Audio & Rush Transcript: Governor Cuomo is a Guest on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House With Nicolle Wallace

Earlier today, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was a guest on MSNBC's Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace.

Nicolle Wallace: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo once again taking aim at the federal response to the coronavirus as cases and deaths nationwide continue to rise. White house coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx says we are in a "new phase of the pandemic." We're lucky now to be joined by Governor Cuomo who's all over the news for your comments on the president, your comments about the mayor, we'll get to all of it. Start though with the federal response and the lack of a plan in the sixth month of the global pandemic being in this country, taking lives and making millions of people sick.

Governor Cuomo: Good to be with you, Nicolle. Look, we see the facts are facts, right? We see the virus increasing all across the country, we are seeing the numbers going up, going up in the Midwest. We see the health experts, Johns Hopkins and others saying the nation has to hit a reset. We do need a reset. But the reset has to start at the top. We have confusion, we have chaos, we don't have operations set up, and I think it has to start with the President of the United States. He has to stand up and say what he didn't say six months ago: he has to say to the American people that COVID is serious, that we can't deny it, that it's not political. It's not going to go away magically. It wasn't going to go away by Easter. The accelerated reopenings were wrong. The liberate the states movement was wrong. Not setting up testing was wrong. I think the American people are confused because they've heard two different messages from the get-go, Nicolle, and that's where it starts; it has to start with the president. The course they went down was just incorrect, we know that now. We see the numbers. This is going to ricochet all across the country. A place like New York we had the lowest numbers we have had to date today. But if the virus is increasing in other states, it's only a matter of time before you see it bounce back and forth between the coasts.

Nicolle Wallace: This was my question for you: on a scale from 1 to 10 is your fear, you know, higher to 600 about a resurgence in New York City and New York State which remains safer, I guess this is a post-9/11 axiom, safer but not yet safe?

Governor Cuomo: Well, as I said, our numbers today were the lowest that we've seen since we started. The number of hospitalizations, the number of deaths, the number of people testing positive. But nobody is safe until everybody is safe, right? An outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere, we learned that. From day one the outbreak started in China, nobody paid attention, it went to Europe, it came to New York from Europe. That was our first lesson that this virus is going to be transmitted. We handled it in New York and the nation learned nothing from that experience, frankly. We saw the spike, we set up testing, we set hospitalization, et cetera. Five months later in many parts of this country you're just as unprepared as you were on day one. And we know that if the virus is in California, or Texas, or Chicago and if it's not addressed it's a matter of time before it gets to New York, and New Jersey and every other state and then you'll see just see a ping-pong of this virus all across the country until you have a national strategy. New York cannot solve this. Every state has to solve it, otherwise, we'll just give it back and forth to each other like family members passing a bug among the family in one home, right? It's the same metaphor for the nation.

Nicolle Wallace: Governor, you said the Hopkins study. Another one I think a lot of parents paid a lot of attention to was I believe put out by the CDC late Friday and it showed that at a Georgia camp literally hundreds of children were infected and camp counselors and there's no denying that children spread the virus. There are now multiple studies that show they carry as much virus load as adults, yet Donald Trump is constantly tweeting about kids being immune. I think his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called kids "virus stoppers." Teachers not so much, so while I would agree that some of the science about our kids is still evolving, kids are in danger, teachers are definitely in danger. What should New York State and New York City's school reopening plan look like?

Governor Cuomo: Yeah, look, I think the federal officials, the White House, Dr. Birx, the secretary, they're sending the exact wrong message. They've learned nothing in six months. They're saying the same thing about the economic reopening, "just do it, just do it, it will be fine." No. Don't just do it. It wasn't fine. We learned that lesson. Do it if you have the virus under control, do it if you have the safeguards in place. Do it carefully and the same is true with schools. You shouldn't just reopen schools. We're not going to reopen the schools in New York unless we know the viral infection is under control in that part of the state. We have more testing than any other state. The data has to say it's safe to reopen, and then you need plan for every school district, every school, to have the testing in place, to have the protocols in place. I believe if we keep the virus down that we can reopen schools if we do it intelligently, the same way we reopened the economy in this state. Our economy's reopened, we phased it, we did it by science but we're reopened. That winds up being faster than the states that just rushed to reopen, Nicolle, had no protections and now they have to close again. This was all predictable. It was all predictable and what's really frustrating is we're replicating the mistake with schools that we made with the reopening. It's the exact same point and the White House is saying the exact same thing. Just do it. It will be fine. It wasn't. Look at the numbers. The numbers don't lie.

Nicolle Wallace: I guess my question is more pointed: how could we consider opening schools even with a low infection rate if any teacher could be at risk of death or serious disease? And I don't know any parent who wants their kids to be a part of an experiment into how this virus takes its toll on our children.

Governor Cuomo: Well look, here is the problem in the "new normal," there is no perfect answer, Nicolle. If the virus is under control and if you have data that says it's under control and you have --

Nicolle Wallace: Is it under control in New York City?

Governor Cuomo: It is under control in New York City. Our numbers across the state - we have one of the lowest infection rates in the United States of America right now. I mean, it's incredible the turnaround. We're afraid of other states bringing in the virus. We have a quarantine for 14 days with 39 other states. So New York is really an anomaly right now. So our viral infection rate is very low. If it stays there, the end of the this week, I'm going to say schools can reopen if they have a smart plan in place. The alternative is keep the schools closed and that also raises real problems. Kids have been home for a long time, they lose socialization benefits. I believe it really aggravates the division in our education system between the wealthy and the poor households. Food issues, et cetera. So closing schools is definitely problematic. But you're right, if you don't do it intelligently you'll see the numbers jump just like you see it in any congregant setting.

