(\ticking\) >> General motors and Ford built nearly four million 微信：xy595856
vehicles in this country last year. Today they are making
exactly zero, because fear oftv" coronavirus has forced them to
close their factories. While they're no longer making cars, both
automakers are bringing back laid-off workers to help manufacture ventilators
and personal protective equipment. >> It (\ticking\) Went from a
discussion to a production in less than three weeks. >>
these were many of the first cities that received cases
of covid-19 as it spread out of mainland China. We
can analyze and visual this information across the globe in
just a few seconds. >> It's a digital early warning
system that uses artificial intelligence to tracken neckious outbreaks. Should
the U.S. government be using it? >> This is a
whole other level of sophistication and data collection. >> That's
our story (\ticking\) >> It is a secure location that
we intend to operate out of in wartime. >> This
mountain was built to withstand a nuclear blast, but every
time a nuclear watch team makes this trek into the
mountain, they risk bringing the virus with them. >> First
step, you wipe down every surface, your computers, your telephone,
your desk surfaces, door handles. It's a president like an
obsessive-compulsive disorder, but we have to be able to make
(\ticking\) >> I'm Lesley stahl. >> I'm bill Whitaker. >>
I'm Anderson Cooper. >> I'm Norah O'Donnell. >> I'm Scott
pelley. Those stories, tonight, on "60 minutes." (\ticking\) >> This
portion of "60 minutes" is sponsored by progressive insurance. Save
when you bundle auto home, or molt cycle -- motorcycle
insurance. Visit progressive. Com. >> Norah O'Donnell: This past week,
another 4.4 million Americans joined the unemployment line, and among
the companies shedding the most workers are America's carmakers. The
"big two"- general motors and Ford- built nearly four million
vehicles here in America last year; Today they are making
exactly zero; Their factories closed to prevent the coronavirus from
spreading among employees. While they are no longer making cars,
both gm and Ford are applying their manufacturing muscle to
the pandemic by turning out ventilators and personal protective equipment
in huge numbers. Last week we spoke to gm c.E.O.
Mary barra and Ford executive chairman bill Ford remotely, both
of them were in Michigan, and they told us they're
thinking creatively to figure out how to get their workers
back on the line, and keep them there. >> Bill
Ford: We're shut down-- pretty much everywhere in the world
except China right now. And then, of course, we were
shut down in China earlier. And we've never had a
time like this where everything has been shut. >> O'Donnell:
I know that Ford reports its first quarter earnings in
a few days and the projection is a loss of
$2 billion. And those losses will continue to mount. Can
you sustain that? >> Ford: Well, obviously, not indefinitely. >>
O'Donnell: Between them, Ford and general motors had nearly $300
billion in revenue last year. Today, that river of money
is running dry. >> Mary barra: The design... >> O'Donnell:
Mary barra is c.E.O. Of gm, the first woman to
run the company in its history. Has covid-19 proved to
be an existential threat to gm's long- term health? >>
barra: Between the strength of our balance sheet with the
steps we've taken in the past, we will get through
this and we will learn a lot of lessons that
we'll apply. >> O'Donnell: I mean, what's the long-term prognosis
for-- for general motors if you're not making cars? >>
barra: No one knows-- when things are going to get
back to what I refer to as a new normal.
I've heard others refer to it as the new abnormal.
>> O'Donnell: In the "new abnormal," gm and Ford have
each tapped into about $15 billion in private lines of
credit to pay their bills. One estimate is that Ford
is burning through $165 million dollars a day. Remember, it
was just 11 years ago, in the last financial crisis,
that gm declared bankruptcy. Ford avoided that, but did get
a $6 billion government loan. So do you think you'll
need another loan to get through this crisis? >> Ford:
We don't think so. We think we can get through
this. And we think we can get through it-- and
get back to work. But we're in an unprecedented time.
