night. "the 11th hour" with brian williams starts right now. thank you very much. it was really nice to be away. it both felt like a visit to >> so, it was really, really nice. i'm very grateful for it. but i am back. and honestly, now, coming back to this news day, now, i am more than ready to turn my brain off again, because, you know, you come back. you know, i will just say. here's the thing that should

never, ever, ever, ever happen. from the white house. not only should this never happen from the white house, it should never happen anywhere, anyone is in any position of supposed authority. i mean what happened today should happen from the white house podium. but it also like shouldn't happen from a teacher's desk. it shouldn't happen from the voice of a cop giving you a parking ticket. it shouldn't happen from the p.a. of a supermarket about which car has its lights on. this shouldn't come from anybody who purports to give you any information from any purported authority but here it was today, from the mouth of the president of the united states. just winging it. just making it up as he goes along because who cares, right? >> the united states stands ready to assist lebanon, very

good relationship with the people of lebanon, we will be there to help. it looks like a terrible attack. >> it looks like a terrible attack? what? it was an attack, said the president? the news today out of lebanon was absolutely terrifying, right? this huge, huge blast in the densely packed city of beirut. at least dozens of people killed. thousands of people known to be injured. a significant area of that big and important city just decimated. it was an attack? the president today speaking from the white house podium called this, quote, a terrible attack. to be clear, before the president said that today from the white house, there had been no publication at all that this was an attack. that this was some sort of terrorist or military assault on the city of beirut. i mean, when the president of

the united states, speaking from the white house podium says, this is an attack, that's a huge piece of news. that's a huge deal. that's like announcing the start of the war kind of news from the mouth of president of the united states. except, with this president, nah, turns out, ehh, grain of salt, he makes things up. he didn't know it was an attack even when saying it was an attack. he didn't know, he was spitballing-ish. >> i want to follow up on the coronavirus question on lebanon. you called this an attack. are you confident this was an attack and not an accident? >> well, it seemed like it. >> well, it seemed like it. it seemed like it. when i announced that huge blast in lebanon today was a terrible attack, i was just -- well, you know, seems like maybe.

don't listen to me on stuff like this, i really do make things up and blurt them out as they occur to me. i mean, it is very nice to have had a few days away. it is nice to be back from a week's vacation. nothing got better while i was gone. that was absolutely atrocious today at the white house. i mean, what other president did stuff like that? this one does that as a matter of course. over of the course of the week, whether you're a pessimist, i think we have an indication to believe that long-standing problems that require fixing eventually gopher time get fixed even if progress is halting. it doesn't work that way. over the course of the week that i was gone, in fact, i think the coronavirus response from this president, from this white house, actually got worse.

i mean, the weird attacks and conspiracy theories about anthony fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor, those absolutely have continued apace. if anything, they appear to have accelerated over the past week. but now in the past week, those attacks have also extended to the white house's handpicked covid chief, dr. deborah birx, she's now getting the same treatment. and with over 150,000 americans dead, with seeming 5 million infections, 5 million infections, more than any other country on earth, the increasing chaos and incompetence of the white house matters in life and death terms. i mean, it matters for the number overall number of americans dead and sick and unemployed and infected and scared. and it also matters to every single american family that are trying to figure out if they're going to be working, if their

kids are going to be in school. here's dr. deborah birx, like her or don't, she's the head doctor on the white house's coronavirus response team. here's dr. deborah birx on cnn's "state of the union." quote, if you have high case load and active community spread we are asking people to distance learn at this moment to get the pandemic under control. she says if you have a lot of cases if you have the active virus in your state, well, school buildings should stay closed for now and kids should do distance learning until community president is stopped. it's not a mandate from dr. birx or anything, but she's explaining this as a clear scientific principle. about how we should think about whether schools should open, how we should think about what criteria should make decisions about schools opening. this is her telling us how we should think about schooling and

whether or not kids are remote learning. you can't open schools unless your case numbers are wide down. that's dr. deborah birx speaking, you would think, on behalf of the white house. but then here's the president at 11:30 last night, all caps, open the schools! that's his reason, scientifically, his argument. open the schools! so, that's what we've got. as american policy on coronavirus in schools. good luck every family in america who's agonizing over this. good luck and god bless. this is the president who we have for this time. your kids were never again be the age that they are. they will never again be this age going into this grade. thinking about this time in their education. but there will always have been this president at this time in their lives. right?

