clear distinctions and fights about what the future is are going to be absolutely essential in terms of determining this campaign. sam seder with a very fetching quarantine beard. that is "all in" for this evening. "the rachel maddow show" starts right now. good evening, rachel. >> no beard for you, chris. >> i can't grow a beard, rachel. and if i could, i'd probably grow a quarantine beard but i can't. so here i am. >> we all know that the problem is if you grew a quarantine beard it would just go straight out from your face and become a barrier between you interacting with other humans. i know how you are grizzly. >> that's exactly right. >> thanks, my friend. >> have a great weekend. you're doing amazing, would, i've got to say, i've been watching and it's incredible. >> thank you, my friend. thanks for saying that.

have a good weekend, grizzly. thanks for joining us, i'm happy to have you with us on this fry nig -- friday night. i would like to introduce you to an e.r. nurse who works in southern california. >> another shift over, fourth one of the week. not too bad. today one of the patients asked me, so do you stay at a hotel, do you go home? i told him, no, i don't go home, i stay somewhere else. my daughter had autoimmune disorder so i try to protect her as much as i can. and they said it must be tough, you don't see your family for a while. i thought to myself, it could be worse. it could be a situation where i don't go home at all, ever.

so thank the lord i'm still okay. >> now is the time to toughen up, everybody. we have to fight. we have to fight and win. i'll continue to fight alongside with my fellow nurses and doctors and rts and environmental service people. everybody in the hospital. we will win. fight on. >> that is manny, an emergency medicine nurse working in southern california. here's dr. ritan, a trauma surgeon who works to save the lives of covid-19 patients now in south florida. >> one of the things that keeps coming up is an analogy to the aids epidemic in the early 1980s. this was before we fully understood the disease, we fully understood the transmission risks and when there were no medicines that could treat hiv.

if you look at the past 40 years of treatment of hiv, only about 50 health care workers in the united states have contracted hiv on the job. but if you look at the last few months of the coronavirus epidemic in the united states, over 9,200 health care workers have contracted coronavirus. some of them have died. in one of the earliest weeks of the epidemic here in south florida, one of my close colleague who say i worked with side by side for six years died from coronavirus. just last week i had a colleague, we shared patients every once in a while. he also died of coronavirus. before he could get any meaningful treatment. the fear that permeates our day-to-day work, knowing that we've lost colleagues already, seeing our colleagues on full

life support in the icu and wondering if we're going to be next, looking around at our teams and wondering who's not going to make it through this is sometimes overwhelming. we try really hard to focus at work because we don't have the time to process that, but at the end of the shift, when we peel off our ppe and peel off the mask and go home to wash our hands and shower, you can't but think about who's next? is it my friend who i just signed out to, to take over my shift? is it going to be me? the way that this pandemic is infecting and killing u.s. health care workers hasn't really been seen in our lifetime. and it's very scary. >> that is dr. rishi rattan in

south florida. as the coronavirus death toll in the united states passed 50,000 today, the number is 51,523 americans who have now been killed by this virus in not much more than a month. the doctors and nurses who are treating coronavirus patients at american hospitals coast to coast are, of course, themselves putting their lives on the line to do this work, to try to keep their fellow americans alive. and their own fear of getting infected while they do this work to save the rest of us is very humbling for us civilians. it inspires something i don't even -- it's more than just gratitude. i'm not even quite sure how to describe it. but i can show you something. i can show you that you are among fellow americans who feel that same way. the americans who have had a stay-at-home order in place longer than anyone else in the country are californians. they had the first stay-at-home

order so they have been under this the longest. that state has also ben fitted from that stay-at-home order and the fact that it was put into place so early, that has resulted in california having a much flatter curve and much less of a peak than other states have had. still, a new poll today of california residents finds that a vast majority of people in that state want their stay-at-home order to remain in place as long as needed to fight this epidemic. support for sheltering in place was strong across all demographic groups. more than 70% in each age, income and racial and ethnic group support continuation of the shelter-in-place policy. overall the support for california's continued stay-at-home order as long as needed is 75% of the public. and it's every strata of that population. and it's not just california. abc news has just released the results of their new nationwide poll asking the same question across the country. here's the results. quote, overwhelming majorities

