prolong the recovery that we have, and i think that we should take better measures. >> a guest appearance by the grim reaper to take us off the air on this friday night along with our thanks for being with us all week. our wishes for a good and safe weekend filled with smart choices. on behalf of all of my colleagues at the networks of nbc news, good night from our temporary field headquarters. thank you for being here. i want to start tonight by introducing you to dr. jane wilcox. she's a cardiologist. she works at northwestern medicine in chicago. >> before i started this role, i was nervous and a little anxious facing a different disease process than i'd ever seen before. i trained during h1n1, and while i remember the occasional sad case of a young healthy person succumbing to this disease, i

was not prepared to enter into an entire unit and multiple units with droves of relatively healthy patients who were now fighting for their life with covid pneumonia. >> when things really started getting tough in my unit, it was a sunday, and i was working, and we were putting down breathing tube after breathing tube in these patients. we got up to 14 or 15 ventilators in our 18-bed icu, and it was just one after the other. and we were all scared. nobody knows how to navigate this, and we're just taking it shift by shift and day by day, trying not to get overwhelmed. one of the things that's really hard for us is as icu nurses, we're used to having constant access to our patients. we have very sick patients, and we're used to going in there and assessing them and reassessing them. but now we have to really cluster our care to try to cut

down exposure time in the room. the less time in the room, the less time we have to be exposed to the disease, the less chance we have of bringing it home to our family. but that's also really hard because we're under constant worry that we're going to miss something, we're going to miss a new symptom, we're going to miss a new vital part of information that comes from our assessments. >> i wish i knew the sheer volume of patients that we would have at northwestern. i wish i knew how sick they would be because that would have helped me prepare a little bit better mentally. i've been an icu nurse now for about 12, 13 years, but i've never seen patients that are this sick. i just wish i knew how many resources each patient would be requiring. these patients require a lot of care. it's very heavy care. it's a lot of specialized machines. >> these patients have no family around to be there in the last

moments, and you try everything. you try so hard to keep these people alive, to make them better, to hope that they'll get extubated and leave the icu. but unfortunately i've just seen so many of them die. i think this is also taking a toll on all of the staff. we've run out of blood tubing. we've run out of suction devices for the mouth. we've run out of blood gas syringes, things that we take for granted on a day-to-day basis. it's hard to stay positive. like i said earlier, we are all trying so hard to do everything for these patients. we're giving them maximum oxygen support. they're on numerous medications to support them. and we'll get these patients and have them for days, and we'll think maybe they'll get better. maybe they just need time. and then they still die, so

that's hard. >> frontline health care providers, doctors and nurses both working in chicago and st. louis, missouri, that last young woman there is a nurse from maryland who volunteered to come to new york city to serve on the front lines at the apex of new york's fight. you could see she's pretty flattened by what she has gone through. i want to show you one more tonight, though, that we just got in from a senior physician at mt. sinai in new york. his name is dr. umesh gidwani, and he is a cardiac critical care physician. watch this. >> welcome to another day in covid land. it's bright and sunny, and it seems like things may be slowing down a little bit. not really for the icu because we've been helping our sister hospitals in brooklyn and queens who have really gotten disproportionately affected by

this disease. and so we've been taking patients from there and then a couple of patients from the field hospital in central park. so the icus are going to stay busy for a while. there are lots of patients who are intubated and on a breathing machine, whose really course is yet to be determined. and obviously the hope is that we can save most if not all of them. we're going to start rounds, and the way the rounds are structured is typically in the normal icu, there will be a senior resident doctor known as a fellow who is specializing in that specialty. but right now everybody's specialties are all mixed up. it doesn't matter what their specialty is. everyone is pitching in. talking about the next patient. >> so we have him on all the drugs we have. he's sedated and paralyzed. and he's on an insulin drip.