screaming into the void, open the schools! even as his own coronavirus coordinator tells the public that we cannot do that until it's safe, and here's why. and this kind of mishmash should shape your views of who we have as president in this country, but it also makes a real difference in the way we try to handle this and the way we try to save lives or not. to have this bad, incoherent increasingly insane leadership on this subject screw things up terribly. every single day. every single day another thousand deaths in the country. every single day, another 50,000-plus cases. having bad leadership messes things up. having confused leadership messes things up. take, for example, the great state of tennessee, the same as the great dr. deborah birx has

advised tennessee looking at how things are going, they should climb back down. she has advised tennessee that they should close bars and limit indoor dining at restaurants. but if you run tennessee, why should you listen the top doctor tapped for that. the president picked her for that job and he doesn't listen to her. he's now publicly dragging her the way he publicly dragged dr. fauci. republican u.s. senate candidates are competing with each other during their primary process as to who can rip dr. fauci with the worst insult. who can effusively promote that coronavirus drug, as if it's a cure for coronavirus, even though it's not a cure for coronavirus. when you look at tennessee, who cares it dr. deborah birx should

close the bars and roll back in-door dining. why should you poll thfollow th advice, even though it's coming from the top doctor hand-picked for that? so the governor of tennessee heard that advice from dr. deborah birx, no, you think i should close down bars and limit in-door dining? no, i'm not going to do it. i don't want to. and who's to tell him any different, really, who's to tell him? i should a that tennessee had a 139% rise in coronavirus in the month of july. but now it's august so now maybe august will be great. about two weeks ago, the trump administration, specifically, the part of the administration that regulates nursing homes, they announced they would require weekly tests for all

nursing home staff, in any state, where the positivity rate was over 5%. well, that's about two-thirds of all u.s. states now. and so what that means in practical terms is that there are thousands of nursing homes in the united states. in the more than 30 states where the positivity rate is over 5%. thousands of nursing homes that purchase the trump administration are supposed to be testing all of their staff, every week. and the trump administration says we are requiring you to do so. thousands of nursing homes in more than 30 states. how many of them, do you think are weekly testing their staff right now? how's that going? we are former nenowhere near ab every nursing home in every one of those states the capacity to test all of their staff every week. but the trump administration says they're requiring that. saying that they're requiring that is apparently the trump administration's plan for stopping tens of thousands of more americans from dieing in

nursing home. right? that's their plan, to say that they're requiring that. which is about as realistic as me flying home from the studio on the back of a giant rainbow sequins unicorn. just saying that's what i'm going to do. saying what can be done so that it can happen that's the absence of a plan. it takes up the space where a plan should be. so, instead, nothing happens. in mississippi, teachers in mississippi are calling for schools in that state to stay on distance learning only until the state's positivity rate is under that same threshold as the nursing homes rule. they want 5% positivity or less in mississippi before they open up school buildings in that state. they want 5% or less. mississippi's positivity rate is currently more than quadruple that. mississippi's positivity rate

right now is currently over 20%. it's the worst in the country. nevertheless, mississippi's republican governor tate reeve has just announced even though there's a statewide mask rule which he announced with delay, even with 20%. with the teachers and the mississippi medical center have been call for that delay, he said, no, not willing to do that in mississippi. he decided, instead, he will tell students over grades seven and eight in eight specific counties that they should delay school by two weeks because that sounds like data? i mean, anyway, he's making it up on his own. who's to tell him different. if he got advice from the president on this. even the president wouldn't tell him to follow white house advice. the white house likes dragging

doctors for political effect. i will tell you among mississippi's problems right now it's not because they're approaching the highest per capita and their biggest hospitals are full already and have been full for weeks now. among mississippi's residents right now, so many mississippi residents are dying right now that the morgues in the state are overtopped. that's the headline, morgues are overflowing in mississippi and coroners are terrified. the head of mississippi's medical center is going to join us live in a few minutes. i'm very much looking forward to that. not to single out tennessee and mississippi, even states in other parts of the country, even states in other parts of the country that have done relatively well over the last weeks and months. massachusetts, for example, massachusetts brought its case numbers way, way down from what had been a scary peak in late april. but in massachusetts, numbers