of americans favor restrictions related to containing the coronavirus and fear moving too quickly to reopen the economy. concerns that break through party lines. in this week's poll the proportion of americans who believe moving too quickly to loosen the stay-at-home orders is a greater threat to the country than moving too slowly is 72%. the proportion of americans who believe social distancing and stay-at-home orders are responsible policies, that proportion is 86%. and honestly it's not like this is a controversial thing or even partisan. even among republicans, 82% of republican voters nationwide say that social distancing and stay-at-home orders are responsible, life-saving actions. because americans get it. americans understand this, broadly speaking. and americans broadly speaking want to do the right thing. and not incidentally, they are

by and large something even more than grateful toward the doctors and nurses and other health care workers who these stay-at-home orders are designed to protect, right, so we don't have too many infections at once and so we don't overwhelm our hospitals so they can do their work. the last couple of friday nights here on this show we have checked in with dr. ernest patty, who was an e.r. doc at st. barnabus hospital in the bronx, which has been an incredibly hard-hit facility. we've talked to him the last couple of friday nights. it's friday night again and tonight he sent us some pictures. he sent us a picture of a bunch of oragami hearts that kids in texas sent to him in the e.r. at st. barnabus to say thank you for what you're doing. each one has a little note on it. here's dr. patty and his colleagues at the st. barnabus emergency room being very happy to have them. you see how they're all holding them. i love this picture. and look at this, this is

fascinating. one of the things we have noticed with dr. patty when he has sent us his check-in videos from his shift at the e.r. in st. barnabus is that he's worried that his patients can't connect with him or see his face because of the mask and the shield he has to wear. so you see where his lapel would be if he was wearing a suit, it's backwards there but he's got his name. we noticed he drew his name and a little smiley face on his name tag so even if his patients can't see his face through his gear, they can see that. it's a sweet human touch we noticed about dr. patti in these videos. dr. patti said someone else in the world was also struck by that and they decided to come up with a solution to the problem that he's trying to fix here. they printed a picture of dr. patti's actually smiling face on a sticker, kind of the size of a baseball card. he peel the back off and stick it onto the outside of is ppe

tyvex suit. so his patients can at least see a smiling picture of what his face looks like that way, when he's talking to them because he's got it pasted on the front of his gear now. people are just sending this stuff to doctors who are working on the front lines, because there's so much support for them among the american people. and americans by huge bipartisan majorities support these stay-at-home orders, which we know do work to slow the spread of the disease, which is the one most important thing we can all do collectively to save our health system and our doctors and our nurses, not to mention ourselves and our families. so you're among good company in terms of the feelings that you've got for american health care workers that you've got right now, and the vast majority of americans supporting these stay-at-home orders as the responsible thing to do. but nevertheless, some republican governors are demanding that their states be opened back up right now.

we are going to get a live report tonight from georgia, from the chief of emergency medicine at the first hospital in georgia that hit capacity and basically overflowed because of the huge numbers that they were seeing in that part of the state already. georgia has got a real epidemic on its hands. they have got more than 22,000 known cases of the virus in that state. and the numbers are going up in georgia, not down. this was a helpful data viz ke- visualization on georgia. you see the map of georgia, it's divided county by county there. this is six weeks ago. this was georgia's new cases four weeks ago. and then this was georgia's new cases two weeks ago. and this was georgia's new cases as of two days ago. this is not the portrait of a straight that has licked this thing and is ready to move on and get better now. but i should mention that even

those bad georgia case numbers are likely a wild undercount because georgia is among the worst states in the nation in terms of the proportion of their population that they have had tested for the virus. they have only tested maximum about 1% of their population. i mean not to sledgehammer this point home or anything, but look also at the kinds of facilities in which we, the american people, have had the worst track record so far in terms of keeping americans safe, keeping them from being infected, keeping them from dying. look at those facilities in georgia. georgia is very rich in those facilities. we got this map today for the data visualization folks at topus showing red dots all over the country indicating prisons or jails where there are known to be coronavirus outbreaks. the bigger the dot, the bigger of the size of the known outbreak. honestly part of the problem in jails and prisons, a, there's not very much testing in most of them. but b, once you've got it in there, it's proving very, very,