And so I suppose you never say never. But that's
not our plan. >> O'Donnell: Part of the financial pressure
is that under their contracts with the united auto workers
union, Ford and gm continue to pay millions of dollars
to their idled workers. And now there's political pressure, with
protests taking place in their home state of Michigan, and
some demonstrators demanding an economic re-start. What do you think
is driving those protests? >> Ford: I think people are--
are understandably nervous, scared-- scared about the disease, but also
scared about their own economic wellbeing. And so I mean
I get it. I totally get it. >> O'Donnell: Many
people in your state want to get back to work
soon. >> Ford: Well, I think we'd all like to
get back to work soon. But we have to do
it safely. And that's not a political question. That's really
a scientific question. >> O'Donnell: As Ford and gm shut
down auto production in march, Michigan emerged as a Major
covid-19 hot spot. The state has the third largest number
of deaths in the nation, and its health care workers
have endured shortages of protective gear. The state's largest health
system, beaumont, says that 1,500 of its employees are presumed
to have covid-19. What were your marching orders to your
team when this crisis began? >> Ford: My team didn't
need marching orders. Right from the very start, it was
from our local hospital saying, "hey, we don't have any
protective equipment, who can help us," our company just jumped
into action. >> O'Donnell: And that began Ford's transformation from
carmaker to medical supply manufacturer. The company has since churned
out millions of face shields, masks, gowns, and portable respirators
for health care workers. This past week, Ford began producing
ventilators for patients. >> Ford: There are companies that can
make complicated things, but they make them in small numbers.
There are also companies that can make lots of things,
but they can't make complicated things. You know, we turn
out an f-150 every 52 seconds. So when we look
at this crisis-- as a country and said, you know,
"which industry is positioned to help us not only in
terms of sophisticated machinery, but can do a lot of
them and a lot of them quickly," the auto industry
is uniquely positioned to do that. >> O'Donnell: In mid-march,
it looked as if American hospitals would quickly need thousands
of ventilators that didn't exist. >> Can we get that
here faster? >> O'Donnell: As the pandemic spread, gm's Mary
barra learned about a small innovative ventilator manufacturer in Washington
state called ventec. Was putting the company's assets and people
to work, to fight this pandemic an easy decision? >>
barra: It was-- a very easy decision. When I got
the call and we got the introduction to ventec the
team just moved so quickly. And we thought if there's
a way we can help, we absolutely want to do
it. >> Phil kienle: The manifold that we had before...
>> O'Donnell: After one phone call with ventec, Phil kienle,
gm's vice president of north American manufacturing, got on a
plane with three of his engineers. >> Kienle: When we
were on the flight to Seattle, I asked everybody to
have a mindset of what if your parents, your wife,
one of your children had this covid disease, and absolutely
needed one of these ventilators? How far would you go
to get this thing into production? How fast would you
move? >> O'Donnell: And given the speed with which you
needed to act, how did you go about sourcing 400
different parts for ventilators? >> Kienle: Our global purchasing and
supply chain team really pulled off a miracle in sourcing
this. We were in Seattle on a Friday. That same
weekend, they were already sourcing the components for us. >>
O'Donnell: Gm and ventec began transforming gm's kokomo, Indiana facility
virtually overnight, from one that made electronic car components to
a ventilator factory. It was ideally suited because both products
contain a lot of circuit boards. Then they called on
a mixture of salaried gm employees and union workers from
the u.A.W. George vandermeir has been with gm for 43
years. He used to make sure parts for pick-up trucks
met safety standards. He's doing the same now for ventilators,
with parts so small they need to be picked up
with a set of tweezers. When were you scheduled to
retire? >> George vandermeir: Yesterday. So I just extended my--
retirement for another month or two just to make sure
this gets off the ground and everything-- works well so
we can get these ventilators out. >> O'Donnell: Tracy streeter
used to move sheet metal with a forklift at his
old gm job. That was before he was laid off
because of covid-19. >> Tracy streeter: And just brought that
plant to a standstill. >> O'Donnell: He is one of
46 laid-off workers from a gm plant in Marion, Indiana
who got the call from kokomo. >> Streeter: I went
and asked my wife. She's an l.P.N. And her eyes
