Gov. Andrew Cuomo Explains How Containment Area Will Work | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Let us get the latest now on the corona virus outbreak, join us now Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York in New York state officials have established a one-mile

containment

area

in New Rochelle public schools in the

area

They

will

be closed until March 25 and the National Guard has been deployed in the area until yesterday. Westchester County has seen 108 confirmed cases of the virus. Governor Cuomo, how does the

containment

area

work

? And for people who are infected or who are worried about being infected, do you still go to the area? hospital yes, well, thank you. I'm glad to be with you Mika and you know all this talk about politics.

I think we are the coronavirus. Remind people that there's nothing theoretical about government, right? It's about making a difference in people's lives, mobilizing and being effective, and that's what we're seeing now in the New Rochelle area specifically which is the densest cluster of cases in the United States. We have 108 cases in New Rochelle. I think to give you an idea, in New York City there are only 36. New York City is 100 times bigger. from New Rochelle, okay, so what the containment area means is just large gatherings in that area or postponed people can come and go, etcetera, it's not a quarantine area but no large gatherings because that's where obviously it's spreading and this week's numbers are going to increase exponentially, we still don't see it in testing because we are not testing enough and it is much bigger than we imagine, so we have to take real action and we have to take it quickly, so What a governor, simply others.

Communities can learn from what happened in New Rochelle. Could you briefly explain how one man's infection has led to the densest cluster in the United States and what other communities should do to avoid what happened in New Rochelle? It required you to really take such a dramatic step, yeah Joe, it's math, you know this community had a big meeting back to back, they had a big religious meeting where there were about 400 people and then a couple of days later they had another big meeting and It's just math, it's just the trajectory of exposure, there's nothing extraordinary and what the other countries did was they did massive testing, you know, China was doing two hundred thousand tests a day, South Korea was doing fifteen thousand tests a day. .

I've learned 5,000 to date, so what I would say is what I've been telling other governors: you're on your own, let the states take action because when they do the retrospective here, Joe, I think this is going to be public health. version of Hurricane Katrina the federal government just failed at the job so let the states do it so I'm still trying to understand how the containment area

will

work

because if someone has symptoms like for example the man who meet The story started when he went to the hospital in neighboring Bronxville and then ended up in the city, so what is happening to people who have the virus and are feeling symptoms?

Maybe they need good attention in this area. New Rochelle, the hot spot first, no large gatherings. Second, we are bringing testing to the community. You know, these tests have been a big fiasco. Even people going to a hospital are a problem. They get into a taxi and expose the attention with which they enter the hospital and expose the workers. So we are taking mobile testing. testing units to New Rochelle and you can literally drive up to a mobile testing unit, everything is contained, it's all isolated and you get the testing right there. We're getting very aggressive with testing because if you look at the way it's been stopped in other countries it's mass quarantine or mass testing and we don't want a quarantine so we're going to have to do testing and we can't wait for the federal government because it's not going to happen, governor, it's Willie Geist Tom Bossert. who, of course, President Trump's secretary of homeland security said yesterday that we are ten days away from hospitals in the United States receiving cream, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday said that we are heading towards the crisis in what it looks like in Italy, frankly, and this

morning

I'm taking it out on the doctors and the people in Italy who are flashing red lights that what we have here is headed your way if you're not smart about it, so what's your threshold , governor, to close schools?

I know it's a municipal question, but to close schools, to cancel any gatherings, to tell people to stop going to work, work electronically, now we can do Google chat, we can do this, where do you see the next shift ? Is there a time when everyone arrives? together and say we have to close things down for a while, yeah, I think well, I think you see that the trajectory is going up. Today I will speak with business leaders in New York. I'm going to ask you to do it voluntarily. teleworking two shifts, a

morning

shift and an afternoon shift, and allowing people to work from home voluntarily.

We have closed some schools. We have closed schools in this hotspot in New Rochelle, at the same time we are trying to slow it down by increasing speed. testing and hopefully the federal government is going to release the handcuffs so they have been controlling the process and that's the way other countries have gotten ahead of themselves with testing, but I think you're right, it's all the numbers. what do they say. There's going to be a wave, we're worried about the healthcare system. We are looking very closely at our vacancy in the healthcare system and are planning backup hospital quarantine centers, just in case we overwhelm the healthcare system. because that is the real challenge, can you deal with the number of sick people in the hospitals?

And then my number one concern, my nightmare, nursing homes, senior centers congregate senior care centers, that's the vulnerable population and that's what we have to watch because that's where we could have a real problem. It was Washington state and these congregate senior facilities, all the people are very close together, that's my main concern, so Governor, I went back yesterday and watched President Obama's address to the nation about Ebola. crisis in which it was quite direct in terms of what we were doing what the government was doing what the government could do in the case of New York in the case of New Rochelle you were talking about the failure of the government what would you expect from the government federal? what they should do and what they are not doing is critical to both New York and their needs and to every governor of every state, yes, look Mike, let me be honest, but let me be careful because I don't want the president to tweet at me next. from this. transmission I have to work with the federal government to make it work here, but we knew this was going to happen in November, in December we knew what was happening in China, we had to know that someone was going to get on a plane and come to the United States.

That's how we got to this point where we don't have testing capacity anywhere near what we need, literally, the HHS secretary said yesterday 5,000 tests to date Korea South Korea $15,000 to 15,000 tests per day China 200,000 tests per day that's how you got ahead of this that's how they turn the curve when they're nowhere near that reminds me of Hurricane Katrina just a failed federal response and a failed federal mobilization they underestimated the challenge now who, how and why I don't know, I'll tell you, in this whole political conversation we're having, I think two people said, hey, remember that government is important, guys, this isn't all theory and abstract, this is who can manage and who can get things done in times of crisis. and I think that's what this coronavirus has done partially on the political scale, but the federal government just had a really poor response and I tell them to at least get out of the way, you know, CDC, FDA, they control all the approvals, They have been monitoring the testing process. now we know the horse is out of the barn, we know this is much more widespread, at least let the states step up and do what they can.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, thank you very much for being on the show, see you soon. It's great to have it. you're with us thanks good luck with those tweets thanks for visiting MSNBC on YouTube and be sure to subscribe to stay up to date on the biggest stories of the day and you can click on any of the videos around us to see more four Morning Joe and MSNBC many thanks for watching