very difficult to keep the rest of the people who live in that facility and work in that facility from getting infected as well. so even small outbreaks in jails and prisons tend to become big outbreaks very fast. they're then a prime vector for spreading the infection to the surrounding community as staff from that jail or prison go home to their families at the end of every shift. so it's kind of on this map. it's kind of rorkable emarkable the spread. even with terrible access to testing, just the spread of prisons and jail cases across the country. but just look for a second at georgia. look at how many of these red dot jail and prison outbreaks there are, specifically in the state of georgia. and again, georgia today is opening back up because that state's republican governor has decided, i guess, he just doesn't want to deal with it anymore so he's going to pretend like it's fine. as for other facilities where we have been having a really hard

time as a country keeping people uninfected, keeping people alive, the other top two nominees besides jails and prisons would be nursing homes, right, and meat processing plants of all places, right? but it makes sense and we're seeing it all over the country. it's places where workers work in large numbers in close contact, in aggregate, and those places have been kept going. they have been kept running, kept open. even where there's stay-at-home orders, those plants are open. so those are the places where we've really seen a hard time getting our hands around this epidemic. in terms of nursing homes, georgia already says that 40% of its deaths from coronavirus in the state of georgia are in nursing homes. so that means the epidemic is already raging through georgia nursing homes. georgia nursing homes are already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of americans. now look at meat packing plants. georgia is tied with arkansas and texas basically for the largest number of meat

processing facilities of any state. georgia calls itself the poultry capital of the world. they have already had multiple meat packing workers die, even as they have kept these meat plants open and there seems to be no strong urgency to get the rest of the workers in these facilities tested. i should also mention just for good measure just so you know, the state of georgia also has a nuclear power plant where 118 workers have tested positive as well. no worries, i'm sure that's fine too. but you add all this up. there's the nuclear power plant thing. probably that's no big deal, maybe. also tons of meat packing plants with known spread of the virus and deaths already. an out of control situation in the state's nursing homes. the hospital system in one corner of the state already overtopped. cases rising in every county in the state, and some of the worst testing in america. so that's the state that's opening everything back up and where you can get tattoos again as of today. go, georgia. you know, if we are going to pay

so much attention to the fringe pro-trump open it all back up protests, i think we should also note protests like this one today against georgia governor brian kemp opening that state back up. you can see the signs here. your life is what is essential. keep your family safe at home. keep your family healthy. stay home. stay home, it's not time to reopen. believe in science, not kemp. life over money. science matters. but you know what, despite the fact that americans by and large do get it and do understand what it's going to take to fight this pandemic and try to save american lives, it turns out that ignorance among our nation's leaders is not a lonely condition. this will today go down in history as the day that everybody from the lysol company to the u.s. surgeon general had to try to figure out the responsible way to deal with the fact that the president of the

united states suggested in all seriousness from the white house briefing room that maybe people should try to ingest disinfectants of some kind, or maybe light, some kind of light that you could get inside the body, because that could work, right? this will also go down in the record books as the day the vice president said the coronavirus epidemic would be well and truly behind us by memorial day weekend. it will all be over by then. okay. this will also be remembered in the medical journals as the day the food and drug administration, the fda, had to put out an actual warning about the dangers of an unproven drug that the appellapresident and t news channel have insistently, repeatedly touted as some sort of miracle cure for weeks on ends. ignorance is not a lonely status at the top right now. but do you remember, do you remember at the beginning of this month more than three weeks ago now the general sort of shock and astonishment when

georgia governor brian kemp got up in april, in april 2020, the year of our lord, and he said into a microphone in public that he had just learned, he had just learned that day that people who don't have symptoms can still be infectious with this disease. hold the phone. he had no idea before then. >> individuals can be infected and begin to spread coronavirus earlier than previously thought. even if they have no symptoms. from a public health standpoint, this is a revelation and a game-changer. >> a revelation, a game-changer, right? cue the national laugh track, as georgia's governor announces that he has just learned something that everybody else has known for months, that has been driving the public health response in the richest nation on earth to the deadliest pandemic in a century. surprise, news to him, right?

that was april 1st when he said that. which was astonishiastonishing. but it turns out georgia governor brian kemp was actually ahead of the curve on that, because it wasn't until 17 days after that, that the trump administration's secretary of defense announced that he too had just learned that same fact himself. he had just learned it that very day. >> what we found of the 600 or so that have been infected, that's disconcerting is a majority of those, 350 plus, are asymptomatic. so it has revealed a new dynamic of this virus that it can be carried by normal, healthy people that have no idea whatsoever that they're carrying it. so we're learning a lesson and making sure we communicate that to our broader force. >> we are learning a lesson there. yeah. yeah, it turns out a new dynamic of this virus we just discovered.