>> is he also getting dialysis? >> he is on cvh. >> is he getting mechanical ventilation support? >> everyone here is getting mechanical support. >> so he's on mechanical ventilator, artificial kidney, and six i.v. drips at the same time. dr. cohen, what are you going to do today? >> i'm going to help dr. lee with the catheter for this patient. >> why are we putting dialysis cathet catheters? >> that's a good question. a lot of patients are going into kidney failure and we're kind of short on the human dialysis machines. so this is an alternative method of performing dialysis for these patients. >> do you think it's time to relax a little bit and back off on social distancing and wearing masks? >> absolutely not. the population of patients is still very much active, and we're working very hard to take care of these patients, get them better. >> so you think if we back off, there will be a resurgence in the cases? >> absolutely. it's just way too soon.

>> amina is a very experienced cardiac nurse, and i'm going to ask her a very important question. amina, do you think it's time to start backing off on social distancing? >> no. i think we have to continue what we've been doing, or else we are going to reverse everything that we accomplish. >> there is still quite a substantial burden of illness and severity of multi-organ failure. we have patients really who have not responded to all the usual interventions. the big fear now is what happens next. are we going to say a recrude essence of this illness? are we going to see spikes coming back as we start to relax and loosen some of the restrictions? we have to be prepared because

we have really learned a lot from this real eye-opening, life-changing series of events that has happened over the last two months or so. >> this eye-opening, life-changing series of events that has happened over these last two months or so. eye-opening, life-changing, yes. i mean we are all experiencing that, right? these last two months have been really freaking weird and terrible. but none of us have had the life-changing, eye-opening experience that's comparable to the 65,000 americans who have lost their lives already and their families. none of us have, you know, gone through what the tens of thousands of americans have gone through who fought this thing almost to the death and then survived. i think we've been asking for

frontline health care workers to send us stuff. i think there's a reason that hospital staff keep sending us videos like these, celebrating, filming and capturing for posterity the triumphant release of some of their patients from the hospital. it's clear that they really feel like they need to uphold that it is possible for hospitalized coronavirus patients to still beat it, to still survive, to still finally get to go home because people do get so, so sick from this virus, and they need such intense care in the hospital. i think the doctors and nurses want us to see this ourselves so that we don't give up hope, but i think they also need it for themselves so they don't give up hope because they're working so hard with people that are so sick with such a confounding, confounding virus for which there is as yet no treatment. so, yeah, we have all had an eye-opening, life-changing last two months or so like dr. gidwa nsaid. but none of us civilians have

had what the doctors and nurses have had, who have been working in these covid emergency rooms and converted covid-only icus. but then of course there's one other group of americans who have been right at the front of the front line just as much as the hospital workers have been, people who have been caring for tons of covid patients, people who have been putting themselves at risk, getting infected in great numbers themselves because they haven't had enough protective equipment to keep themselves safe while they care for large numbers of coronavirus patients. those americans have had a different couple of months than the rest of us have too, a difficult, dangerous, life-changing past couple of months, and they are the largely underpaid, often totally unrecognized people who work in nursing homes, right? where we know the virus has been exacting a toll of biblical proportions among the population of americans who reside in nursing homes and long-term care

facilities. but because of that, there is something else that i want to show you tonight, this friday night. we've been in touch with frontline health providers in hospitals. we have been talking about the fact that more americans are dying from this epidemic in nursing homes than in any other single place. i mean the place you are most at risk of both getting this virus and dying from it in america is in a nursing home. so if we, the american people, want to save the most lives, we have to focus on the places where the most lives are at risk. we have to start to see the nursing homes and long-term care facilities around us. literally, i mean we need to know where they are in your town, in your county, wherever you live in america listening to any right now, in your town, in your county, the place where the most lives are going to be stolen by this thing are the lives in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. so you should know where these facilities are in your community. you should part of any activis