lit up and she went, "you get to help." So
it was a no-brainer. >> O'Donnell:Your wife is a nurse
and she said, "this is an opportunity to help." >>
streeter: Exactly. >> O'Donnell: In just two days he was
trained to assemble and test a part of the ventilator
that holds oxygen and has to be airtight. >> Streeter:
There's a little tiny screw that goes into-- the part
that I build. But even though that screw is so
small, it's an important part. I look at it in
the scheme of things, I'm just probably just as-- insignificant
as that small little screw. But I play a part
in what's happening in the bigger scale. >> Kienle: It
went from a discussion to production in less than three
weeks. >> O'Donnell: At first, gm and ventec were operating
on their own. In late march, president trump ordered them
to make ventilators under the defense production act. 12 days
later they signed a half-billlion dollar contract to make 30,000
for the federal government by August. Gm says it's not
making any profit on the ventilators, but the project is
teaching the company valuable lessons to help get its car
factories open faster says Phil kienle, head of manufacturing for
north America. >> Kienle: Well, we've actually pretty much used--
kokomo as a beta site, if you will, for new
safety protocols that we'll instill when general motors restarts. >>
O'Donnell: That's really interesting. So not only are you making
ventilators, you're also learning about how to work safely in
this new era once you reopen the car plants. >>
kienle: Absolutely. >> O'Donnell: Many of those working on kokomo,
Mary, told us that they get their temperature taken before
they go into work. Is that going to be the
new normal in American manufacturing? >> Barra: Yes it will
be. And before I walked into this facility today I
had my temperature scanned. I think it's a very important
part of the protocol. >> Ford: Good morning. >> How
are you doing? >> Ford: Good, how are you? In
the plant I'm in today, we're wearing face masks and
we're wearing face shields. >> O'Donnell: Ford's executive chairman bill
Ford says the company has also installed plastic barriers between
each work station to enforce social distancing. >> Ford: Everybody's
also wearing watches that buzz if you get within six
feet of somebody else. >> O'Donnell: That's the first I
had heard about these wristbands that buzz when you get
within six feet of somebody. >> Ford: Yeah, we're trying
it out. >> O'Donnell: The watches that Ford is testing
are made by Samsung and use Bluetooth technology. >> Ford:
It also tells you who you've come into contact with
that's also been wearing that-- that-- wristband, so that if
anybody was infected, it's very easy to trace who they
were interacting with. >> O'Donnell: Ford is testing the watches
with small teams of workers now making medical equipment. And
what do you do when it buzzes? >> Joanne ritchie:
Back off. (Laugh) >> O'Donnell: 30 year Ford employee joanne
ritchie is on a line that's made over a million
face masks. Just six weeks ago, in another clean room,
she was making transmission valves. Joanne's daughter Andrea is a
critical care nurse in one of the hospitals near Detroit
that has seen both shortages of protective gear and multiple
staffers diagnosed with covid- 19. And when your manager called
to ask if you would come back not to make
cars, but to make face masks, did you think about
your daughter and helping her? >> Ritchie: That was the
first thing that came to my mind. I thought, I'm
gonna protect her. If I can, I'm gonna protect her.
I'm gonna give her what she needs to do her
job. >> O'Donnell: Joanne ritchie goes to her job at
the factory 30 A.M., seven days a week. About an
hour after she leaves for work, her daughter heads for
her job at the hospital, to treat covid-19 patients. >>
ritchie: The first couple days that she came home, she
was-- you couldn't even look at her in the face.
She didn't want to talk. And I says, "I'm worried
about you. I'm-- I'm waiting to make sure that you
come home at night. Because I don't know if you're
going to come home. >> O'Donnell: She really is on
the frontlines. >> Ritchie: Oh yeah, she is. Sorry about
that. (Laugh) >> O'Donnell: Turns out, it runs in the
family. During world war ii, joanne's grandmother chiara worked for
the Hudson motor car company in Detroit, helping to make
planes and engines for the U.S. war machine, just as
millions of other women did in factories all around the
country. Your grandmother chiara was a real Rosie the riveter.
>> Ritchie: Yes, she was. You just step up to
the plate. >> O'Donnell: Gm's George vandermeir also stepped up.
The first shipments of ventilators he helped build went out
to Chicago area hospitals last week. When you first saw
a ventilator built and completed, ready to ship, how did
that make you feel? >> George vandermeir: It was amazing.
