CNN "The Situation Room" - Interview with Chris Sununu

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

BLITZER: All right, joining us now the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu.

Governor, thanks so much for joining us. I know you've got a lot going on in New Hampshire as well. Your stay-at-home order, I understand, last until May 4th. What will you do if the president, for example, wants to reopen the country May 1st before you think it's safe for your state?

GOV. CHRIS SUNUNU (R-NH): Well, I can tell you, here in New Hampshire when we make decisions we make them for New Hampshire. And so we appreciate the support that Washington has offered, the financial support and all of that, but at the end of the day we have to make the decision for this state. And that's where we'll stand. And we've maintained a very good relationship with the president.

I think the president, and having the vice president as a former governor, has been very helpful in allowing the administration and everyone in Washington really to understand how governors operationalize the opportunities that Washington can create. In other words, we're the ones that are on the frontlines of the business, with the families.

We understand the pros and cons and how the unemployment insurance is working, how the SBA programs are working. So it really has to be led up to the governors. I have full faith that the administration appreciate that.

BLITZER: Yes. And I've spoken to a lot of governors over these past few weeks and so many of them totally agree with what you just said.

The president just tweeted this. And I want to get your analysis of what he means by this. He said this in his tweet. "Governors, get your state's testing program and apparatus perfected. Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses. The federal government is there to help. We are testing more than any other country -- any country in the world. Also, gear up with face masks."

How do you interpret that?

SUNUNU: Well, on the testing side, the vast majority of the testing really is coming -- a lot of it comes out of the commercial market, but as you know we were essentially competing with the federal government. I expressed a lot of frustration this past week. The new Abbott rapid COVID test. It's a great device. Every state got 15 of them. And I was one of the first ones out of the gate to say look, we got 15 devices but we only got about 100 actual tests, 100 actual cartridges.

Now we've heard in the coming weeks we're going to get hundreds and hundreds more. It's going to be coming in. That's good. That wasn't the story we heard last week. So there are clearly some positive movement. But in that test, for example, it all has to come through FEMA and the federal government so -- and the CDC. So we're really beholden to them on that.

On the commercial side of testing, you have about one to two-week backlog and a lot of the commercial labs out there. They're doing an amazing job, I think, given the pressures that are on them. We have our labs here in New Hampshire that we rely onto. So we're OK where we are with testing now. Obviously we'd love to see it ramped up.

And as new tests come on board, maybe it's the new (INAUDIBLE) test, maybe -- I'm sorry, the antibody tests or some of the other ones that might come online soon, we just want to have access to them and make sure that we're not going to be competing essentially.

On the PPE side, FEMA has gotten us three shipments already. That was fine. We know we have to go to the commercial market today in New Hampshire. We were blessed with a great Easter day gift. We had over six million masks arrived in New Hampshire. A kind of a public-private partnership, facilitated with Dean Cayman (ph), our local entrepreneur here, FedEx, some folks at FEMA and obviously the state.

So again, we're kind of scrounging it and competing against the rest of the world for this PPE but we are getting it done. And you're seeing some of that all over the country. We've been very fortunate here in New Hampshire. But there's still a long way to go. We're not getting out of this in a couple of weeks or probably even in a couple of months.

BLITZER: Yes.

SUNUNU: So we got to keep this momentum going.

BLITZER: Well, well-said, I think you're right. I think it's going to go on. Even if we like the idea of May 1st, it's probably going to go on for a while longer. And then it could come back, God forbid, in August, September and November. Who knows? It's one of the problems that everyone is bracing for.

Dr. Fauci said earlier today here on CNN that mitigation efforts could have saved lives if they had been announced earlier. You announced the stay-at-home order in your state on March 24th. What would an earlier warning from the federal government to you have meant for your state if you had known, for example, in mid-February that there were these dire projections, warnings coming from top health officials inside the administration?

SUNUNU: To be honest, we didn't make our decision on the stay-at-home order or closing of businesses, closing schools so much on what the federal government was doing. The one area where we looked to the federal government was the large group gatherings of 50 or 10 people. Those CDC recommendations and then based on that, we're able to discern well, if you have large groups in a business or in some of these other facilities, we had to pull back.

[18:55:02]

Our decisions were more based on the numbers we were seeing here in the state and also given that we're in New England, we're very close to our partners, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, what they were seeing. Boston had a very big flare up. New York obviously in quite a crisis down there.

We've very close. So we have a lot of businesses that do -- that interact across those borders. So what our neighbors were doing obviously was a big variable in our decision-making. And that's why most of the states in New England kind of took a lot of these stances and these tough big decisions. We did them all about the same time because there's just so much connection.

BLITZER: Well, good luck to you. Good luck to everyone in your own wonderful state.

Governor Sununu, we really appreciate you joining us.

SUNUNU: Thank you.

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