turns out people are asymptomatic and they still have this thing. we just learned that. i love how he finishes that comment by saying, now listen, we're letting everybody in the navy know this. because we're pretty sure nobody else had any idea about this so we better alert everyone. we've newly discovered a fact. that was less than a week ago that the defense secretary said that. he's just figuring it out. which is, you know, disconcerting given that that is the person who president trump has put in charge of running, you know, the largest military on earth. it's also disconcerting when the whole reason it came up with secretary esper is because there really has been an outbreak of more than 850 coronavirus cases among u.s. navy sailors onboard one nuclear powered aircraft carrier and where today another deployed u.s. naval vessel, a deployed vessel, a destroyer called the uss kidd emerged as the site of another outbreak at sea where 18 u.s. sailors tested positive so far.

the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier with that giant outbreak, captain brett crozier was fired by trump's navy secretary after he raised the alarm about the burgeoning outbreak on his ship and the need to test and treat his sailors. the navy secretary himself has since resigned in disgrace for having taken that action. today "the new york times" reported that a navy review of captain crozier's performance recommended reinstating him as captain of the uss theodore roosevelt. trump secretary mark esper was expected to announce captain crozier's fate after he received the recommendation of that report, but then he decided not to. "the washington post" first to report that the decision on crozier's fate has now been apparently delayed, deferred for some reason. presumably because they need to figure out some new revelation that they can blame their actions on or some way to make this something the president likes, or who knows.

meanwhile, our nation's veterans continue to suffer almost unimaginable death tolls from this virus. the death toll in the soldiers home in holyoke, massachusetts, in western massachusetts, is now up to 73. 73 veterans dead at that one facility. on long island in new york at the long island state veterans home, which is in stony brook new york, the death toll among veterans there at that one facility is 46 dead. 46 dead out of a total of 350 veterans at that facility. the management there actually sent out an urgent plea to the public this past week for help getting ppe to their staff. they're just asking anybody in the community to please help them. 46 dead already. in louisiana at the veterans home in reserve, louisiana, there were 150 veterans there at that home at the start of the epidemic but they have had 43 deaths over the past two months. today the times picayune reports there are 91 veterans left at that home plus 5 fighting for their lives in the hospital.

today that home announced the testing of all remaining vets that are still there and it turns out half of them are positive. it almost feels like a miracle that they're not all positive. but, you know, the hardest places to fight this thing are the places that you have to fight the hardest. coming up for you next tonight, we've got a constructive, practical, instructive story about how to do that and how to do it really well. and that's next. $9.95 at my age?

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at the end of last month, two nursing home residents in los angeles who had just been discharged from the hospital began showing coronavirus symptoms. so their nursing home, briar oak on sunset, isolated those two residents and tested them. and when their tests came back positive, briar oak decided that they were going to test all the staff in their facility who had

been in contact with those two residents, even though none of the staff were showing symptoms. even though none of the staff were showing symptoms, 15 of those staff tests came back positive. according to briar oak's director of clinical operations, quote, with that number of positive, now you have to be concerned about the possible exposure of everybody. now, the problem of course is that briar oak couldn't test everybody. despite being the place where the most americans are dying from coronavirus, nursing homes have largely been on their own as individual facilities in terms of trying to get ahold of tests for their residents and their staff. so pretty much no one at any facility anywhere could test everybody. but some nursing home leaders in l.a. were trying. and it turns out there was a larger long-term care facility, the los angeles jewish home, that had managed to get itself several hundred coronavirus tests from the city. the l.a. jewish home agreed that

they would give this other facility, brier oak, enough tests to screen all their residents and all of their staff, which was a really stand-up thing for them to do. and brier oak was able to do all that testing and what they found will curl your hair. 75% of the residents had the virus, 90% of the staff had it as well. which meant that brier oak immediately became possibly the worst outbreak in the entire state of california. as of today, 77 residents and 70 staff at brier oak have tested positive for the virus. three of their residents have died. but the key here is that this one nursing home appears, right, appears to have this extra terrible significantly worse outbreak than other facilities, but maybe that's because they're the only one that tested everybody, right? and the only reason they were able to test anybody is because of this sort of accidental circumstance in which they got this incredibly neighborly help