group, any political group, any church or synagogue or mosque, any civic group, you should know if the nursing homes around you -- first of all, you should know who they are. you should know where they are. and you should know if the nursing homes around you need something, if they need things they don't have. you should figure out if there is some way that you can help them get help. i mean i'm speaking very broadly here. i'm not trying to start a movement or anything, but i'm just saying in terms of where americans are dying, that's where americans are dying. and there isn't any help coming from the top. there's sort of happy talk coming from the top now about this from washington, but there really hasn't been any help coming from the top, coming from the federal government to try to keep americans alive in this most vulnerable place. and so local communities are going to have to do this from the ground up in order to keep as many people alive as possible in these facilities where they're otherwise just being cut down. and i want to show you this

tonight because people, look, really are starting to show up for their local nursing homes all over the country. this is today in lexington, north carolina, which is davidson county, north carolina. they had three residents die last week at this one facility from coronavirus. they've got 41 coronavirus cases among the residents there now at alstonbrook nursing facility. well, this today is the town, the county, the community there in in north carolina showing up for them. you can't visit a nursing home. you can't come inside. you can't put the residents at any further risk, but this is a way to try to connect. that's north carolina. this was from glens falls, new york, yesterday. five different nursing homes were visited. there were apparently 30 or so cars. people put signs on their cars thanking the people who worked there, reaching out to the people who lived there. these were from tuesday and wednesday this week. people again turning out to thank and connect with their local nursing homes and people

working there and living there, literally the americans whose lives are most endangered by this disaster. this is fountain inn, south carolina. i think we've also got footage from albertville, alabama. albertville has had a big outbreak centered at a big chicken plant there. but as we know, outbreaks in one kind of a facility do not tend to stay inside that facility. so if you've got a big meat processing plant that's got a whole bunch of cases, you are soon going to have a bunch of cases in your nursing home in your community too. this is a highly contagious, communicable disease. that's how it's going to work. i should also say vice versa. if you've got a lot of cases in your nursing homes, you're going to get cases in your community and ultimately in places where it's going to spread like wildfire, especially aggregate work environments that aren't closed like meat processing plants. here's some pictures from other people turning out to support their local nursing homes in their communities. in brunswick, maine. lubbock, texas, we've got some

pictures. it's happening now everywhere spontaneously. it's really nice to see. these are all just photos and videos taken just over the past few days. we've also heard that a charity called global empowerment mission that was working to get ppe donations to health care facilities, this he also started organizing ppe donations for nursing home staff now as well that had not been part of what they were working on from the outset. but now they've realized that nursing homes need this material for their staff as well, and they've started helping nursing homes too. it's a big charity effort, lots of high-dollar donations, one of the places they're now starting to focus on is nursing homes. that's great. here's one i want you to see from new hope, minnesota. and this was actually a week ago now. but the story behind this is interesting. last week this story ran in the "minneapolis star tribune" about the saint therese of new happy nursing home. a very worrying headline last week. this is a 258-bed nursing home.

this was the star tribune reporting last wednesday that they had 12 deaths at that nursinurs nursing home from coronavirus. later that day, this happened outside that nursing home. people coming out to support that nursing home. the people who live there, the people who work there trying to lift them up. you can see the signs that people are holding there. we stand united. thank you for all you do. you're all sunshine for your residents. we stand united. i stand with saint therese. thank you. but the situation at that facility, which it is great to see them getting that community support. the situation there is really bad. that facility was reporting 12 deaths as of last week. that appears to have been what prompted this rally in support of them. 12 deaths last week. well, now as of this week, they are reporting 47 deaths at that facility. 47 people have died there. of the remaining residents of that facility, they've got 130 positive cases, and they only know that because they were just this week able to finally get

everybody tested at that facility. i mean, listen, our government may have really screwed up the response to this crisis, and they may be continuing to screw it up. i will tell you the administration yesterday finally announced that they're thinking about maybe getting together some experts, some big brains to maybe start thinking about talking about what we might maybe could do about the fact that, best guess, maybe 20,000 americans, possibly more, have already been cut down in nursing homes in less than two months by this virus. they just yesterday announced that they're going to think about getting a group together at the federal level to start thinking about that. they want you to know how urgently they are considering this problem. they are going to meet for the first time, they think, in late may sometime. they don't even have a date. they're just aiming at maybe trying to convene for the first time in late may.

