U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joins Yahoo Finance to discuss how New York City hospitals are preparing as coronavirus cases continue to rise.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." I'm Brian Sozzi. You're seeing markets under pressure, but let's talk some politics. Our very own Rick Newman is here. Rick, you're working the political beat hard. Who'd you speak to?

RICK NEWMAN: I interviewed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York yesterday. She's a Democrat. Nice wide-ranging discussion. We'll have more of that later today. But I asked her about the fairly grim situation with the hospitals in New York City and whether they were getting enough resources from the government. Let's listen to what she had to say about that.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: Right now, our hospitals are preparing, and they're doing a great job. Some of the rural hospitals, some of the public hospitals in New York City are struggling because they don't have enough resources. They don't have enough masks, not enough protective equipment, not enough ventilators, not enough gowns.

So we are urgently getting supplies to those hospitals. We've called upon the Department of Defense to release the masks that they had in reserve, millions of masks. So far they've released about a million. We've asked them to release their ventilators. They've released about 2,000. We're trying to get as many of those to New York as we can. It has to go through HHS and FEMA.

So we are just urging support for New York City right now because we are in a deluge. We are really getting hit hard, and so we need more supplies faster than perhaps other places in the country that aren't yet getting hit as hard.

RICK NEWMAN: Brian, the situation in New York City is perhaps a preview for what some other cities are going to experiencing soon-- places like New Orleans, Chicago, maybe even Detroit.

In another part of that interview, Senator Gillibrand was very critical of President Trump for being very slow to respond to this-- not mobilizing federal resources sooner. But I asked her about this spat between New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Trump. Cuomo's complaining that he's not getting enough from the federal government. I asked, do you feel like that is interfering with what New York needs? and she said no. She said she thinks for the time being New York is getting as much as it can get from the federal government, but it's going to need more.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah, Rick, some of these photos you see out there are just-- they're tough to-- tough to say. Good interview. Thanks so much.