What we could do in such a short period of
time, taking a vision and making it reality in three
or four weeks. And we all got that opportunity to
sign the box of the first shipments. >> O'Donnell: Worth
putting retirement off for? >> Vandermier: Absolutely. Hands down, no
question. (\ticking\) >> Bill Whitaker: When you're fighting a pandemic,
almost nothing matters more than speed. A little-known band of
doctors and hi-tech wizards say they were able to find
the vital speed needed to attack the the computing power
of artificial intelligence. They call their new weapon" outbreak science."
It could change the way we fight another contagion. Already
it has led to calls for an overhaul of how
the federal government does things. But first, we'll take you
inside bluedot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that
scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It's a
digital early warning system, and it was among the first
to raise alarms about this lethal outbreak. It was new
year's Eve when bluedot's computer spat out an a Chinese
business paper had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious
flu- like disease in Wuhan, a city of 11 million.
The signs were ominous. Seven people were already in hospitals.
Almost all the cases came from the city's sprawling market,
where live animals are packed in cages and slaughtered on-site.
Medical detectives are now investigating if this is where the
epidemic began, when the virus made the leap from animals
to us. Half a world away on the Toronto waterfront,
bluedot's founder and c.E.O., Dr. kamran Khan, was on his
way to work. An infectious disease physician, he had seen
another coronavirus in 2003, SARS, kill three colleagues. When we
spoke with him remotely he told us this outbreak had
him worried. >> Dr. kamran Khan: We did not know
that this would become the next pandemic. But we did
know that there were echoes of the SARS outbreak, and
it was something that we really should be paying attention
to. >> Whitaker: Covid-19 soon got the world's attention. Bluedot's
Toronto staff now works from home, except for Dr. Khan.
But in December, the office kicked into high-gear as they
rushed to verify the alert. Chinese officials were secretive about
what was happening. But bluedot's computer doesn't rely on official
statements. Their algorithm was already churning through data, including medical
bulletins, even livestock reports, to predict where the virus would
go next. It was also scanning the ticket data from
4,000 airports. >> Khan: And just draw right over the
city of Wuhan, and it'll reveal the locations of airports.
>> Whitaker: Bluedot wasn't just tracking flights, but calculating the
cities at greatest risk. On December 31, there were more
than 800,000 travelers leaving Wuhan, some likely carrying the disease.
>> Khan: So these yellow lines reflect the nonstop flights
going out of Wuhan. And then the blue circles reflect
the final destinations of travelers. The larger the circle, the
larger number of travelers who are going to that location.
These were many of the first cities that actually received
cases of covid-19 as it spread out of mainland China.
>> Whitaker: You can do that in a matter of
seconds? >> Khan: We can analyze and visualize all this
information across the globe in just a few seconds. >>
Whitaker: The virus wasn't just spreading to east Asia. Thousands
of travelers were heading to the United States too. >>
Khan: Most of the travel came into California and San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Also, into New York City. And
we analyzed that way back on December 31. Our surveillance
system that picked up the outbreak of Wuhan automatically talks
to the system that is looking at how travelers might
go to various airports around Wuhan. >> Whitaker: So when
you see that map, you don't just see flight patterns?
>> Khan: If you think of an outbreak a bit
like a fire and embers flying off, these are like
embers flying off into different locations. >> Whitaker: So in
this case, that Ember landed in dry brush in new
York and started a wildfire? >> Khan: Absolutely. >> Whitaker:
Dr. Khan told us he had spent the better part
of a year persuading the airlines to share their flight
data for public health. Nobody had ever asked that before.