from a nearby facility. maybe if every nursing home had universal testing, we would discover that lots and lots of places are as bad as brier oak and we could get them resources to try to deal with their problems. you know, we'd at least be able to see the scale of the problem that clearly needs to be tackled in these facilities where the most americans are the most at risk of death. well, this week the los angeles county health director announced that nursing homes are now being advised to test all residents and all staff. the county announced that they had given this previous guidance that only people who had symptoms should be tested. the county to their credit announced that that previous guidance was a mistake. the health director said bluntly in public, quote, we were wrong. and now regardless of symptoms, everybody should be tested in every nursing home and long-term care facility. well, the los angeles jewish home, the facility that got those hundreds of tests from the city and then gave some of those

tests to this other facility to brier oak that had this problem so they could -- so they could figure out what was going on in their facility and so we could all see what it looks like when a nursing home tests everybody, the l.a. jewish home's medical director is a man named dr. michael wasserman. he is also the president of the california association of long-term care medicine, which represents doctors, nurses and others working in long-term care facilities. expanded testing is one of several measures that he's been advocating for to better protect these facilities and their residents and their workers. now that l.a. county is going to try to do universal testing in its nursing homes, dr. wasserman told "the l.a. times" this. we expect to see the number of cases that get reported skyrocketed and we expect to see the number of deaths that get reported to skyrocket. joining us now is dr. michael wasserman, he's also the medical director of eisenberg village at

the los angeles jewish home. dr. wasserman, thank you so much for being with us tonight. you've been in the middle of such an interesting and important circumstance. thanks for taking time to talk with us. >> thank you, rachel. you've actually said it better than i can, to be honest with you. this is such an important issue right now. one thing i do want to let people know, an outbreak has no reflection on the quality of a nursing home. it's what you do about it that matters. and nursing homes across the country can not be afraid to test. it's really critical. >> you know, and i will underscore that by saying as i have been reading far and wide, and you really have to read local news reports in order to get a handle on this because there isn't national federal reporting on these things yet. there are certainly circumstances where there have been large outbreaks in certain facilities and people in the community say that was never a

well-run facility and there had been complaints but there were outbreaks in some of the facilities that were described as the absolute gold standard. places where there's been no complaints and people see it as the best facility in the area. there doesn't really seem to be any way of escaping this in these facilities just for being a well organized, well administered place. i would hope that that would lead to a loss of defensiveness, a loss of a sense of shame so we could get more public information about them. >> there's no question, rachel. nursing homes are accelerators for this virus. we literally have to put a moat around them. and so if we test, and we test all the staff and we test all the residents, as they did at brier oaks, what they did immediately, once they knew they had positive staff and positive residents, was they went into lockdown mode. every staff wore personal protective equipment. everyone had masks. and i believe, and a number of my colleagues around the country

believe that once you know you've got the virus in your nursing home, if you move into going full bore on your protection and, again, stellar infection prevention and control, you can actually make a difference. you know, an article came out of the new england journal today that showed again that you don't know what you don't know. and there's a lot of facilities out there right now that have staff and residents with the virus and they don't know it. if they just go on about their regular day, they're going to become another kirkland. >> in terms of trying to maintain a practical and constructive approach to this, since we've been talking about nursing homes a lot, we've heard a lot of people expressing real despair, especially if they have relatives that are in one of these facilities, who need to be in a facility like this because they can't be cared for at home. we've heard people really distraught, worried that there's no way to protect them.

so what you just said about how there are protocols that work, that there are ways to protect people i think is important to hear. what i want to know is how we can try to up that standard, we can get more facilities up to those kinds of high standards nationwide. we have seen individual facilities, you know, pleading for help in terms of donated ppe for staff. we've seen so many facilities where they say they don't have access to testing. do you think that we could act systematically as a country to get testing and get ppe and get medical consultation into these facilities to bring more facilities up to that high standard that you're describing quickly? >> not only can we, we have no choice. we have to. this is where the virus grows and accelerates and then leads to more people back in the hospital. so if we don't focus on our nursing homes and assisted living facilities and protect the individuals there, you know, i use the word skyrocket. that is true, the numbers of folks with the virus and the