yeah, our government has not been johnny on the spot when it comes to trying to keep americans alive in any significant numbers. and the glaring -- i don't know exactly know what to call it in polite company. the glaring -- it's not ineptitude. it's not incapability. i want to call it unwillingness, but i don't know. the worst of what they have failed to do is evident in the places where the most americans are dying. they've done nothing. and the administration so screwed up, the testing situation for the whole country from the very outset that now even months into this, now with 65,000 americans dead, it's still hard to get testing even for the facilities where the most people are dying, where they most desperately need to test people because they need to know who's positive so they can isolate them from the people who aren't, who are at grave risk of

getting it and then dying from it. the government has just absolutely screwed this up, and it is not getting any better. but we know as americans, we have lived long enough with this to know who needs priority access to tests and where the most help is needed and where people are at the most risk. i mean in minnesota where that facility, saint ter reese of new hope is located, they think that nearly 80% of the deaths in the state have been in nursing homes. nearly 80% of the deaths in minnesota. the outbreak, the epidemic in minnesota doesn't have to start in these facilities, but, sure, that's where it ends up, and that's where it will take the most lives. test there. try to keep the people there alive. they're at the most risk of dying the quickest in the greatest numbers. saint therese of new hope just got everybody tested. in sioux falls, south dakota, where the huge outbreak there was centered on the big smithfield meat processing plant, today one large nursing home in sioux falls announced

seven new deaths. seven americans. in grand island, nebraska, where the big outbreak there is also centered on a jbs meat processing plant. their local health director just announced ten new nursing home deaths yesterday. i mean test and ye shall find. we know where it is. we know where it's going to be. go look there, and you will find a facility that needs help and where the people living there and/or working there need more protection than they have got. why is this so hard to focus our efforts like this? in montgomery county, pennsylvania, this week they finally got their hands on enough test to test everybody at the montgomery county jail. as of last week at that jail they thought they knew how many cases they had. once they tested everyone, they found out the actual infection rate at that jail was 30 times higher than what they thought they were dealing with. that isn't just like a whoa math moment. that then of course requires action to prevent the other 80%

of the prisoners in that facility from getting infected by the 15% to 20% they have just discovered already have it, right? and you can't count on only testing people who have symptoms or only isolating people who have symptoms. it doesn't matter if you have symptoms. you have to test people. if they're positive, they can infect other people whether or not they have symptoms. it's not rocket science, but you have to test. as of today we have the third largest prison outbreak in the country newly discovered at trousdale correctional center in tennessee. how did they find they had 1,349 new cases at that prison in trouz dale county, tennessee today? they found that out because they tested the prison at long last. th now you have to act to prevent everybody else from getting it, both prisoners and staff in that facility. it is a call to action. it tells you where the problem is and what you need to do.

tennessee's governor says he's now looking for resources to test all of the other prisons in the state of tennessee because this is the first one they tested and they turned up the third largest outbreak in america. it will be great if when they test all of the other prisons in tennessee they don't find huge numbers in all of them. but if and when they do, that will be important information about what will likely be some of the biggest outbreaks in the country, some of the biggest outbreaks on earth in a state that may or may not be prepared to handle both what that means for those prisons and jails, but also what it will have already meant for the communities around those facilities, right? that all of the staff go home to at the end of every shift. because once you find out you've got more than 1,300 cases inside the prison, guess what you're about to learn about what's going on in the community outside your prison. it's here in huge numbers. we have an absolutely enormous coronavirus epidemic in this country. we've got more than 1.1 million