But he saw it as information gold. >> Khan: How
is it that someone knows 16b, that seat is available,
but 14a has been taken? There clearly must be some
kind of information system. >> Whitaker: Why is that so
important? >> Khan: There are over four billion of us
that board commercial flights and travel around the world every
year. And so that is why understanding population movements becomes
so important in anticipating how disease is spread. >> Whitaker:
The virus spread across Asia with a vengeance. Bluedot has
licensed access to the anonymized location data from millions of
cellphones. And with that data it identified 12 of the
20 cities that would suffer first. >> Khan: What we're
looking at here are mobile devices that were in Wuhan
in the previous 14 days and where are they now
across east Asia. Places like Tokyo have a lot of
devices-- Seoul in south Korea-- >> Whitaker: So you're following
those devices from Wuhan to these other cities? >> Khan:
That's correct. I do want to point out these are
also anonymized data. But they allow us to understand population
movements. That is how we can understand how this virus
will spread. >> Whitaker: To build their algorithm, Dr. Khan
told us he deliberately hired an eclectic engineers, ecologists, geographers,
veterinarians, all under one roof. They spent a year teaching
the computer to detect 150 deadly pathogens. >> Khan: We
can ultimately train a machine to be reading through all
the text and picking out components that this is talking
about an outbreak of Anthrax, and this is talking about
the heavy metal band Anthrax. And as you do this
thousands and thousands and thousands of times, the machine starts
to get smarter and smarter. >> Whitaker: And how many
different language does the computer understand? >> Khan: So it's
reading this currently in 65 languages, and processing this information
every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. So it's a
lot of data to go through. >> Whitaker: Within two
hours of detecting the outbreak on December 31, bluedot had
sent a warning of the potential threat public health officials
in 12 countries, airlines and frontline hospitals, like humber river
in Toronto. >> Dr. Michael gardam: We've been able to
really make a lot of decisions, I think, a little
bit earlier because I kind of feel like we had
a bit of an inside scoop here. >> Whitaker: One
of Canada's top infectious disease physicians, Dr. Michael gardam, told
us it was like getting real time intelligence. What did
you do when you got that information from bluedot? >>
gardam: Getting that intel allowed me to kind of be
the canary in the coal mine, to stand up and
say we need to pay attention to this. And to
start thinking about it, start thinking about supplies, start thinking
about how busy we might be. Now at this point,
everybody knows about covid-19. But it's, it's not so much
now. Now you've pretty much bought whatever p.P.E. You can
buy, it's very hard to buy that anymore. It's what
did you do a month and a half ago that
was so important. So, none of this is any surprise
to us whatsoever, and yet, you see countries around the
world where this has been a surprise. >> Whitaker: Bluedot
had no clients in the U.S., so while Dr. gardam's
hospital was making plans in January, president trump, as late
as march, was still assuring Americans that everything was under
control. >> Trump: We're prepared. And we're doing a great
job with it. And it will go away, just stay
calm. >> Whitaker: California wasn't so sure, and braced for
the worst. In march it became the first state in
the country to lock down its cities. Mickey mouse suddenly
looked lonely. Drivers had only dreamed of such empty freeways.
But the lockdown bought time. Despite having its first case
of covid-19 five weeks before New York, California dodged the
hurricane of infection that slammed into New York City. At
his daily teleconference in sacramento, governor Gavin newsom made no
secret where he'd outbreak science. >> Newsom: It's not a
gross the old modeling is literally pento-paper in some cases.
And then you put it into some modest little computer
program and it spits a piece of paper out. I
mean, this is a whole other level of sophistication and
data collection. >> Whitaker: With the virus spreading around the
world, California enlisted the help of bluedot, esri, Facebook and
others, using mapping technologies and cellphone data to predict which
hospitals would be hit hardest, and see if Californians were
really staying at home. Data became California's all- seeing crystal
ball. >> Newsom: We are literally seeing in to the
future and predicting in real-time based on constant update of
information where patterns are starting to occur before they become
headlines. >> Whitaker: Can you just sort of like, give
me an example? >> Newsom: We can see in real
time on a daily basis, hourly basis, moment-by-moment basis if
necessary, whether or not our stay-at-home orders were working. We
can truly track now by census tract, not just by
county. >> Whitaker: Here's what it looked like. Bluedot scanned
anonymous cellphone data over a 24-hour period last month in
Los Angeles. The blue circles indicate less movement than the
week before, the red spots show where people are still
gathering. It could be a hospital, or a problem. That
cellphone data allows public health officials to investigate. It also
raises worrisome privacy issues. How are you able to ensure
that this cellphone data will remain anonymous? >> Newsom: Well,
I didn't want to take the companies words for it,
I say that respectfully. I have team of folks that
are privacy-first advocates in our technology department. And we are
making sure that no individualized data is provided. If it
is, we're out. >> Whitaker: So what's been the most
frustrating part of this for you? >> Newsom: It's just
incumbent upon us to have a national lens. And to
recognize we're many parts but one body. And if one
part suffers, we all suffer. >> Whitaker: From this experience,
do you think the federal government needs to overhaul the
way it tackles pandemics? >> Newsom: I don't know that
there's a human being out there, maybe one or two,
that would suggest otherwise. No, the absolute answer is, of
course, unequivocally. >> Dylan George: Data technology has transformed the
way we do business in many aspects of our lives.