have started going up as the numbers have gone back up. yeah, the positivity rate is roughly one-tenth the rate they've got in mississippi but the trend is going in the wrong direction. positivity cases are starting to rise. case numbers are starting to rise. anecdotal information suggests that hospitalizations are starting to become systematic as well. so epidemiologists in the state of massachusetts are now telling that state's governor charlie baker that he should go back to what works. he should go back to the so-called phase two operations, under before, where the case numbers were being held very low, and massachusetts was a model for the nation. go back to that. since governor baker said, no, i want to move forward, go to phase three, with in-door dining and the rest of it, that's when the numbers started going up. so why would you stick with that? one experting telling t"the

boston globe", i would back up to when i knew it worked. level two worked. level three didn't work. right. when your case numbers are going up, your positivity rate is going up, your hospitalizations and your death numbers are going to follow that trajectory, too. if that's the trend line you're on, it means what you're doing isn't working and you have to do something else. if you had been doing well and you stopped doing well, go back to what you were doing when you were doing well. not rocket science. we don't have a cure. all that we have are these hard things that we fight over, math, keeping restaurants closed. and having rules about gatherings. that's all we got. not rocket science. but you do the things that work. and when your numbers show you that new things that you're trying don't work, you stop doing them. but who's to tell you what to

do? who's to say? if you even got advice from the top doctor working with the hospitals on these issues, you should stick to her advice, the president is terrible now, dragging her for political effect, who's to tell you what to do, if you listen to the president? that said, in 91 days, we all get to decide if the guy who is currently in charge of how we're responding to this epidemic should stay in the job for four more years. or if democratic candidate joe biden would do better at this. it's honestly hard to know what it will be like for a president to stand for re-election with 200,000 dead americans as a key metric from his first term while he asks for a second term. but we're going to talk tonight about how some of that is going to work. and some of what we can see coming down the pike. and a lot of it is very

worrying, in terms of the institutions of our democracy and what we count on to keep us a constitutional republic. we're going to be talking tonight, for example, what appears to be one sort of shocking sign that the white house doesn't expect president trump to be here for a second term. back in april, the administration went to congress and told them that because of covid, they were going to need some more time to get the census done. instead of basically finishing up the census and turning in the results of it by the end of this year, they wanted a few months' extension. an extension into next spring to be able to get the thing done and compiled. and it honestly makes sense. the census is a huge undertaking. it involves thousands of people doing tons of shoe-leather work and much of the offices were closed because of the pandemic. so it makes sense that they would need time to finish it up.

the associate direct from the 2020 census recently did a briefing saying there was definitely not enough time for the census bureau to get this thing done properly on the original schedule, unavoidingly because of covid. and so, yeah, they needed the extension. but now a sudden about-face, a sudden u-turn from the trump administration, because i think they just realized what that means if they're going to take that extension that they asked for. the administration has suddenly just announced that they're not only not going to take that extra time they asked for, they're actually going to wrap up the whole census thing a month early. they're going to stop the count altogether next month. which on its surface is bizarre. they already said they're not going to get this done, because they're crunched. at vanita gupta points out she was just on with chris hayes on

msnbc. she points out that the census is calling it quits early, even as their response right now is the lowest its ever been. at this point in the process, they have counted fewer than us than ever before in the process. so why would they cut off the count early? they would not only need that extension, they would need to scale up what they're doing? why would they be cutting it back? on the surface it makes no sense, if you actually want to count everyone in the country, you need the extra time. and they should not only be taking the extension, they certainly shouldn't be stopping work early. i mean, the census is supposed to count everyone in the country. if that's what you want to do, what the trump administration is doing right now makes no sense. if, however, they're not really counting the whole country and if specifically, they're not interested in counting the people who are hardest to count. poor people, minorities,