known cases and bupkis for testing. when we do have tests, when we test the places that we know by now are likely to be placed where it is spreading unchecked, we are consistently finding supersized numbers everywhere. yesterday we reported on the results of testing at the tyson meat plant in logansport, indiana. at the start of the week, officials declared a county wide public health emergency. they started testing alt the employees at that tyson plant and found nearly 900 of them were positive for coronavirus. that's what we learned yesterday. 890 workers at one plant positive. today we learned they're going to reopen the plant. with nearly 900 people who work there positive already. in nobles county, minnesota, where the epidemic has centered on a jbs meat processing plant, they have 900 cases in that county. that county has only 20,000

people. that's an inkrecrease of 235% i one week. i wonder where that's all coming from. in st. joseph, missouri, a meat plant there reported that they had zero cases as of two weeks ago. last week they reported 46 cases. yesterday they reported 126 cases. today they reported 295 cases. the company who owns that plant telling "the kansas city star," quote, we will continue to use this information at triumph foods in developing our daily staffing and work plans. yeah, that's -- that's -- yeah, at least. but at least you can now do that because you have test results that tell you, you know, at a bare minimum who really can't be coming to work right now, symptoms or not. in nebraska where the state government doesn't track cases in meat plants, where the governor citizen he doesn't think the virus doesn't spread in meat plants at all, in nebraska where the meat plants themselves are not exactly being

pushed by the state government to disclose when their employees coincidently turn out to keep getting coronavirus. the big meat plant in nebraska did just test their applies. that plant has refused to -- there have been a lot of suspicions about what's going on there because the surrounding metro area there. it's dakota city, nebraska, but the surrounding metro area is sioux city iowa. the sioux city, iowa area has started to notice a big spike in cases in the community and people turning up at the hospitals in large numbers. and local mayors in the sioux city area have been pleading to the governors, to the companies please to get some information about where all these cases in the sioux city area might be coming from. well, that plant in dakota city, nebraska, has now done testing of their employees, and somebody leaked to the sioux city journal the results.

669 positives among people working at that plant. nearly 700 cases among people who work at that plant. that's over 15% of the adult workforce of all of dakota city, nebraska. it's amazing what happens when you test for it, even if your governor chooses not to believe it's happening. this was a protest today in lebanon county, pennsylvania, where people who work at the huge local bell & evans chicken plant say that multiple workers at that facility have died from coronavirus already that bell & evans plant has released zero public information about coronavirus cases among its employees. they won't even address whether any of their employees have died from it. so today that earned them a mock funeral procession around the plant to try to get someone's attention. our government's response to this is terrible, but we can all

see the places that need attention. i mean not looking is not a safe way to hide this stuff. and on that point, we have an exclusive story you have not seen anywhere else. we think we've dug up something that might be important, and we've got that story here exclusively next. next

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earlier this week i raised a worry about a cdc investigation that recently happened at the smithfield meat processing plant in sioux falls, south dakota, that's been linked to well over a thousand cases in the sioux falls area. the cdc of course has a long history of investigating public health emergencies. they've got world-class specialized disease detectives that work on things like this. they've got a whole epidemic intelligence service at the cdc. these are the folks that actually get dispatched into the field to investigate the root cause when there's an e. coli outbreak or a tb outbreak or a sudden spike in legionnaires cases at a veterans home somewhere. these are great scientists. they're brave and interesting and intrepid. they go out into the field in

small teams and they investigate, and they write a short, punchy report that explains what happened and has actionable guidance in it so local officials can get a handle on whatever health crisis they have been dealing with. you invite in the cdc. they send their elite disease detectives. that team figures out what happened. they tell you in no uncertain terms with no minced words what you need to do to fix it, and then you fix it. that's what's supposed to happen. that's what does happen every time we know of that the cdc has done an epidemiological investigation in a public health emergency. that is the system. that is how it works. that is not what happened, though, when the cdc visited that meatpacking plant in sioux falls, south dakota, with that big, important, scary outbreak there. now, i want to be clear there's no reason to think there was anything wrong with the investigation or with what those scientists figured out about the outbreak at the smithfield plant or what needed to be done too run that plant without continuing to spread the virus