numbers who will succumb will dramatically go up. so i think it's absolutely critical as a country that we focus on getting personal protective equipment and make testing readily available. we've actually developed what we call our quadruple lane, which is abundant personal protective equipment, readily available testing, stellar infection control, and then the final piece is all nursing homes need to be running in their emergency preparedness mode because it's a lot of hard work. that's one comment i just have to make is the front-line staff in these nursing homes are putting their lives on the line. and often some of these folks barely make a living wage, if that. and they're doing incredible work right now protecting the older adults, the vulnerable older adults in our country. >> do you think that it makes sense in the absence of

community mobilization to support nursing homes, the way we have seen community mobilization to support doctors and nurses and other front-line health care providers, do you think it makes sense that community groups and, you know, local governments and civic organizations should be like adopting their local nursing home and trying to figure out what they need that can be either donated or organized for to try to surface their problems, to try to get them help and to make them more visible in terms of what they need? >> absolutely. honestly, in a lot of places, the state, the federal, the counties have failed in this. you know, that's what makes our country great is that we do step up and we help each other. and i think absolutely everyone should be doing everything they can right now to bring support to nursing homes and assisted livings. there's one other group. there's small group homes which

have six or seven seniors living in them. they're also at very high risk. so all those areas, we all need to be doing everything in our power to help prevent the virus from sort of running amok within the walls of those living facilities. >> dr. michael wasserman, medical director at the l.a. jewish home which played such a remarkable role in this epidemiological find basically in l.a. senior centers, doctor, thank you for helping us make sense of all of this. i hope you'll come back and talk to us about this. this is not something we plan on abandoning as a story line. we're going to stay on this until somebody makes us not. >> i'd love that, rachel, any time. >> thank you, doctor. we'll be right back, stay with us. we'll be right back, stay with us so many great stories from amazing people... it makes me want to be better. it changes your perspective. it makes you a different person. see what listening to audible can do for you.

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"scenes from georgia's cautious reopening. lines start early for hair cuts." today the republican governor of georgia, brian kemp, took steps to reopen businesses in georgia amid the growing coronavirus epidemic in his state. he nevertheless allowed salons and tattoo parlors and gyms and a whole slew of other businesses to open up in his state. here's something to know about american leadership in the context of this brilliant decision. earlier this week, the president of the united states was asked whether he thought reopening all these businesses in the state of georgia, the president was asked whether that was a good decision by governor kemp. >> mr. president, what do you say to the concerns like georgia is opening up barber shops and bowling alleys. >> he's a very capable man. he knows what he's doing. >> that's basically the slowing appear for the federal response to this national crisis so far.

you want to know when it's time to do anything? don't ask me, ask a governor. he's a republican governor, i'm sure that governor is doing a great job. ask governor kemp. he's a very capable man. he knows what he is doing. all right? well, that was the answer from the president on tuesday. if you ask him again the next day on wednesday, it went differently. >> i told the governor of georgia, brian kemp, that i disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities. i disagree with him on what he is doing. >> it's not like the president said these things like a few days apart or a week apart and then had a change of heart or something. that only took 24 hours. honestly, i mean it gives you whiplash. >> he's a very capable man. he knows what he's doing. i disagree with him on what he's

doing. >> leadership. one 24-hour period. we do not have a national response to our national epidemic. instead we have a president who reverses course in a matter of hours on how he feels about the kinds of policy that will decide whether people live or die, and that's one thing to know that about this president and what this will forever do to the american presidency and expectations thereof. but we are starting to see now how it is affecting real people right now on the ground, among other places in the great state of georgia. and that's next. ia and that's next. it's our policy that your pizza is never touched once it comes out of the oven. and we're taking extra steps, like no contact delivery, to ensure it. yoat nature's way, that startsn with quality ingredients. like our sambucus - made from elderberries grown and picked

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a large and escalating epidemic with no substantial access to testing of any kind, the other reason georgia will have a starring role in the history of this american how the virus kneecaped the hospital system. where in the link of an eye all 38 icu beds they had were full and burned through a six-month supply of ppe but they had stocked away just to be careful. they burned through that sixth-month supply in one week. all b albany georgia is radiating heat with infections and hospitalizations and deaths from the beginning in georgia but now, so are other parts of the state. places like hall county, georgia north of atlanta where reported cases are ticking up and according to the "new york