marginalized populations. people who move a lot. people in homeless shelters, people who are hard to find. if the trump administration really doesn't want those people, because maybe they don't want those people to be counted. they don't want, for example, all of the consequences of those people to be counted which include federal funding for where those people live, right? getting congressional seats proportioned to where those people live. if, for example, you'd be happy with those people never getting counted at all, well, then, cutting out the cut early would convene the fact of people hardest to find, people hardest to lock down. but by wrapping this thing up early, right, rather than taking the extension that they were going to, by wrapping this thing up early, that also means they're going to be handing over defenseless data to the president who is in office this

term, not the one who will be in office next spring. under the deadline they had previously asked congress for, they'd be handing over the data to the white house in the spring which happens to be after the next inauguration. now, by walking away from that plan which they themselves said they needed because of covid, now, the data will be sent to the president by the end of this year, not next spring when joe biden very well could be in the oval office. as vanita gupta put it in "the washington post" op-ed, quote, in the event that president trump does not serve the next term cutting the census short would ensure that decisions about congressional apportionment are made under his presidency. what that looks like, the white house thinks president trump is going to lose, or at least they're hedging their bets and that means cutting the census short from even what they said

they needed. that's making sure that it's trump who will get the census data before biden is sworn in january. so it will be trump who can proclaim, yeah, a census looks good to me. and he can proclaim whose been counted where. and which states get congressional seats and which states live them based on who was counted and who was left out. it was the trumble administration itself who said they couldn't get it done in time. now they're like, screw it, let's not get it done in time. and at least republicans can grab extra seats in congress that way, from a deliberately bad count. that seems fair. let's do it that way. there are primaries under way today in michigan and missouri, arizona, kansas, washington state. there are worries in those states tonight. and around the country right now, and for the next 91 days, about whether the covid necessity of mail-in ballots is

another thing the president and his administration could be messing with. could try to mess with. could try to keep him and keep republicans in office. new york state prosecutors have just told the courts they need action in their subpoenas for the president's financial records because of their investigation into what they reference as, quote, extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the trump administration. the president just told axios in his bizarre jonathan plumb article played all day, oh, that's the best we can do. he also got off the white house briefing and said, look, lebanon was attacked, a terrible attack. right? you know, he makes things up. 91 days until the election, far

fewer than that before you and everyone you know starts voting by mail. healer we go. all at once. everything all at once. lots to get to tonight. senator amy klobuchar is going to join us next. stay with us.

we've been watching the president's efforts to undermine the november election playing out before our eyes for months now. we have the worst coronavirus epidemic on earth. keeping americans safe, therefore, means that as many americans as possible need to not crowd together in polling places november or any other time. people instead should vote by mail. and so, of course, the president has discouraged people from voting by mail. he's backed efforts to make it hard to vote by mail. he's been constantly promoting this live that mail voting is rife with fraud. he's now putting in a new postmaster general who is deliberately slowing down the mail at the postal service so, of course, that means ballots

maybe won't be delivered on time. as strategies go, it's unsubtle. if you're a president who thinks you might not be able to win more votes in an election, you just create as much smoke and chaos as you can around that election, use the control you have in the government to make the election less fair and maybe you'll be able to hold on to power somehow by claiming the election is tainted, even if you lose. but if you are an administration or a political party that was starting to worry that that plan might not work, if you wanted to try to lock in a certain amount of political power for yourself for years to come, regardless of what happens in november, well, then the first thing you would probably think of to try to do that would be to mess with the census. the census every ten years tries to count every person living in the u.s. and where in the u.s. they live. that count is done this year. every ten years, 2010 -- it was 2000, 2010, 2020. the count that's done this year will be used to determine america's political representation for years to come. how many members of congress every state gets for the next decade. it's all based on how many people live where and the fact that they get counted.

well, now the census bureau has suddenly announced that it's cutting its count short. it will potentially miss millions of people who historically have been the hardest to reach. those people tend to be poor people, people of color, immigrants and people who live in blue cities and blue states. so a flawed census count could help republicans increase their representation in congress simply by not counting ton millions of people who tend to live in democratic districts which is a neat trick. just to be safe, the census bureau announced instead of submitting their final numbers to the white house next april when joe biden could potentially be president, they will submit them earlier than they planned to do. they now say they'll submit those numbers on december 31st, so no matter how flawed the count, it will be donald trump who is still there in the oval office to sign off on their work, even if his election plans don't work out. the next few months are going to be a wild ride, both in terms of the election, but also, of course, what comes after.

