supporters, and just about nobody else. it's like an os trifrp. the country is burning, the country is burning and they're fiddling. they're fiddling. nero. but i think hoove ser the best analogy. >> an ostrich named nero hoover. chuck schumer, from your home in brooklyn tonight, thank you for making time tonight. thank you. >> thank you, chris. good to be with you. >> that is "all in" for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening, rachel. >> good evening, chris. thanks my friend. much appreciated. have a good weekend. >> you bet. you too. >> thanks to you at lome for joining us this hour. happy to have you here especially on a friday night. and for your troubles, as a reward, for you being here on a friday night, i would like to thank you for being here, by introducing you to warnell vega. watch this. god bless him. >> hello, my name is parnell

vega. i tested positive for covid-19. i have been in the hospital for about a week and a half. and today i get to go home. i am so excited. when i first got here, trouble breathing, coughing, everything. i feel so much better now. and i am happy. thank you to the doctors, to the nurses, thank you to everybody who helped me get better. >> you're looking good. >> thank you. >> so i just made it home. first time being back home, after being in the hospital for so many days. i'm excited to be back with my family. they're happy to have me home. i'm happy to be home. and one of the things i'm looking forward to doing first

is having a good night sleep. it has been a while. so i think a good night sleep is well deserved. >> my name is raymond sangster. i'm a covid survivor. i was admitted to mount sinai hospital on the fifth of april. just prior to being hospitalized, for three days prior to hospitalized, my mom died of covid. and then i was hospitalized here on the fifth. i came in here, i spent almost, a little more than 72 hours on the ventilators, and now i'll be able to go home to my family,

just after coming out of icu after one week, and now ready to go home to my wife and my kids. >> whoo! >> bye. take care. >> love you guys. >> love you too. >> love you guys. love you too. that's warnell vegga, the first gentleman there and raymond sangster, whose mom died from coronavirus three days before he was hospitalized with it himself, and was eventually put in the icu and himself intubated, but now, has gone home. godspeed to you both. you know, we keep asking front line health care workers across the country to send us their thoughts, send us things in their own words, send us their own view on their own work right

now, what they're going through, i think it is an interesting peak into the mind set of these front line health workers who are risking so much for all of the rest of us, that a lot of what they keep sending us is portraits of their patients, their parents who are surviving it and making it out of the, their patients who are surviving and making it out of the hospital. and i think it is also rel relevatory for us civilians on the outside, to see how important those successes are, and not just for the patients and their families but also for those working themselves to death, trying to help save people who from a disease that is very unpredictable and very cruel and just relentless in terms of the number of americans it has sickened and killed and today celebrate these moments which i think is important for us to know about them. this is another one we just got from indiana, watch this one.

chrg chrg chr . >> the gentleman was discharged today after april 24th, and spent time in critical care, and discharged today joyfully after spending about two weeks in the hospital. 300 patients, it an enormous number. his discharge speaks to all of the patients who have been cared for. you think about the number of hours of care that have been involved & getting to the number 300, that is an incredible number. it's not just his discharge. it's everybody who has come before him as well.

for the nurses on our unit, it is an incredible sense of pride, rising to this occasion, to take on the biggest understakitakingy lifetime and we continually adjust to all of the needs that are required of us. i could not be more proud. >> i could not be more proud. that's tracy davis, she's an rn in indianapolis, at indiana university health methodist hospital which has been a really hard-hit hospital in indiana. the indianapolis star today profiling what they call the slow disaster of a covid crush at that particular hospital in indiana. and so darn right, you know, they are going to celebrate when their 300th patient survives, and is able to leave the hospital, after all it takes from all of these health care workers, to try to keep people alive once this thing has gotten a hold of them. because we keep just hearing, over and over again, especially as this thing has sprawled and

grown, into this enormous epidemic, that we've got in our country, it's grown from march, and has stretched on all the way through april and is now stretching on through may, it just keeps going, and the people who are doing the physical medical work to try to keep americans alive, who are worst hit by this, they just keep telling us, i feel like they need us to know what it is that they need to keep going, but also, just how hard this work is. >> it's been a very, it's been a very difficult experience. i've been a nurse for years. i've never experienced anything like this. i've never experienced this much emotion. i find it difficult to talk