times", the forth georgia medical center there believes that they are on track to be over topped at capacity very soon as soon as may 4th. cases are still in the upswing there. hall county is not due to peak until early june but expecting the hospital to be at capacity by may 4th. who knows what the models will say once georgia's restaurants and nail salons and tattoo parlors and gyms have been open for a week or two and that all started today. as georgia enters these uncharted waters, the lessons from albany georgia where they navigated this pandemic without a compass, they will be more important than ever before. joining us now i'm honor to say is dr. james black. the medical director in albany, georgia. dr. black joined us earlier this month to talk about what was happening in his hospital. dr. black, i'm really glad you were able to come back. thanks for making time for us

tonight. >> thank you, rachel. >> when we last spoke, you were talking about a really incredible amount of utilization at your hospital and in your e.r., your worries about supplies in erm thes of terms t staff safe. how have the last few weeks been and what is your utilization rates now? >> heavy but we developed rhythm to reach out to vender sources and our supply chain guys who keep track of inventory and medications. we have managed to avoid running out. we have come dangerously close but we've never -- we haven't run out of anything critical thus far. >> how is your staff been coping just with the pace at which you have been seeing coronavirus patients with the serious illness that i know a lot of patients present with this illness? i imagine it's been stressful on the staff in terms of the number of hours everybody has been

working and also, seriousness of the cases that you've been handling? >> without question, you know, i guess we're sort of used to taking care of critically ill patients in the emergency department but the sheer numbers that come in grouped together who are in critical condition is something none of us experienced in an amount of time. you wonder who will happen. >> given how hard you were and sustained patients and heartbreak in the community with the number of people infected and sick and number of people that die, i feel like you are the person more than anybody else in georgia who i want to ask about opening businesses back up and what the governor has decided in terms of loosening all these restrictions and letting people go back to doing all sorts of business activity and all sorts of

activity that's likely to spread this virus more? >> well, i think we understand that governor kemp and other leaders have to strike a balance between economic health of this state and the well being physically for the residents, it not really our place to endorse or criticize and remain focused on taking care of citizens no matter the landscape of the context. i think, you know, we've made some pretty good gains. two weeks ago we had over 155 covid patients and this afternoon we were at 89. we felt like we're at the point we're not having to transfer patients out. we're actually having transfer patients to us and that we're seeing fewer patients on a daily basis and seeing a significant amount of covid patients. i think we're concerned that we might see out spike and ill

timed or conceived get together, however innocent may send us right back to where we were a couple weeks ago. >> in terms being concerned about that spike, obviously, you and all ban knee, you and your hospital system really had the early worst of it in georgia. we are seeing really worries about other facilities in hall county for example is really worried right now that they're having large numbers and a peak that's going to hit later than they might top out capacity at the hospital. do you have advice for your fellow emergency medicine chiefs for your fellow front line physicians in other parts of georgia who may be looking at a steeper peak and a larger number of cases now that the state is opening back up? >> i guess early advice is number one, you have to take care of yourself and staff. you need to take care of the community at large but certainly, i would ask that they

try to look two to three weeks into the future and just assume that the pace is going to keep increasing. i think that's one of the things that was a little disheartening early on is every day we keep coming here and owe would hope there would be two or three less spaces but every day it's two or three or ten or 15 more and all ill. we were opening up additional units, opening up additional icus again going through equipment and just, you know, making sure that your staff stays engaged, that people are looking out because they will work hard every day but see a tremendous amount of illness and a tremendous amount of death that no one is used to, not in our country in our day in age so it's kind of uncharted territory and just expect that it's going to continue to come until it starts to get slightly better. >> dr. james black, the medical

director of emergency services in albany, georgia dealt with so much of the blunt of it in georgia already. good luck to you and your colleagues and god bless what you do. thank you. >> thank you so much, rachel. >> we'll be right back. stay with us. ch, rachel. >> we'll be right back stay with us - [narrator] soon, lights will come on. soon, people will be walking back through your door. soon, life will move forward. we'll welcome back old colleagues, get to know new ones some things may change, but we'll still be here,

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get a $50 prepaid card when you switch. it's the most reliable wireless network. and it could save you hundreds. xfinity mobile. thanks for joining us tonight for this unexpectedly 100% no teleprompter version of the rachel maddow show. our coverage will continue. when i return on monday night, however, there will be 100% more apparent eye contact between me and you. i'll see you then. good night. the push to return to normal. georgia moves towards reopening businesses. >> i think we're taking the right measured approach at the right time. >> enas siven as