like wildfire there among its employees. the investigation itself seems to have been totally normal cdc, totally normal and sound. what was not normal was the report that was issued at the end of it. instead of issuing a cdc report with clear-cut directives like cdc always does, weirdly, in a way that i have never seen before, cdc instead put out a report on what happened at that plant in sioux falls that repeatedly told the plant there to consider implementing certain protocols, to do things if feasible and when possible. right at the top of that report it even said this, quote, these recommendations are discretionary and are not required or mandated by cdc. cdc does not say things like that in these kinds of reports. what is that doing in here? where did that come from? who added that? so on tuesday night, we brought you that report. i sort of raised that worry. that's why i asked, cdc, are you

okay? as of tonight we still do not know exactly what has gone wrong at cdc. we have an idea, but we haven't yet nailed it down totally. but we have narrowed it down to a two-day period in terms of exactly when it seems things went bad. and i can show you what happened before and after in that two-day window. all right. so here it is. this is a report that hasn't previously been made public. this is a report that was issued by a cdc team after they visited the big jbs meat plant in greeley, colorado, that has also been dealing with its own large coronavirus outbreak. and as you can see, this report on the colorado situation, it's dated april 20th. unlike the report that was written about the smithfield, south dakota plant just two days later, this one is totally normal. this one is very straightforward. quote, these recommendations are intended specifically for the jbs greeley beef plant. the health and safety committee and labor representatives should develop an implementation plan

for these and any other interventions to be rolled out in the workforce. that's how cdc talks, right? officials should develop an implementation plan. here's what you're going to do, right? i mean that is a far cry from what we saw just two days later in the sioux falls, smithfield report. these recommendations are discretionary and not required or mandated, right? this is the same agency visiting meat plants right around the exact same times, plants that are confronting exactly the same kind of crises but something happened at cdc in the span of those two days, right? i mean they put out the greeley report, colorado report, it's normal. two days later they put out their sioux falls report and there's all this mealy mouthed non-cdc language that tells the plant they don't have to actually do anything. look at the juxtaposition. here's what the cdc told the plant in greeley, colorado, on april 20th. emphasize that face coverings

must cover the nose and mouth at all times and should remain in place until taken off safely. two days later here's what they told the smithfield plant in sioux falls. face coverings are generally recommended. so you go from must cover the nose and mouth at all times to generally recommended. here's the colorado guidance from april 20th. provide all entrants to the plant with a face covering and show them how it needs to be worn. two days later for the south dakota report, quote, if feasible, all employees should wear the face covering. if feasible, but if not, you're fine. the cdc in the april 20th colorado report says, teach workers to ask for new face coverings when theirs becomes dirty, wet, and/or difficult to breathe through. two days later in the south dakota report, it's not nearly so stern. quote, the facial covering should be discarded and replaced when dirty or wet if possible. do that if possible. but, you know.

the colorado plant, april 20th, was told stagger breaks to minimize the total number of workers that are in common areas at the same time. somehow two days later in south dakota, that guidance becomes, stagger shifts, start times and break times as much as feasible. >> in colorado, put hand washing stations near the outside break areas to encourage hand washing. two days later in the south dakota report, that plant was told, portable hand washing facilities could be utilized. they could be if you want. april 20th in colorado says this. physical barriers should not be used as a replacement for maintaining at least six feet between workers. however, when that is not possible, barriers can be installed. two days later in south dakota, the cdc was feeling a little different about that. telling that plant to, quote, consider the following actions to physically separate

employees. consider them. think about these. then there's just this last one. here's what the cdc recommended in the colorado report on april 20th. quote, ensure all workers who have a fever of 100.4 degrees or more are sent directly to secondary screening. provide specimen collection and ordering of covid-19 testing on site for workers during secondary screening who are found to have fever and/or symptoms. colorado report says, quote, entrants who are not workers at the plant who indicate they've had a fever or symptoms should not be allowed entry to the plant. now, that's the report from colorado, april 20th. how in the span of two days did that guidance get morphed into this for the south dakota report? quote, if possible, specifically ask employees about recent history of fever. if possible, but we know it might not be possible. i mean we don't know what

happened at cdc between april 20th, when they were still behaving like the cdc, and april 22nd when they were this new thing. but i'm telling you something happened, and the cdc is not behaving the way it always has been and the way we really need them to be behaving right now. we have narrowed it down now to a two-day window in which something broke, and i'm telling you we are going to figure this out. got more on this story straight ahead. stay with us.