still. i think the one good thing that i've had so far is knowing, that i talk about my nursing staff and how it's very helpful to talk to them, and they've been a great support, but it's been more than that. you know, i think that we help each other get through this, because we share the same experiences. you know, we all have families that we have to go to, we all make sacrifices, by not seeing them, for long periods of time, it's been, it's been very difficult and i don't think that, i hope that nobody has to experience like what we've been experiencing, but i'm going to

to go home, i'm going to listen to some music, like i said earlier, i'm going to zoom with some of my friends, for just, to look forward to seeing my son tomorrow. >> lyn is an icu nurse at mount sinai west in new york. she herself got infected and got sick with coronavirus early on in early march. she has now recovered and she is back on the job. i also want you to meet josephine stevens. josephine stevens works in port jefferson, louisiana, she actually works in a dental clinic, in port jefferson, louisiana. but with the epidemic descending with particular ferocity, upon louisiana, josephine moved over to do something entirely different, at saint charles hospital, in port jefferson. she trained to work with covid patients who can't have their families with them. they can't have their families with them, they can't have any

visitors, josephine is now the one who sits with them, and facilitates face time conversations, conversations via phone and ipad between these very ill patients and their families at home. she is the one who helps them bedside to connect and communicate their last wishes in some cases and to say goodbye, if that time has come, if that time comes. that is josephine's job now, because everybody's job has changed in the epidemic. >> three north. and everybody's been very different since covid-19 came into play. about five weeks ago. everybody's working very hard to save as many lives as they can. and it's really scary. it's just heartbreaking, and it is really hard.

it's just very, very different. you'll definitely look at life in a different way. you'll appreciate every breath you take, and every family member that you have. very hard >> i just finished working a 16-hour shift. i came in at 7:00 a.m. and it is approximately 11:00 p.m. now. the day started off pretty rough. came in running. ran to a patient's code. realized that the day starts unknown every single day. i'm very grateful for the team i work beside. we all work really hard. we look out for one another. and we're very grateful for one another. it is kind of the family that i built, especially since my entire family lives out of state. i haven't been able to spend much time in the last two months with them. i keep coming back though. i keep coming back because the patients need us.

but the biggest thing is, the patients who need us, they need us to also stay hea you. the biggest concern for the public is reopening our cities and getting things open, for all of us, including me and i want to, go i want to be able to go out to dinner and do something, but unfortunately, we can't right now. we really have to get this virus under control. to prevent it from spreading out, even further than what it has. >> 7:45. the end of a 12-hour shift. today was definitely busier. we will to intubate a few patients with suspected covid disease. it seemed like the volume is ticking up again a bit, although not as bad as it was a few weeks ago. you can hear the noise, it is

still somewhat lower than it was when i last reported a few weeks ago. so i'm hopeful of keeping things under control, although we still have to maintain our vigilance and not let our guard down, because these sick people are still coming in. just not to the same degree. stay safe. stay healthy. stay strong. stay home. >> dr. ernest patti from the saint barnabus medical center from the bronx. you recognize him. we have been checking in with dr. patti every week for a few weeks now. he is the emergency medicine chief at the very hard-hit emergency room at saint barnabus in new york and that dispatch was the past week and you can hear from him the sort of mix of hope and worry, you know, hope that the numbers won't tick back up to be as bad as they were, but also some worry from him, as what he describes as the noises,

he said the noises from all of the ventilators, start to ping again, scon tantly in the background, constantly in the background in his emergency room as they continue to get new patient who are in acute distress. in addition to sending us that dispatch from the saint barnabus emergency room this week you will want to see what else he sent us this week. he sent us a big multi-part bundle of hope. first of all, he, too, sent us one of these videos. this video shows the release of the 500th coronavirus patient from st. barnabus, the 500th patient who had beaten the virus and released from the hospital. patient number 500 gets to go home and get out of the hospital alive and you can see the health workers are so proud, right? even the firefighters came out for the 500th patient to celebrate his milestone. so dr. patti sent us that. dr. patti sense these pictures

of his co-workers from st. barnabus outside after sending off that 500th patient, trying to encourage everyone with signs that say keep calm and think positively. we will overcome this. dr. patti also sent us pictures of the stuff that he and his colleagues have been sent from all over america, by just regular americans, trying to lend support, to try to bolster and support and show a desire to help the st. barnabus doctors and nurses and what they're doing and it is an amazing collection of stuff from all sorts of people who perceive all sorts of needs a woman named marge in silver springs, maryland, sent in respiratory equipment, a respirator, and masks. dr. patti received what he called an enormous box of hawaiian-themed gifts, and treats, from darlene in honolulu, who used to live in

