Emergency Medicine Physician at Columbia University Dr. Craig Spencer joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to discuss the latest coronavirus outlook as U.S. cases surpass 3.5 million.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: On the coronavirus front, nearly 3.6 million cases. Unfortunately, it feels like I give you guys the numbers every day. They just keep ticking upward and upward. We are seeing the daily case count now topping 70,000. For anyone at home that has been watching this show and has been listening to me, remember, we saw a surge of 50,000 daily case counts a day, 60,000 case counts a day. And now, up over 70,000 case counts.

We're seeing record death counts in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. And in New Jersey-- we just got this news crossing the wires today-- virus transmission rates are rising to its highest level in weeks. Of course, this means that businesses right now are forcing mass mandates for any customers to enter the building. Home Depot has now joined that list, joining Starbucks, Walmart, Target, CVS, Costco, and several others.

So I want to keep this conversation going on coronavirus. As I mentioned, they have blown past their previous records of the most cases in one day, hitting over 70,000 cases. And as a result of these case surges, we are starting to see US mask rules expanding all across the country. So for more on this, I want to bring in now emergency medicine physician Dr. Craig Spencer. He's also director of global health and emergency medicine at Columbia University.

Doctor, thank you so much for joining us. That 70,000 number, it feels like just a couple of days ago or maybe weeks ago that Dr. Fauci was saying, listen, we are going to be hitting a case count, a daily case count, of 100,000 cases. I feel as if, at one time, that was an almost unfathomable number. We were at 50,000. Now, this is where we are. Do you at all think that we could be touching that estimate of 100,000 cases in one day anytime soon?

CRAIG SPENCER: Absolutely. Think about where we were just over three weeks ago at the end of June. We were having half as many cases per day as we're reporting now. Over 70,000 cases would sound crazy if anyone told you that in the middle or towards the end of June. So when Dr. Fauci said that, 100,000 did sound like a huge number of cases. But what he knew and what the rest of us know who are taking care of this disease and watching it spread across the country is that we really do have unmitigated spread, especially in a lot of big cities in the southwest, in the sunbelt.

But that's expanding into other places as well. We are increasing testing, which is good, which does account for some increase in those case numbers. But the biggest increase in those case numbers is due to the fact that this virus is just infecting and finding more people. We have hospitalizations increasing. And some people were heartened by the fact that deaths had an increase, that they had been on this downward trend since April.

However, those in the past week have nudged up. And we're starting to see death counts that we haven't really seen since April or May. So in all respects, all indicators are not really optimistic in terms of us getting this under control right now.

KRISTIN MYERS: So I'm glad you mentioned the reason why we're starting to see these spikes. You know, Dr. Fauci kind of laying the blame at the feet of young folks, saying that they are propagating the virus. I mean, is it just young folks that are going out there, going to bars, having parties? Or do you at all see any blame from the government or government officials that are suing now cities, as in the case of Georgia and Atlanta?

I'm going to want to get your thoughts on that in just a moment. But really, if we had to play the blame game, is there enough blame to go around? Or is there one group of folks that we can say, you guys are the reason that this virus continues to spread?

CRAIG SPENCER: I think everyone could do better, including young people, old people. But I do think the most important thing to point out is that this has represented an abject failure on behalf of the federal government. We have needed assistance since, really, the beginning of this outbreak. We needed PPE. We needed testing. We needed, really, the support of the federal government. And it has not been present.

Because of that, the United States is an outlier. We're one of the only nations that had a surge, had a decrease in cases, and now is having a huge increase again. Very few places in the world have had that, one of which is Iran. So we're in this really horrible company of other countries that haven't been able to get this under control.

Everyone who took a public-health approach to this and not a political approach has gotten this virus under control. We're trying to have similar discussions to all those other places. Can we have sporting again? Can we send our kids back to school? We are not at the same level, we are not in the same situation, as any of those places. We are in the middle of a raging pandemic. And we're trying to have discussions about some semblance of normal life as opposed to the federal government being accountable, taking the reigns, and actually putting together some type of plan for reopening the country and responding to this pandemic as opposed to pushing to reopen schools.

KRISTIN MYERS: So pretty strong words from you, Dr. Spencer, "abject failure." When it comes to Georgia, we saw the Georgia governor essentially suing the Atlanta mayor over mask mandates. We're seeing in other cities that they are struggling with enforcement. What are you making of the mask rules? And what are you making of the move a governor to prevent local mayors and municipalities from trying to come up with some sort of regulation forcing folks to wear a mask when they go out in public?

CRAIG SPENCER: That's, frankly, just pure stupidity. Look, there are very few things in this situation that we know can help prevent the spread of this virus. We know that social distancing helps. We know that a public-health approach helps. We know that masks are helpful. No, they're not perfect. But having a bunch of people indoors or just flouting the rules of public health in favor of your political musings is not going to help anyone. It is not going to help get this pandemic under control.

You know, here in the United States, you hear so many people talking about our freedom to decide whether or not we want to wear a mask. Well, people all over the world are enjoying the freedom of going back and doing normal things like going to the theater and eating outside without the fear of being infected by this virus. We need to think about at what cost this freedom to decide whether or not we wear a mask when we want to go to Walmart, whether that cost is actually worth what we're spending, which is 135,000 American lives and only rising.

KRISTIN MYERS: Right, I want to ask about the vaccine, see if we can get some tone of optimism from you, doctor, on this. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, Johnson and Johnson now moving into that phase-one trial for its coronavirus vaccine. I mean, I feel like, every day, I'm adding a new name to the list of a pharmaceutical company, Gilead, Biontech, Regeneron, Moderna. You know, when you hear this news, does this make you say to yourself, OK, you know what, I think that we might actually get a vaccine out there by January? Or are we still a long ways off? And are we just kind of glomming on to this news that we're moving into phase one, phase two, et cetera, et cetera, of a different vaccine trial?

CRAIG SPENCER: It's a great question. I think there are two parts to that. One is, when will we have a vaccine? Two is, what is the vaccine going to do for us in responding to this pandemic? And I think those are two different things. The first, will we have vaccine, vaccines, by the end of this year? Absolutely. Moderna looks promising. Oxford looks promising. We're hearing really incredible things about some of these different candidates.

I am nearly certain that one or many of them will work. Will they provide 100% effective prevention against getting coronavirus? No. Will they likely be sufficient enough to help prevent the spread? Yes. I think what this does is it really elevates and amplifies the power of science over politics. Think about what all of these vaccine manufacturers and the scientists have done in such a short, really a historic period of time. If there's any sense of optimism here, it's the fact that we've been able to compress what is normally a 10, 15 year long process into potentially one year. That's incredible.

Now, what happens once we get a vaccine? That's the bigger question. So we have 100 million doses to 300 million doses. Who gets those? Do we prioritize people that are older? Do we prioritize frontline health care workers? I'm concerned about how this is going to be regulated and how it is going to be-- quite honestly, the decisions around who's going to get this first. Look at what the United States did, really, just you a week or two ago. By buying up the whole global supply of remdesivir, we are sending a message that we're in this for ourselves.

From a domestic standpoint, maybe that's just a smart strategy. But from an international cooperation standpoint, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot. This is a global outbreak. And we're going to need global solidarity. We need to be working together with other countries, other organizations. And at the time we're doing that, we're pulling ourselves out of the World Health Organization and really marginalizing ourselves.

And I think that's going to, ultimately, in the end, it's going to portend-- it's going to be a bad decision.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, we'll have to leave that there. Emergency medicine physician Dr. Craig Spencer. Thank you so much for your comments today.

CRAIG SPENCER: Thanks for having me.