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this virus is testing all of us. and it's testing the people on the front lines of this fight most of all. so abbott is getting new tests into their hands, delivering the critical results they need. and until this fight is over, we...will...never...quit. because they never quit. this is the headline at the medical news outlet stat news today. quote, we need the real cdc back, and we need it now. quote, since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the cdc has been inexplicably absent and americans are suffering and dying for it. the cdc has been slow and its response inadequate in an area where it has always excelled, evidence-based guidance. throughout this pandemic it's been slow in coming, confusing

and not necessarily evidence-based. americans rely on cdc for evidence-based guidance. we have not received it. this piece at stat news was written by dr. asheesh ja. he's the director of the harvard public health institute. he's a professor at harvard medical school and a practicing physician and public health expert who says he's worried, among other things, about the mushy, weak, watered-down guidance driveling out of the cdc in the middle of the greatest public health threat this country has seen. what is screwing things up at the cdc right now at this time when we need them the most? joining us now is dr. ashish jha. thank you for taking time to be here. i know there's a lot of demands on your time right now. >> rachel, thank you so much for having me on. >> i wanted to talk to you tonight because honestly i was struck by the bluntness of your criticism of cdc in this piece. i have been chasing something that is driving me crazy, which is that i feel like the cdc

started to produce very non-cdc-like guidance or lack of guidance when it came to them investigating that big meat plant outbreak in sioux falls, south dakota. i'm worried that there's something broken inside cdc, which is why we're not getting the kind of guidance that you say we really need. >> yeah. so, rachel, this has been baffling to all of us in the public health world. and by the way, writing this piece was one of the most painful things i've done in a long time. i grew up as a public health person loving and admiring the cdc, arguing and believing that it is the best public health agency in the world. and the scientists are still there. but in this entire pandemic, it's been one fiasco after another, and it's either possible that all the scientists all of a sudden forget their science, or there's something at the leadership level that's really hindering them. and my theory is it's much more the latter. and we've just seen it

repeatedly -- they messed up the testing. they haven't collected the data. the guidance that you've been laying out has been mushy and often not evidence-based. and my sense is that the leadership of the cdc has been sidelined in a way that is really, really harmful to the american people. >> i will say that one of the things i kind of woke up the other day -- i don't sleep very well anymore. i know everybody sort of feels this way. but i woke up the other day just thinking, you know, in the movie version of this, when i have imagined america being in a major public health crisis that captures all of our attention and changes our lives, i think that we should be getting briefings from doctors every day. like i don't think that we should be getting -- i don't care whether or not we're getting noise from the president every day. but shouldn't there be a cdc briefing every day? at the very start of this, there was. and just something as simple as

that, as the cdc itself speaking on its own terms, independent of any politician, offering scientific information and explaining it seems like just a basic thing that we -- i think we expected, and it's weird that we don't have it. >> absolutely. and so you would think that the cdc would be the source of data and evidence for this pandemic. and when i started writing this piece, i called up public health experts and friends around the country, and i said, look, if you want to know how many covid cases in the u.s., where do you start? no one said the cdc. i said, if we want to know how many hospitalizations there are for covid, where do you go? no one said the cdc. the cdc has just been absent. and that -- it isn't because they've all of a sudden forgot how to do all of this. there's clearly been a decision to sideline the cdc to make sure they're not collecting and presenting data to the american people. and it makes the work of all public health officials across the country much, much harder. we need the cdc back.