new york city and wanted to send that. iris who works at planned parenthood in ohio, sent the st. barnabus emergency room some masks. beth in chicago sent what she called her own personal supply of masks. so you see the appreciation, both of people sending that stuff, to st. barnabus but also the appreciation of this physician, saying do you believe people are being so kind? it's nice, i mean that mutualaity i think is nice to see, but i mean, honestly, big picture, in the news, things are terrible, 1.3 million cases in this country, we are over 77,000 american deaths at this point. the unemployment rate today hit 14.7%, which is the worst level of unemployment in this country, since the great depression. we do not need to qualify it any other way. the associated press tonight reporting that the highest levels of the white house, there

was political intervention to block the cdc from issuing practical guidance about how businesses and services could safely reopen, without risking people getting infected there. the white house at the highest levels intervened, to block the cdc from releasing that guidance to the american people, which would save lives, because the white house is encouraging all sorts of states to open up. the cdc produced guidelines on how to do that safely. the white house blocked it. and then the white house overtly lied about it when they were asked, when they were asked about the cdc guidance, they said oh, that guidance wasn't actually approved by the cdc. actually, the cdc had approved it. and the white house blocked it. things are bad. i get it. if there is one thing that is worse than an aastonishingly botched response to an existentially challenging pandemic, that is killing tens of thousands of americans on an ongoing basis, if there is one

thing that is worse than it's maybe an astonishingly botched response to that kind of an epidemic that just keeps getting worse over time, right? where the public health people and the scientists are actually exerting less control over the country's response over time, rather than more. where the scientists and the public health people who actually know to what to do are getting more and more muzzled, as the terrible response of our government continues, and actually gets worse day by day. so i got it. everything's terrible. i know. and we're going to cover a bunch of that stuff over the course of this hour tonight, including a look at what might be the worst state in the country in terms of how the epidemic response is being botched, and how the people of that state are being prevented from knowing the truth about the scale of the disaster there. things are bad. i know. we will cover, we will still continue covering all of the badness of it, but for a hot second here, on this friday night, i do just want to cover one piece of this that is

something constructive and innovative and good, so forgive me. let's go back to dr. patti at st. barnabus for a second. you might remember something that caught my attention in this photo that we showed from dr. patti a week ago. and you see, he's got his respirator on, the face shield at the top of his head, the ppe gown, the gloves on, but you can see the sticker of himself, the sticker of his own face, that little picture of a smiling dr. patti, that is put on his medical gown as a sticker. dr. patti told us that somebody sent that to him, among all of the people who have been sending him an his staff great stuff, somebody sent that picture of him of his head shot, so that his coronavirus patients could see his face, and know that there was a human being behind all of that protective gear. turns out there is a kind of amazing story behind that. that sticker, with dr. patti's photo on it was sent to him by somebody who never met him in real life. her name is laurie justice

shockett, an artist with a medical degree and married to an e.r. doctor and the mom and the stepmom of two more e.r. doctors. she is connected. and right now, one of the things she has started doing, is making ppe portraits for medical staff who wear full protective gear when taking care of their patients, so you, the doctor, or you the nurse, send her the smiling photo of yourself, she will print, laminate and mail a sheet of ppe portraits to stick on the outside of your ppe gear so your terrified patients who can't actually see really any of your face, they can at least have some idea of who you are, and what you really look like. and where this idea came from, i had no idea, was the ebola outbreak in liberia, in 2014 and 2015. an american artist named mary beth heiferman who teaches at occidental college, she was moved and intrigued by the images of the full space suit-like ppe, that health

workers were wearing, while caring for people with ebola in liberia. and she started studying it. and she ultimately created the ppe portrait project. subscribing it as an art intervention designed to improve ebola care. and this was, this was not a whim. it was not a small thing. it was not an easy thing. it was a deeply-research, grant-funded project, focusing on the psychological effects of isolation on patients and ultimately the beneficial effects of puncturing that isolation by allowing them to connect better with their providers. mary beth herrerman, the artist was invited by the government of liberia to come work with doctors in ebola treatment centers in 2014 and 2015 and she told us that she has always hoped that what she started doing in liberia, these few years ago, would become best medical practice for all kinds of patients who have to experience the isolation of never seeing people outside ppe.