joining us now, i'm delighted to say, is senator amy klobuchar, democrat of minnesota. senator klobuchar, it the been too long. thanks so much for being here tonight. >> thanks, rachel. it's great to be on. i can see you've done a lot of thinking over your time off and had much to say, and, of course, you come back the day we're yet into more shenanigans are announced with the census. and i will say they've tried and failed several times. remember the citizenship question? when they tried to put that and the court pushed back on that. then recently the president has talked about not counting all people, but just counting citizens and, of course, that is not what the law says. and now we get to the day. and what they're trying to do here, of course, is to lock in the trump numbers on the census when, in fact, we have one of the lowest numbers, as vanita pointed out, in recent history of people responding. people still have to respond. i did it today, rachel. it took five minutes. because i was afraid you'd ask me if i did it.

census.gov. it's really simple to do so everyone should go do it when your show is over. but we need the time. and you don't just tell all these people running the census, guess what? we pulled it back a month. but i'm here with a solution. the heros act that passed the house, it's been sitting on mitch mcconnell's desk for over two months, that we're valiantly working every day to get passed in the senate. it actually contains an extension that would extend it four more months because of the pandemic so we can get people, especially on our tribal reservations, people of color, people who have historically who haven't been counted to be able to be counted, and that's what i think we should do, is to negotiate and get that provision in a final bill. >> it feels like such a profoundly cynical and partisan thing to deliberately undercount the hardest people to count and to deliberately move their own goal posts. it was the trump administration that said they needed more time to get this done rather than cutting it short so that they can get these numbers to president trump instead of a

potential president biden. but that's what it looks like from the outside. do you feel like your republican colleagues in the senate get that this is the wrong thing to do, in terms of the census, just in terms of this being an effort with integrity? >> you know how they haven't stood up? time and time again they don't stand up. and they've had one day to hear this. i'll be talking to them about it tomorrow. but i think beyond that, you have started to see some cracks when it comes to, say, voting. and that you've seen -- you were just talking about with the vote by mail. trump is on one side. you've got republican governors, republican secretaries of state. roy blunt has been working with me on this pushing to say, hey, no matter what donald trump says on his twitter feed, people are going to vote by mail. they're doing it at rates of 60% to 70%. in the state of maryland in the gop primary, over 95% of the people voted by mail. it is happening before our eyes.

so we need to make sure the states have the resources that they need, and that's what we're also pushing for right now. and it the not just vote by mail. you know, if the president doesn't want to do vote by mail, even though he's done it himself in the comfort of 1600 pennsylvania avenue while people in milwaukee stood in the rain in homemade masks and in garbage bags just trying to exercise their right to vote, hey, some of this money is going to go big time to training poll workers so people aren't vulnerable, to sanitizing poll places, to make sure polling locations are open early so that people are able to vote when there's less people congregating. we have to help the states on this. the republicans know it and that's what i'm really focused on right now, in addition to this census issue. >> let me ask if you share some of the concerns that have been voiced about what's happening at the postal service. obviously the president has installed a new postmaster general. i wasn't speaking hyperbolically. he has actually instituted policies that have deliberately

slowed down the mail process which has alarmed a lot of people inside that agency. are you worried that the president is messing with the postal service in a way that could materially affect our ability to vote by mail nationwide? >> completely. and let me make the case again to my republican colleagues which we will be making, four of us, including senator schumer and senator gary peters, actually sent a letter to the postmaster general asking a bunch of questions about this. yeah, this is also going to be about ballots. but it is also about people's medications. during the pandemic, more and more people are getting their lifesaving medications by mail. if they mess with stuff like this, they are literally going to mess with people's lives. i know as a result of this that senator schumer and speaker pelosi i believe are going to be meeting with him and asking these questions. because as we work, again, on this very important heros act, we have got to make sure that

there's also funding for the postal service because it's not just the funding that's an issue. it's the rules he's put in place that has resulted in people getting delays in all over their mail. not just their ballots, all of their mail. >> senator amy klobuchar of minnesota. it is great to see you. thank you so much for joining us tonight. >> good to see you, rachel. >> i missed talking to you. i hope you'll come back soon. >> oh, i will be back very soon. thanks, rachel. >> all right. thanks, senator. all right. much more to come here tonight. do stay with us. so what's going on?

