 2016, biden beat sanders there by 23 points. in arizona biden also won by a double-digit margin. he won by 12. going forward, democratic

primary contests have already been postponed in five states to come. presumably more will be added to that list. interestingly alabama postponed their primary runoff for senate. they postponed that until july. that's of national interest because that's the race where attorney general jeff sessions is trying to get his old senate seat back. but in the democratic presidential primary with vice president biden doubling his delegate lead last night, there's reasons to believe the democratic primary may be coming to an end anyway functionally if not formally. it would come to an end formally if senator bernie sanders decided to end his campaign. as of this morning, the sanders campaign has pulled all of its digital ads off facebook. they haven't reserved any tv ads beyond this week. an e-mail stourpters today was frank. "while our campaign has won the battle of ideas, we are losing the battle over electability to joe biden." instead of ending that e-mail with the customary donate here button the message instead linked to the senator's coronavirus plan. tonight, "the washington post" reports that staffers to both

candidates have been in touch regularly to discuss the public health crisis that's gripping the country, disclosing talks that could form the basis of a broader agreement on policies and might make sanders more comfortable leaving the race. we'll see you again tomorrow. now it's time for "the last word" with lawrence. good evening, lawrence. >> good evening, rachel. and don't ask me why but i'm sitting in your chair tonight in this studio as we shuffle around and make adjustments to the new world order here. by the way, it does sound like this is the end of the bernie sanders campaign. there is so many indicators there including that one that i didn't know, that you said on the website it no longer has a link for contributions. that pretty much tells us where we are -- >> an email that they sent out s today, at least, they didn't have the link to contributions. so it not like they -- yeah.tod have the link to contributions. so it not like they -- yeah. but still, it is -- the signs are there but the senator obviously gets to make his o