seeing only masked faces for days at a time. well, now, this epidemic that we are in, appears to be putting her idea into effect, putting her idea at the center of consciousness, at least, in more and more places. it was her work, the ppe portrait project, in liberia, for the ebola crisis, that inspired laurie, who saw dr. patti at st. barnabus here on this show, and she sent dr. patti his portrait and that is why we were able to see him wear it. the same work also inspired a stanford university researcher who works on quality improvement of patient care. as the covid epidemic drove tens of thousands of patients into american hospitals, and american front-line health providers everywhere, were into full ppe whenever they could get their hands on, it the stanford researcher, katie brown johnson, got in touch with mary beth

happerman, and now they are working together on a project at stanford that provides ppe portraits to hospitals across the country. this very a dic version of the project on the web which is basically a template that health care workers can use to do this. i will also tell you that we got kind of a hilarious offshoot of this idea from a brother and sister team named linda and jack. jack was recently being treated for cancer at the hospital, during the covid-19 epidemic, and after seeing all of the medical workers dressed head to toe in protective gear, jack and his sister linda and their other siblings decided to design their own sort of home-grown, home-conceived version of this very fancy high level art world, high level medical world idea. and what jack and linda and their siblings came up with is a version of it that is sort of equal parts awesome and hilarious and slightly

unsettling. look. behold. it is the selfie mask. this isn't you printing a portrait of your straight to camera smiling face on a sticker that you put on your gown, this is you approximating the look of your face, as kind of a mask overlay, it's like wearing a face suit of yourself, on your face. they tell us they've now made a bunch of them at the hospital jack is being treated at for cancer, this is jack's oncologist wearing his. look at that. key shave that goatee and nobody would ever know. jack and linda's brother andy helped them come up with a fairly simple way to augment a normaled 2 image of a person's face oochs so it could wrap around a traditional mask and traditional face covering along with a link to the standard template for health care workers to get a link for their ppe gowns and we'll post a link on the selfie mask web tool that lets you up load an image and

print one for yourself just in case you too want to stop walking the dog and looking like this and instead want to start walking the dog wearing your own face on your face. right? i tell you, it's like equal parts hilarious and awesome and unsettling. but it comes from this idea that is deeply rooted in patients needing that human connection with their providers. and it turns out to have pretty good data, pretty good databases, in terms of how this can help patients in what may be the worst and most scared time in their lives. joining us now, is katie johnson, the research scientist at the stanford university school of medicine that i just talked about who helped revive the project for the ebola crisis now put in the coronavirus era, and thanks for joining us tonight.

and i have to ask you how much have i got wrong or i explained the basics of it that is still coherent. >> you're still coherent, rachel. thank you so much for having me on the show. >> tell me about the way this idea, which is sort of cute, and intriguing, and interesting, and warm-hearted, how it ultimately translates, i mean you are a serious researcher in terms of patient outcome, and the way that patients interact with their health care providers and how that can ultimately affect the course of their care, what does your research show? what do we know about how this improves things for patients? >> so i'm a social scientist, and very interested in human connection, and patient provider connection. and so with the fear and isolation that was coming up, around covid, we knew we needed to address that right away, so the research behind this, a warm

and a competent provider, connects with the healing mechanisms within a person's own body. and ppe, obviously, it's straight up and down competence, it tells you competence right away, the only warmth that you might get would be a ppe per trait, and so that's really some of the basis of the research that has us interested in pursuing this. >> i can imagine, i mean just seeing dr. patti wearing his portrait, i mean we had talked to him in his apartment, so we knew what he looked like, and then we had received these video diaries from him, in the e.r. at st. barnabus where he is completely covered up and sometimes would very to use subtitles in order to be able to convey what it is that he is saying. there is that barrier in terms, but being able to see him, you are able to make that human connection, back to the guy who you recognize, or the guy who you might think you could know,

rather than having this almost alien interaction, even while somebody is doing their best to save your life. i mean i think even those of us who aren't patients sort of inherently get how this might work. >> absolutely. i think it's really valuable for patients. i think the exciting thing that we've been, we shouldn't have been surprised, but we've been surprised at how important this has been for health care workers, so health care workers experience a huge amount of burnout in general, and we're really hoping that this, well, we hear from them already, that this really helps them feel humanized and reconnected and those are the types of things that will help our health care workers, those are the types of feelings that will help our health care workers in the long haul that the covid is calling

