Delaware Senator Chris Coons (D) joins On The Move to discuss why he is "very optimistic" that the House of Representatives will pass the stimulus bill.

Video Transcript

- Now I want to bring in a member of the house in Congress that has voted on this bill. Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, is joining us from his office in Delaware. Senator, first could I get you to comment on what's going on in the House now, and your confidence level that they will indeed pass it in the next 12 to 24 hours?

CHRIS COONS: I'm very optimistic that the House of Representatives will ultimately pass this bill, whether the easy way, by voice vote, after Congressman Massie finishes his remarks and a few other members finish their remarks, or whether it's actually going to ultimately require a full roll call vote. I do think that you've got the leadership of both parties, both chambers, and the president fully behind this bill. So the odds that it's going to get derailed I think are very small. I think what we're seeing today in the House is a procedural speed bump, but in the end, the bill will become law.

RICK NEWMAN: Senator Coons, this is Rick Newman. So this stimulus measure will go into effect. And you've heard the calls from President Trump and others to reopen the economy or start getting people back to work before this virus is contained. So what are senators saying about that? Is there some role for Congress in determinations such as that?

CHRIS COONS: Well, the good news, bad news here is that decisions about reopening parts of our nation are being made by governors, who actually have the power to impose bans on gatherings of more than 10 people or to require the closing of schools or restaurants or hotels, or to allow them to reopen. As you well know, I'm sure, exactly what controls there are in place around public gatherings, what kinds of restrictions there are on schools and on restaurants and hotels really does vary from city to state and from state to region.

And the president, although he can share all the aspirations he wants about what Easter Sunday will look like, or how quickly our businesses will reopen and how beautiful that may be, these are decisions that should be made based on science and based on what our public health experts are telling us, and I frankly think should be made cautiously.

We can see around the world examples of countries that really did a good job of testing robustly in large numbers early, and of social distancing and imposing the economically painful shutdowns or stay-in-place orders, and we have other countries that really did not do that, that did not flatten the curve, that did not have enough preparation in place. The United States, although there's a lot of inequity in it, we have one of the best resourced, most sophisticated health care systems on Earth.

And I'll tell you that, in recent conference calls in my own state, with my governor and our Secretary of Health and Social Services, the heads of our hospitals and our Director of Public Health, there is genuine anxiety about how quickly this is growing, about what resources we're able to get, and about what the next two weeks may look like based on what we see in New York, based on what's happened in Seattle, and certainly based on what's happened in Europe.

And around our nation, we've got leaders, governors and mayors, who have to make decisions. And my hope would be those decisions would be advised by, informed by science and public health leaders, because if we have an uneven, patchwork national response that too quickly allows for widespread COVID-19 infection from person to person, we will deeply regret it, and the consequences, both human and economic, will end up being tragic.

- We heard earlier that the number of hospital beds, for instance, in the ICU in Atlanta is already maxed out. We know in New York, the governor is calling on the federal government to build an additional four more emergency hospitals. And then we get this ventilator issue. Is there money to fund the GM conversion of this plant in Kokomo to build the ventilators? The president seems to have pulled back from that. It's a billion-dollar price tag. And if he invokes the Defense Production Act, the government still has to pay for it, correct?

CHRIS COONS: That's correct. So one of the provisions that is in the bill that was not in the bill before Saturday when we had a showdown on the floor between the two parties is $130 billion that is dedicated to supporting hospitals, health systems, and the necessary supplies and resources. I don't know if there is some specific appropriation for a specific plant in Kokomo, Indiana, but I do know that the Defense Logistics Agency, according to press reports, is stepping up, and is trying very rapidly to engage with relevant manufacturing companies and mobilize their resources.

I am a little puzzled by why the president made such a show of invoking the Defense Production Act authorities but then not using them. And I will say that, here in my state of Delaware, the disconnect between what we need in our hospitals in personal protective equipment, what we need for testing resources for our state, and what we're currently able to get out of the national stockpile and out of the supply system nationally is concerning. I understand that, in our federal system, you know, states get to decide for themselves what they're going to order, how they're going to buy it, but I really think there is an important federal role here for better coordination and for better facilitation nationally than I am currently seeing.

- Senator, I just want to ask real quick, you know, this virus is continuing to spread. Obviously New York the hardest hit, but it's spreading throughout the country. Has there been any talk among senators about having the federal government invoke some form of blanket lockdown for the country? Right now, it's really kind of a patchwork of governors saying that they want their own states on lockdown, but is there anything coming out from a larger level?

CHRIS COONS: One of our challenges as a Senate in talking to each other is that we, frankly, are mostly isolated from each other. We don't have committees meeting. We are supposed to be practicing social distancing on those rare moments when we were on the floor together in the last couple of days. And some of the folks in our wonderful media criticized senators for failing to stay six feet apart even during those brief periods when we were voting. So for me to be able to say that the Senate as a body has any particular opinion is kind of difficult at this point.

I do think there is a lot of concern by the senators I've spoken to individually, by text, email, or by phone, about whether or not there is a unified national response. I understand that there are whole portions of our country where there are states who have 100 cases or 50 cases, and they don't yet see the urgency, the imminence of this problem.

And they view it mostly as something that's happening on the coasts, in Seattle or New York or Chicago, and isn't really impacting their community and their state. And so they're questioning why should we have an economically harmful shutdown order. It is exactly that dissonance between some in national leadership who are saying, oh, this will all be over in a few weeks and those of us who are much more concerned about the likelihood that this will spread throughout the entire American population, and may come around a second or even third time, as the 1918 global pandemic flu did.

I was actively involved in our response to Ebola, and became interested in viruses and pandemics at that point. And one of the things I find maddening is my colleagues who go on TV and say no one could have possibly imagined or foreseen this. That's just not true. There has been case after case of near pandemics, of viruses that have jumped from animals to people over the last 10 to 20 years, whether it's MERS or SARS or H1N1, bird flu, or others. And there is a whole group of dedicated scientists and public health experts who've been warning for years that we needed to invest in more robust information systems, in testing, and in vaccine development.

I'll just mention that, in Delaware, there is the National Institute for Innovation in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing, which is all about speeding up how quickly we can produce vaccines and therapeutics in response to an emergent crisis like this. That institute, I hope, will get the resources to expand its work. It is a national network of 140 private sector businesses, research universities, and manufacturers. And it seems to me that this is an appropriate time for us to be coordinating and connecting between the federal agencies, the research labs, the private company-- private sector companies, and our universities to make sure that we respond successfully to this pandemic.

But folks, as Bill Gates has been warning for years, if this pandemic had a higher level of lethality, we would be facing a genuine tragedy. It is-- I mean, a dramatically worse tragedy. As it is, the worst-case scenarios that have been laid out by public health experts are alarming. The best-case scenarios, which would involve much more active and aggressive shutdowns and social distancing than is currently happening, are encouraging, and do suggest we could get through this with one round only, and in a couple of months, if this has high seasonality, and if the R0 factor, the rate at which it infects people, and the mortality factor, if they are lower than current models suggest.

But we frankly don't really know yet. And in my world, my perspective, we should be doing everything we can to mobilize our national resources, to calm the markets, to calm the anxiety that millions of Americans are feeling, and to give them the confidence that a competent government is responding to our urgent needs.

- Here, here. Thank you so much. Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, joining us from his office in Delaware. We appreciate your time, sir.