we really do. we're going to have a much harder time getting through it without them. >> do you know how we get them back? i mean i understand that in public health you have to know both the science but also the political science, and you've been part of, you know, fighting for agencies like this to get their due in terms of resources and respect in the bureaucratic world that is federal government. is there somebody who could fix this? could congress fix this through better oversight? could public pressure fix this? how do you imagine this getting righted? we really need them back. >> yeah. so the good news is all of the great people at the cdc, most of them are still there, right? they have hung on. and so when i look at who's still hanging in, the top scientists, they're still there. so we don't have to like bring them back. that's the good news. the bad news is that they've been muzzled, and they are not getting to do what they know how to do well. and we have to find a way to

unmuzzle them. we have to find a way to let them do their job. and i don't know who does that. congress? i think public pressure, all of those things would help. ultimately i think dr. redfield, who is the appointed head of the cdc, i think has to look himself in the mirror and ask, is this the public health agency he wants to lead in the greatest pandemic in a century? and if he can't do it, he should step aside and make sure that somebody else can lead that agency and help the american people get through this period. >> dr. ashish jha, thank you for your time. >> thanks, rachel. >> all right. we've got more ahead here tonight. stay with us. an apron is protection. an apron is not quitting until you've helped make something better. what does an apron have to do with insurance? for us, especially right now, everything.

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1928 was a rough year to work on capitol hill. three congressmen collapsed in a single month and one died in his office. they weren't all collapsing and dying from the same thing.

but for whatever reason in 1928, they were not a hale and hearty lot that year. never theless when one member of congress died in his office, it took two hours for a doctor to show up to the scene. that's because there was no doctor who actually worked in the house or the senate. to make sure that never happened again, the office of the attending physician was created at the capitol. its sole mission is to oversee the well-being of both representatives and senators. well, on monday the u.s. senate is due back in session in person on the orders of the 78-year-old republican leader of the senate, mitch mcconnell. senators will be forced to make their way back to washington, d.c. in person despite the fact that yesterday was the single deadliest day yet in the epidemic in washington, d.c. and despite the fact that nearly half of all senators are age 65 or older. six of them are age 80 or older. seven if you count lamar alexander who is about to turn 80 very soon. per the cdc, that means they're at higher risk, right?

nearly half the senate. and now the attending physician, whose only job is to oversee the well-being of representatives and senators, the attending physician is now sounding a foghorn about this plan to bring all the senators back on monday, warning that, quote, coronavirus tests will be available for staffers and senators who are ill, but there are not enough to proactively test all 100 senators. oh, and even if a senator can get a test, it will take days to get the results. never theless, they're all coming back to work together. late this afternoon, the attending physician gave senators a list of things they should do before monday, like installing sneeze guards and rearranging their office furniture so people don't sit close together, re-engineering air flow so the virus doesn't spread that way. i mean no rush, right? plenty of time to get that stuff done this weekend. so a high-risk and kind of high-importance group is about to board planes and trains back to a city that's blinking red with coronavirus, and when they get there, there aren't enough

tests to figure out who has it before they all get together. seems like an excellent plan. watch this space. the ups and downs of frequent mood swings can plunge you into deep, depressive lows. or, give you unusually high energy, even when depressed. overwhelmed by bipolar depression? ask about vraylar. some medications only treat the lows or the highs. vraylar effectively treats depressive,

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we go tonight, if you by any chance have some information that you could share about the politicization or artificial weakening of scientific investigations of meat plant coronavirus outbreaks, or if you have some information to share about nursing home in your area or if your community is doing something to help or support first responders or health care providers and it's something you think maybe everyone should do or we should all know about, i want to know about that. i want you to tell me. if there is ever anything you think that we should know here on this show, please tell us about it. go to www.sendittorachel.com. no story is too small, no tip goes unnoticed. i mean it. it's time for a special hour, "life in the time of coronavirus" hosted by dr. zeke emanuel and the great ali vel