for. >> katie, thank you very much for helping us understanding this. this obviously can toured our imagination but it helps to understand patient outcomes. it is intriguing. thanks for helping us understand. >> thanks for having me, rachel. all right, much more ahead here tonight. stay with us. uch more ahead here tonight stay with us people that liberty mutual customizes your insurance, so you only pay for what you need! [squawks] only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty. ♪ when taking a break from everyday life is critical to everyone's health, there is one thing we can all do together: complete the 2020 census. your responses are critical to plan for the next 10 years of health care, infrastructure, and education. let's make a difference, together, by taking a few minutes to go online to 2020census.gov. it's for the well-being of your community and will help shape america's future.

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mr. president, i'm so grateful for the governor's leadership in iowa.

so very impressed with her team. iowa has been leading the pack. iowa, with governor reynold's leadership has been a success story, because whether it be the mitigation efforts, social distancing efforts, and now rolling out testing at a record pace in the state, iowa has stayed in front of this effort. >> are we talking about the same iowa? vice president mike pence at the white house this week praising the great success story that is iowa. iowa leading the pack. rolling out testing at a record pace. got lots of testing troubles in iowa. people are waiting two weeks plus for their results. i'm not sure why the white house thinks that things are going awesome in iowa. they do have testing trouble. they have several of the fastest-growing outbreaks in the country in iowa. they did terribly with social distancing. they actually never did a stay-at-home order. and they have lots of, i mean don't take it from me, i will

say the local press in that part of the country itself appears mystified by this characterization from the white house that iowa is doing great. the quad city times out of eastern iowa ran with this headline, quote, pence calls iowa "success story" as virus-related deaths and hospitalizations climb. the des moines register made a similar point. quote, although pence this week called iowa a success story in its handling of the pandemic, rates of infection continue to climb across the state. one columnist with the omaha world in nebraska, tweeted a picture of that success story line from pence with this, as the caption. are we in the upside down? against that backdrop, vice president pence visited iowa today, he has been arriving an hour late, after the news broke that his press secretary had tested positive for coronavirus. because of that, other staff members on board his flight were asked to de-plane and go get tested. so the vice president was late.

by the time he actually landed in iowa, iowa was dealing with a flood of headlines about one of the meat processing plants in the state that pence had been bragging about on wednesday at the white house, bragging about how great it was that it was reopening. ahead of yesterday's reopening of the tyson meat processing plant in waterloo, iowa, the governor kim reynolds had soberly announced that 400 workers a the that plant had tested positive. that was yesterday. today, as pence was finally belatedly landing, the state was grappling with headlines about the fact that it is not actually 400 workers from that one plant like the governor said just yesterday, it turns out to be more than a thousand workers at that one plant in waterloo, iowa, who have become infected. more than a thousand workers from one plant. that's not to mention their families, their community contacts, nothing. just the workers, over a thousand cases, one plant. iowa. more than double since the governor's sober assurances yesterday. i mean for whatever reason, the white house seems very invested in lawding iowa as a great

success story. if i had to pick a state, i wouldn't pick them. and i mentioned the omaha world herald, and the reaction of their columnist to that characterization about iowa, and that whole part of the country is having trouble honestly, particularly in places where those states come together. one of the reasons that sioux city iowa, is dealing with one of the worse outbreaks in the whole country is thought to be because of a huge meat processing plant across the river in dakota county, nebraska. that county, dakota county, just saw a record surge in new cases, the largest number of new cases one day yet, they have 361 new positives in one day, and that is a county with only 20,000 people in it. we don't know how many of those positive cases are workers from that dakota county plant, which also just reopened, the plant is not announcing how many of its workers are infected. nebraska's governor says the plants don't have to say how many of their workers have tested positive. because it's a business decision.

it's their call. but that county, dakota county, just across the missouri river, from sioux city, iowa, dakota county does have a population of less than 21,000 people, and they are up over 1400 cases overall now. i mean not testing in the first place. not allowing test results to be made public when there is testing. i mean denying that these outbreaks exist or that they attend to any specific place or workplace is a bad strategy. it's a specific kind of bad though. it's the kind of bad that one nebraska state senator is now calling a political coverup in his state. he joins us next, stay with us. i deliver that's a trip that family doesn't have to take out of their house. it relieves stress off of me to let me know i'm doing something good for the community, not just papa john's. i'm doing something good for the community,

