ICYMI: Governor Cuomo Is a Guest on MSNBC's the Rachel Maddow Show

Last night, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was a guest on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss New York's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

AUDIO of the Governor's interview is available here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's interview is below:

Rachel Maddow: Sir, I am grateful for your time tonight. Thank you for being here.

Governor Cuomo: Pleasure, thanks for having me, Rachel.

Rachel Maddow: I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was the 75th straight day on which you have given a coronavirus briefing including Saturdays and Sundays and no days off since the first cases in New York. Is that right?

Governor Cuomo: It feels just like yesterday, doesn't it? No, it's 75 days.

Rachel Maddow: Let me ask, I was really struck today when you said there has been no news since we started this where we were too cautious or too concerned. All of the news has been bad. 75 days into this, with everything that you have been through and that New York has been through, if you could go back and tell Governor Cuomo 75 days ago, one key piece of information, or two key pieces of information, what do you wish you could tell yourself then?

Governor Cuomo: Yeah, I wish I could go - Actually, if I could modify the request a little bit, Rachel, I would like to go back to last November, December, when we first heard about this in China and say, to the country, say to the world, a pandemic anywhere is a pandemic everywhere. When you hear that there is a virus spreading in China, beware, because it may very well have gotten on a plane yesterday, and is on its way to you. That's where you have to rewind the tape, to get this right. We were talking about it in China in November, December, January. Here, by the time we did the China travel ban, it was already gone. It left China. It went to Europe. The cases we have here in New York, the east coast, they came from Europe. We were all looking at China, the virus had already left China by the time we moved. So, that's what I mean when I say we've been behind from day one, and day one started in China.

Rachel Maddow: One of the things that you have said over the past 24 hours is, as one of the main sort of takeaways, one of the real lessons that we've learned here, is that we need to make critical medical supplies in the United States. We need domestic manufacturing capacity for the things we need to deal with, to keep ourselves safe and to be able to treat people in this epidemic context. Do you think that if we had that kind of manufacturing capacity, from the get-go, that it would have changed the overall contours of the epidemic, that it would have saved a considerable number of lives?

Governor Cuomo: You know, Rachel, there's going to be so many lessons from this situation, how it started, where the notice was from, et cetera. On the equipment, I don't know if it would have saved lives. I know it was a tremendous waste of time, tremendous waste of money, it was chaos compounded, that we can't find enough masks and gowns, in this country. And then you have 50 states, 50 governors, trying to buy everything from China, and trying to find brokers between the U.S. and China, and states bidding against other states to buy the same masks from China. I mean how did we get to this position? And it was masks, it was gowns, now it's testing agents, the reagents, we can't find, they're coming from other countries. Well, so I don't know if it actually would have cost additional lives. I know you had nurses and doctors going to emergency rooms without the right precaution. I know that they suffered from the lack of PPE. I hope, I hope, I hope that we didn't actually lose any lives because of it.

Rachel Maddow: Of course, as you note, the shortages continue. And it's not, it's not been the same shortages of the same equipment all along. Right now, it does feel like testing really is still constrained, both in New York, and around the country, by shortage of specific things that you need to be able to carry out tests and to process them. I wanted to ask you about that in light of your order to New York State nursing homes that they need to start testing all of their staff twice a week or they're putting their licenses at risk. I know that you've sent out more than 100,000 test kits to nursing homes to help them meet that mandate. But you know that it needs to be a lot more than that. Are you confident that there will be enough tests for nursing homes to be able to do that, and that they will be able to get their hands on them?

Governor Cuomo: I'm confident Rachel that there will be enough tests to do the employees of the nursing homes twice a week. That's going to be our top priority because that is the top priority. That's the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable situation. That's how we were introduced to this virus, right? In Seattle, Washington. So we can make that happen. We're ramping up testing all across the board. We're now doing more testing per capita in New York than any state in the country and more per capita than any country in the globe so we've been aggressive ramping up the testing and we will do more. I sent 110,000 kits but that's just for the nursing homes to conduct those tests themselves. They can also go to the drive-throughs. We have drugstores that now are doing the tests so there are a lot of other testing mechanisms.

But you're exactly right. The PPE shortage has now become a testing supply shortage and we had a period where we went back and forth the states with the federal government, who's responsible for what, and the federal government was saying the states have to test. But the states couldn't get the tests and the laboratories in the states couldn't get the supplies from the national manufacturers because the national manufacturers had an international supply chain that went back to China. I mean you couldn't, if you wrote this in a movie, they would say you went too far.

I then had a conversation with the President and we came up with a rough division of labor where the federal government is going to do the supply chain issues to the national manufacturers. The states will then do the actual administration from the laboratories in those states. But that supply chain still needs more work. We still are unprepared to do what we have to do in testing. It's a scramble once again. Now, on testing, Rachel, no one anticipated ever a testing capacity of this magnitude. So we're building the airplane while we're flying it but we're doing it on a 50-state basis which gets back to your point in the opening. Every state has to come up with the entire system to do this. Whether it was PPE, or now testing and the reagents and the vials, so there has to be a better way than we're doing it but every state is doing what they can.