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we have to be very smart about convincing mississippians that wearing a mask is the right thing to do. and i understand that a lot of you think we can just snap our finger and all of a sudden 100% of the people will comply and everything will be great. some of you believe that if i will just opine that the statewide mask mandate is the right thing to do that the virus will go away.

just like when we sheltered in place for three weeks in april, the virus didn't go away. >> mississippi governor tate reeves speaking just over a week ago, talking about why a statewide mask mandate was not needed in mississippi. well, in the eight days since he made those comments, governor reeves has now had a change of heart. today he announced a new executive order mandating masks throughout that state. he also announced that he'll delay certain school openings, but not for all that many students and not for all that long. today mississippi's top health official ordered anyone who tests positive for coronavirus to immediately self-isolate or risk being subjected to fines or even jail time. mississippi has the second highest number of new cases per capita in the country right now, behind only florida, but they're gaining fast. new daily infections in mississippi have roughly doubled over the past month. researchers expect that the state will overtake florida and claim the top spot in the coming days. the top spot being the state with the highest infection rate in the united states.

we're starting to see record daily death tolls in mississippi. hospitals that are not only under strain right now. many hospitals have been under strain for weeks. which takes an immeasurable toll on the staff of those hospitals. here's the head of the university of mississippi's medical center. >> our icus are full. i mean, that is the bottom line. we have been full for several weeks. when other hospitals around the state call us for help, we're unable to take their patients. we've had to assist a number of times in having patients transferred actually out of state. what we have been doing has not changed the trajectory of our number of hospitalizations, the number of new cases, et cetera. we need to do something different. >> that is dr. louann woodward. she simultaneously runs the university of mississippi medical center. she is dean of the university of mississippi's medical school and she still works as an emergency room doctor herself.

each of those three jobs is something i cannot imagine ever having the skill or energy to do even for one day, but doing all three of those jobs at once seems superhuman. doing all three of those jobs at once in the middle of a pandemic when your state is on track to be the worst-hit in the country in terms of cases per capita, that is whatever comes after superhuman on the number line. but dr. woodward joins us now. dr. louann woodward from the great state of mississippi. thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight. i know you are in demand. >> it's a pleasure. very glad to talk to you. >> i'm worried about mississippi's case numbers. and what seems to be on track to be the worst in the country in terms of cases per capita. that said, there does seem to be some changes happening policy wise. for example, the new mask order effectuated today by the governor. i know that's something that you supported. overall, how worried are you about your state and do you feel like the right decisions are being made?

>> i think the right decisions are being made at this point. we do have a statewide mask mandate in place, especially as of today. we have taken action from the governor's standpoint to delay some students' return back to school, and i think both of those are positive moves in the right direction. the work that we are doing from the medical center standpoint, that i'm doing, that many on my team are doing, and other health care leaders across the state are doing is to try to really get that message out to the citizens in mississippi that we can make a difference in the path that we are seeing in this pandemic by behavior modification. so we are at a point where we're seeing an increased number of cases across the state. increased hospitalizations. increased deaths. that's happening statewide. it is also happening here at our own medical center as well as other large hospitals in the state.

and with behavorial modifications, we can change that path that we see out in front of us. and that's really what i hope we can accomplish with the actions that have been taken today. >> i know that the university of mississippi medical center is really a flagship medical institution in the state, level 4 trauma center, you do all the really complicated stuff, transplants and all that kind of stuff. as other hospitals around the state have come to you for help, have wanted to ship their patients with complex problems to you, i know that you have had -- even at that flagship institution -- issues terms of capacity. what should we understand at the national level in terms of mississippi hospitals and what you have and what you need in terms of beds and in terms of health care providers to staff those beds? >> so, a few points that i would make about that. we are the only academic medical center in mississippi. the only tertiary referral center. the only level 1 trauma, level 4 in icu. as you said, the only place

doing transplants. so for a lot of things like that, at the higher level of care, we are the only in mississippi. so it is typically our role to take patients that other hospitals from outlying areas of the state, particularly the rural areas, it is our role to take patients that need that higher level of care. we are very uncomfortable and we are very unhappy when we are not able to perform that function and that role. so it has been the case in the last few weeks when, in fact, we have been unable to accept patients that needed to be transferred here and we had to work with others to get them taken to hospitals out of the state of mississippi. >> hmm. >> so one point that i think people should recognize is some of our hospitals in the rural areas of the state do technically have icu beds.