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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. had week, nebraska's republican governor pete ricketts announced the state would no longer release any data on coronavirus case numbers in

specific meat processing plants. he said counties would have to get a signoff from the original plants if they wanted to continue releasing that kind of information. the governor made that announcement, i should say, just as at least one major plant in the state known to have at least dozens of cases was about to receive the results from testing all of its workers. this announcement from governor ricketts, drew incoming fire from a bunch of places in the state including the state senator adam who represents parts of lincoln, nebraska. he said that ricketts shutting down public information on the spread of coronavirus inside nebraska's meat packing plants is quote commonly referred to as a political coverup. quote there is no legitimacy that this is a privacy concern. understanding where outbreak are occurring is important for the public and the government to know and to understand from a public safety and mitigation point of view. no data equals no spread equals victory and will eventually say there is no zero new cases in

plants, sort of like the claim that zero nebraskaens in prisons have the virus only because we have tested zero inmates. state senator from nebraska, thanks for being here, thanks for making time to join us tonight. >> thank you for having me. >> so i am fixated on your state because i feel like governor ricketts is mounting a response to this epidemic that is troubling to me, and it seems, even though a lot of states have not great responses, but it seems particularly troubling, is the lack of data that's being released to the public, the state is not releasing data on individual nursing homes. it's not releasing data on individual meat plants now. and as you point out, they're not even testing any prisoners in the state. i want to ask if you feel like that national concern is warranted at this point, from those of us in the rest of the country, looking in on what is going on in your state. >> absolutely i think the national concern is warranted

and it's warranted because just releasing aggregate data is dangerous to the public safety, because we can't tell, as antit are doing a good or bad job. an quite frankly, right now, we should be building trust, not keeping certain things in secrecy. and that's pretty important. because we need to make sure that we are allocating scarce resources to where we need them the most. and if we're not providing specific data, the public doesn't know where the actual problems are. which means that organizations in the state, like nebraska advocacy, the workers center, can't provide critical training and services for employees and employers. and public officials like me don't fully understand what the scope of the problem is, and how well we're doing. all of this plays into the narrative that the governor wants, which is that we're ready to open back up. that things are on the upswing, when we haven't even hit our peak yet. >> we are seeing, in a number of states, varying levels of transparency when it comes to

how big the outbreaks are in individual plants. there are federally-required guidelines, on these things. there's guidelines but there is no actual rules that the plants have to follow. some county health departments or state health departments have been able to exact promises, from individual plants that they will test all of their workers, and that they will make those results public, nebraska seems to be the least transparent of all states, in terms of the number of plants that aren't saying anything publicly, and where the information that we've got about problem outbreaks comes from anonymous tipsters, comes from journalists ferreting out the information, and it seems like it may ultimately come from individual county health departments defying this line from the governor now that they can't release this information and they have to defer to these businesses. it sort of sounds like things are getting worse in nebraska and not better over time. >> it is getting worse, and you wouldn't know it from the governor's office. but you would know it from the local public health officials that are telling the truth, that

are coming out and saying hey, listen, we have major problems, in our state right now, like the republican mayor of grand island. i think it's also important to note that if we don't know exactly where the problems are, we can't allocate resources in order to help people. and that only plays into the governor's narrative again, that we're supposed to be ready and open for business when in fact, we are in the middle of our outbreak. and that's very concerning, because the governor seems more concerned about protecting the reputation of businesses, which is one of the stated reasons, why this information needs to be private. rather than saving the lives of nebraskaens and protecting the public health and public safety of our state. >> adam, state senator from the great state of nebraska, i'm concerned so much about nebraska, because i like nebraska a lot, because i really am worried. >> thank you. >> about one of the worst managed large epidemics in the

country. i know you've been doing your damnedest to squawk about it and try to improve it. keep me apprised and keep covering this and we will stay on the story. >> thank you, rachele. >> we'll be right back. the sto >> thank you, rachele. >> we'll be right back r brands >> we'll be right back. um... >> we'll be right back rinsing b. for sparkling-clean dishes, the first time. cascade platinum. what if your clothes could stay fresh for weeks?t smell clean? now they can! this towel has already been used and it still smells fresh. pour a cap of downy unstopables into your washing machine before each load and enjoy fresher smelling laundry for up to 12-weeks.