Rachel Maddow: Do you feel like if we do have a second wave, and again, waves hit different states and different localities at different times and New York is in a different place than some of these other states that are reopening right now even when they're very high up their curves and not coming down yet. I understand there is a heterogeneousexperience of this in this country but if we do get a big national second wave of this in the fall and New York finds itself back in the thick of it and other states that have been hit hard find themselves back in the thick of it, do you have hope that we would have a national unified response where everybody is pulling in the same direction at least for the second wave? Or do you think it's still going to be all a states for themselves again?

Governor Cuomo: No, there's no reason to think that you're going to have a different response from the federal government. The federal government charted its course and we know what that course is. Now, I spent as you know eight years in the ClintonAdministration. I was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I did all of the emergency management, participated in it during that time, so I come from a very different school, right? And I do believe the federal government, this was a federally declared emergency, right? That normally means the federal government is the lead agent and I believe you could have a more muscular, more intelligent federal government's response here rather than leaving it to 50 states.

Today they did the CDC guidelines as you mentioned but how could any state really open without CDC guidelines? There had to be one national definition of what is safe. You know, safe can be defined. There are numbers. What's the increase in the number of deaths, the increase in the number of tests, what's the infection rate, what's the RT, what do you call safe, come up with a definition, then say to the states, here is the definition. That's what we're doing in New York now. We have one definition of safe based on numbers, 62 counties, okay, this is what we define as safe. Counties, you can work as hard as you can to get to that definition but there should have been a national definition of safe that the states then had to follow. You want to call it CDC guidance? Fine. The supplies, PPE, test kits, I think that should have been handled federally. Let the federal government purchase it on behalf of the states. Why are states competing with each other? The number of tests - set what is safe and appropriate for the number of tests and help provide the supplies for that number of tests in that state. Tracing - what's the right number of tracers? And let's nationalize the protocol, what does tracing mean, nationalize the training, and then let the states execute by those national standards. That's what the federal government could have done - they didn't do it. They left it to these 50 different states with no real guidance or national standard. You're right - New York, the curve is coming down, you take New York out, the curve is going up, Rachel. And they're opening, by what standard? So, I don't think that's going to change for the second wave if there is a second wave because that's the federal course and the ship has sailed.

Rachel Maddow: Governor, one of the things that's happened in states that don't have as many cases as New York - and nobody has had as many cases as New York - but in the heartland of the country, we saw states and counties, even cities, that didn't have very many cases but then did have very large outbreaks, hundreds and hundreds of cases that were associated with specific workplaces, and it's mostly been these meat processing plants, places like South Dakota and Minnesota and Iowa and Nebraska, and there doesn't seem to be a standard for how those outbreaks get handled, how information gets handled, how they gets ultimately contained, how communities can prepare themselves when that sort of thing happens in a workplace. You in New York have a processing plant that has a significant number of cases in rural New York, in Oneida, Green Empire Farm, they have 169 cases there among 340 workers. I don't feel like we're coming up with a national standard for how to deal with something like that, but as a governor who's dealt with more of this crisis than anybody else, how are you going to tackle that problem at that one food processing plant and do you expect that it will be one of several?

Governor Cuomo: Short answer is yes, I do expect that, and this has nothing to do with meat, right? I know they're meat processing plants but a lot of people has said, "Well what is there about meat?" It's not about the meat. It's not about the agricultural farm; it's about the density, it's about the gathering, it's about the size, and all it takes is one - the rule of one works, Rachel. All you need is one person who is infected in a mass gathering, a large gathering, with density, and they become a super-spreader - another term I'd never heard before but now I never want to hear again. We had the first hot spot in the United States - it wasn't in New York City, it was in New Rochelle, Westchester County, suburban county. And it had nothing to do with the demographics, it was one person who was positive, who went to a couple of gatherings that had 100, 200 people at the gatherings and now you had the hot spot in the nation. The processing plants, you have 1,000 workers, you have one who gets infected, and now it's fire through dry grass. So look, we learned the hard way here in New York, but again, go back to the facts, go back to the science, go back to the testing and the tracing, the hospitalization rate, the infection rate, we know how to isolate, it just has to be done. It has to be standardized and executed. And that's what we're doing in New York - it would be nice if we had a national standard to all of this so it wasn't states informally sharing best practices. You know, I talk to other governors and we share information, but you could have had a national standard and all the states then can follow the national standard, and it would have been nice if there was funding that went along with that, but this will happen in other parts of the country, I'll bet you tonight that you'll see it pop up wherever you have density and gatherings and it only takes one, the rule of one.

Rachel Maddow: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo - sir, I hope when we speak again, whether it's sometime 75 days from now or sometime sooner than that, we're speaking in very different circumstances. This has been a heck of a marathon for you, sir, and thanks for taking time to be here and continued good luck.

Governor Cuomo: Thanks - well, I hope to speak to you before it's over, Rachel, because I'm too big a fan and that is too long a period of time.

Rachel Maddow: I hear you - don't tell your brother.

Governor Cuomo: He knows.