Nicolle Wallace: And I guess that's my question. The income disparity plays out on which schools can open safely. A small private school with 16 kids in a class can easily push the desks out. Every public school, even the nice ones in New York, will have a very hard time doing that. I guess I think what parents feel is despair with either decision. There's the despair of having your kids at home, missing out on not just socialization, but I think for a lot of families school lunch, school breakfast, other services if you have special needs. But there's the despair that the people who need to go back to school the most are probably the schools that are least likely to open fully. How can we fix that?

Governor Cuomo: Plain truth - there is no perfect answer here. Either way, neither answer is going to be without risk and without downside. That's the sad truth. And by the way, I say in New York, it's not really up to the school district, it's not up to what I say, the infection rate is, every parent is going to make this decision. You're talking about the health and safety of their child. This is their decision and it's a tough one. I want to make sure they have all the information necessary and let them look at their school's plan. I'll explain where we are in terms of the overall infection rate. They'll have their schools plan and then they will decide. It's a tough decision either way. I fully agree with that, but that's the world that we are in today. That's reality.

Nicolle Wallace: I want to ask you something sort of off topic and not in the news yet, but it's something I think about as a New Yorker: How much of your day can you spend thinking about how to bring New York City back? I mean, you go to New York City and it is not the city that it was 6 months ago. If everyone doesn't come back to school and that isn't an equal situation for everybody, even more people I'm afraid, will leave the city. As you said, we have the lowest infection rates. I've suggested on this program we bring all the baseball teams that are dealing with infections in states with rising cases, which is just about everybody else, to New York. How much of your time can you spend on New York's comeback?

Governor Cuomo: First of all, I took that idea on the baseball teams. We have spring training --

Nicolle Wallace: Well they say, the league's about to fold. What did they say?

Governor Cuomo: Nicolle, I shamelessly took the idea and I said, I offered to Major League Baseball, I said play all your games here. We'll set up a protocol, we'll have quarantine hotel. We'll do the testing. I haven't heard back officially, but the teams want to play in their home city, their own home state. Long term, you're right. We have a real job to do in New York City. It did take a terrible hit with the COVID to begin with. We then had issues with looting, et cetera. There are crime concerns. It is going to be a long road. I opened up the new St. Nicholas. The church is building back on 9/11 - the only church that was on the 9/11 site was a Greek church, St. Nicholas, it was destroyed. It's just now starting to really come out of the ground. It's magnificent. And I said, you know, God works in strange ways. I think He now has us rebuilding this church on the 9/11 site to remind us that we have taken damage before, we have been hit, but we do build back, and we do build back better. And sometimes it's hard and it takes time, but St. Nicholas Church is coming back. New York is going to have issues. The first step is going to be controlling this virus, making sure the numbers don't come back. Second step is, Washington has to pass a fair bill in this session. This bill is everything, Nicolle. You know, every past CARES Act bill was imperfect, grossly imperfect. They always said, well, don't worry, there's another one, there's another one. This is the last one. And if they don't make this bill right, frankly, if they don't get it right, they shouldn't pass it, because it will be the last bill. And if this bill does not have funding for state and local governments, you're going to see a real economic recession, not just in New York, you'll see it all across this country. Every economist says the economy doesn't come back if you starve state and local governments. The last thing you should be doing now is forcing state and local governments to lay off people. And that's Republican economists, Democratic economists. So if they do that, they would make a tremendous mistake, and rather than make a mistake, they should do nothing, is my advice to them.

Nicolle Wallace: What are you doing to make sure that businesses and employers don't leave the state until some of this planning can take place, companies that maybe say, I don't need high-priced real estate in the State of New York or in the city of Manhattan, how do you, I worked for a governor who spent a lot of his time trying to get businesses to move to Florida. How do you get businesses to stay in New York?

Governor Cuomo: Yeah. I spend a lot of my time doing it also. The situation we have in New York City right now is not that they are leaving the state, but you've had a lot of businesses that have gone to now remote work, work-from-home for a number of months. A lot of businesses are saying, you know, this isn't so bad. They're out on Long Island, they're in the Hudson Valley, a little bit in Connecticut. But they're more thinking about staying where they are, right. They went out to their retreat house or their summer house or they rented a property to get outside of the city during COVID. And that sort of worked well, and now they're saying to themselves, and this is not just New York, it's all across the country, I think you're going to see an economic transformation. Some businesses are going to say, I don't have to bring 100 employees into the office every day. I can do it with them coming in two days a week or three days a week. so that's what we have to worry. In a place like New York City, where Broadway's not going to be up and running, the great restaurants aren't going to be up and running, the big dinners are not going to be up and running, you'll see people staying in their second residences, I fear, in the outer ring, in the suburban ring. And they may be doing that longer. I think, ultimately, like post-9/11, where people said, we'll never go back to New York City, it's a terrorist target. I lived through that. New York City has a fundamental energy and cultural institutions and is a talent magnet. And that will win out at the end of the day. Our challenge is to make sure it's a short day and not a long day.

Nicolle Wallace: As long as we keep working on getting all of baseball to come where it's safe and there are no infections, I could agree with you. Governor Cuomo, thank you for spending some time with us today. So much in the news. We're grateful for you taking the time.

Governor Cuomo: Thank you, Nicolle.