but you have to realize that all icu beds are not equal. in fact, these patients, the covid patients, many times need bedside dialysis and they need other support that is not available at outlying hospitals that perhaps do have a five or six or ten-bed icu unit, but they don't have the level of care that needs to be provided for these patients. sometimes if you just look at the number of icu beds available, you don't realize that distinction between the level of acuity that a particular hospital can take care of versus another. another point that i would make for mississippi is we went into this pandemic with a few features that were challenging to begin with. we are number one on a lot of lists that you don't want to be number one on. we are number one in the rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, stroke, all of

these bad things. we are also last in the ranking of the states when you look at physicians per capita. so we started out with a population that was sicker than many in the united states. and we started out with a challenge from our health care workforce across the spectrum, but particularly physicians. that is not a good place to start a pandemic. the challenges that presented themselves to us due to the pandemic were layered on top of these chronic challenges that we already recognize and that we already have to deal with. the result of this is, we have many patients that are very sick. we have many patients that are very sick. we have icus around the state that are full. and we have a workforce that is fatigued. the workforce is doing everything that they can do. but if you look at all of the physicians, the nurses, the

respiratory therapists, all of the people that are taking care of patients in the emergency departments and the covid units and the critical careweary. >> and that weariness is not only a moral challenge to the rest of to us do what we can in terms of support, they're a weariness so that you and your colleagues and others can get a break from what you've been going through. dr. louann woodward, dean of mississippi medical center and practicing doctor, you wear a lot of hats. please come back soon. we'd love to stay in touch as you go through these challenges. >> it's a pleasure. >> we'll be right back.

here's something to watch. this is fascinating. i mentioned at the top of the show we have a bunch of primaries today and tonight,

washington, arizona, missouri and kansas. look at this in missouri. voters are deciding today and tonight whether they're going to expand medicaid. expansion of medicaid is part of obamacare, which is something republicans are still trying to kill entirely. but missouri voters are voting on whether to do it any way. it could provide health insurance coverage to over 400,000 people in missouri, if they decide to do it. of course, over the objections of republican lawmakers in the state. if missouri voters say yes, missouri would become the sixth republican controlled state to vote to expand medicaid at the ballot box just since trump has been president. they would follow oklahoma, maine, nebraska, idaho. as of right now, we're watching the results come in, in missouri. it's obviously early yet, but if missouri votes to expand medicaid, again, against the wishes of its republican lawmakers and legislators, that would be a huge deal for hundreds of thousands of people in that state being able to get health insurance.

results continue to come in. watch this space. what if i sleep hot? ... or cold?

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that is going to do it for us tonight. good to be back. thanks for being here. i will tell you there's one thing to watch tomorrow morning in the news. 10 a.m. eastern sally yates is scheduled to testify in the senate and republican hearing. she was deputy attorney general under president obama. you may remember she resigned in protest over the trump muslim ban. she was the one who came up to the white house in person and warned the trump white house that mike flynn, the national security adviser, was secretly talking to the russian

government and lying about it. 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, she will be testifying in that public hearing in the senate, as senate republicans try to make the obama administration seem very bad as a way of trying to make joe biden seem very bad. in advance of the election. i have a feeling she will hold her own. that's tomorrow morning 10:00 a.m. see you tomorrow night. "first look" is up next. a massive warehouse explosion in beirut kills dozens of people and leaves more than a dozen injury. we'll have the latest from richard engel. and mitch mcconnell admits a lack of support and says he'll have to rely on democrats to help come up with the deal. new overnight, the trump campaign has officially filed in the state of nevada over its plans to hold the 2020 election almost entirely by mail-in ballots.