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in, i think is a clarifying moment. senator pat roberts is a republican. the senior u.s. senator from the great state of kansas at a senate hearing, he is expressing concerns how the operation of meat processing plants is being apeffected at all of these covid-19 outbreaks happening at the plants for some reason. here is what he think the evs t problem is. >> the problem is our workers. this morning they showed up in the plant not in numbers we hoped for but we at least keep the meat packing plant open. and what's happening is that they're not catching the virus at the meat packing plant. it's afterwards.

>> it's afterwards. the problem is the workers. they're not getting infected at the plant, nothing is happening at the plant. it's these people after they go home, it's just a coincidence that all the meat packing plants all over the country are having huge outbreaks among their workers. the problem is nothing happening at the plants but coincidentally they have terrible worker people who are getting infected elsewhere victimizing the plants. health and human services secretary alex aczar echoed this argument this week on a call with members of congress. he told them outbreaks at meat pack k plaing plants are due to home and social aspects of people's lives. not getting infected at work but at home and coming to work at the same place, it's so weird. then there was wisconsin this week a lawyer for the democratic governor of the state was making an argument to the state supreme court this week about why

governor tony's stay-at-home orders were important and shouldn't be overturned. the court's conservative chief justice interrupted the lawyer that seems to clarify and sum up what is going on here. >> the glasses in brown county in the span of two weeks surged over tenfold from 60 to 800 and that's two weeks that would be required for emergency rule making. so look -- >> these are due to the meat packing. that's where the brown county got the flair, it wasn't just the regular folks in brown county. >> giant outbreak in brown county. it wasn't the regular folks there. it was just the meat packing people. not the regular people. so you can't really call that a point of concern. it's not the regular. we're starting to get a better sense of why these huge outbreaks in the middle of our country seem not to be causing

any concern whatsoever among lots of political leaders. at least no concern beyond what effect the outbreaks may have on the plants themselves as opposed to the thousands of people who work in them who are all getting infected there. those workers are thought of as apparently being not regular in a too different, not part of the real community therefore not really real people. butparticularly care what happens to this group of regular people but another to decide it has nothing to do with, no effect on the rest of us, and because of that, i want to show you something that was sent to us today by a data visualization company. this shows the meat packing plant in indiana. this is a plant you probably heard something about. it shut down and 900 workers

tested positive for covid-19. 40%. this is in cass county, indiana that opened yesterday. all those tiny blewish white dots in there are people's mobile devices giving off a signal at that facility. tectonix used data to create an animation of what happened to those mobile devices and the people attached to them over the month -- the course of the month of march. those devices traveled out into the surrounding counties and states and ultimately also across almost the entire country by the end of march, people who had been inside that tyson plant that would be diagnosed with 900 coronavirus infections just among people who work there, people had traveled to nearly every state in the nation. and it makes sense, actually. meat processing plants are in the middle of a sprawling national supply chain. the trump administration and

leaders in these states with meat packing plant outbreaks may want to blame the outbreaks on the workers in these plants and describe them as no big deal because it's just those people but however much you pay for that at the end of your life when you answer for the way you have lived, right now that sort of prejudi prejudice and short s will not make the outbreaks go away and won't contain the outbreaks to those workers. there needs to be a better plan for this. and the clock is ticking. it's best we stay apart for a bit, but that doesn't mean you're in this alone. we're automatically refunding our customers a portion of their personal auto premiums. we're also offering flexible payment options for those who've been financially affected by the crisis. we look forward to returning to something that feels a little closer to life as we knew it, but until then you can see how we're here to help at libertymutual.com/covid-19. [ piano playing ]

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do you need a best new thing in the world today? i do. we got one that's plural. may i introduce the newest members of the rachel maddow family? oliver james and henry joseph. oliver james is the elder brother by four whole minutes, which we are hoping and expecting him to low lord over henry joseph their whole happen by lives. both with perfect as you can fee and healthy and already speaking up on their own behalf. they will of course, be the beginning of a whole new adventure for our beloved associate producer johanna. we're happy for you and mike and these bundles of joy. it's a crazy time