But it has not transformed the way things are done
in public health. >> Whitaker: For Dylan George, that's an
urgent priority. As a scientist tracking biological threats in the
bush and Obama administrations, he has seen first-hand what he
calls the panic-neglect cycle. >> George: Perhaps the most tragic
idea in all of public health is this-- in a
time of an outbreak everyone lights their hair on fire
and is running around trying to figure out. After it's
over, everyone forgets about it. >> Whitaker: He has joined
a growing number of scientists an infectious disease forecasting center
modeled on the national weather service. >> George: We need
to have professionals that their day job is dedicated to
helping us understand how infectious diseases will, will risk our
wellbeing economically and from a national security perspective. >> Whitaker:
That idea has been kicking around for a while. It's
never gotten the funding. Do you think things will be
different this time? >> George: When we see that there
is $2 trillion being spent on stimulus bills to help
us get out of this, to make sure that we
can rebound, we need to think transformatively. We need to
think broadly about how we can move these things forward.
This kind of a center would help us do that.
>> Whitaker: As the coronavirus continues to upend our lives,
Toronto's Dr. Michael gardam told he has seen the difference
a digital early-warning system can make. >> Gardam: One of
the biggest challenges in infectious diseases is you never want
to be the doctor that picks up the first case
because you're probably going to miss it. And you probably
weren't wearing the right gear and it's probably already spread
in your hospital. And so getting the early warning that
help gives you the intel to make that first call
is so incredibly important. (\ticking\) >> David Martin: Anyone joining
the United States military takes an oath to defend the
country against all enemies foreign and domestic. Safe to say
very few of them had coronavirus in mind when they
raised their right hand. By latest count, some 60,000 servicemen
and women have been sent into action against this new
enemy. But the military's number one mission has been to
defend its own ranks against infection. It can't protect the
nation if it can't defend itself. The aircraft carrier Roosevelt
made headlines when coronavirus ran roughshod through its Crew. And
there have been other outbreaks that required drastic measures to
contain. The U.S. military was up against an enemy it
could not see and did not understand. >> One! Two!
>> Martin: Everything in the army starts with basic training.
And every day starts before dawn. But it never looked
or sounded like this before. >> Halt! >> David castelow:
Hard surfaces. Everything that your little hands touch. Everything! It's
gotta get wiped down. Your beds, everything! If it's a
hard surface it collects dust. You're gonna wipe it down.
Do you understand? >> Yes, drill sergent! >> Martin: It's
not dust drill sergeant David castelow is worried about. It's
coronavirus. And that's why he takes every recruit's temperature first
thing. >> Castlerow: If your organization is infected by something
like this, you know, these people, these initial entry trainees,
are our combat power. So if they go down, or
and if we can't do it safely, then we are
rendering ourselves obsolete. You understand? >> Martin: Last month, 63
recruits in a class of 940 here at fort Jackson,
south Carolina, tested positive for the virus and upended basic
training. >> You're going to do everything that I tell
you. You do not move unless I tell you to.
>> Martin: That's not a recruit he's barking at. It's
a four star general, army chief of staff James mcconville.
>> Make sure that you are standing on top of
the red and the white x. Is that clear? >>
Martin: Mcconville took on the role of a recruit to
witness the revamped training first hand after coronavirus had forced
the army to stop taking in new soldiers. >> James
mcconville: We took a two week pause. >> Martin: So
for two weeks, you're not taking in any recruits? >>
mcconville: That's correct. >> Martin: Has that ever happened before?
>> Mcconville: I'm not aware of any time- at least,
in my 39 years where we stopped taking recruits in.
But these are different times. >> Martin: Training is still
going on at fort Jackson for recruits who arrived before
the two week pause. But now every soldier is wearing
a face mask, loading up on hand sanitizer before moving
into firing position and trying to stay six feet apart.
>> Hey stop, stop. Keep your distance. >> Martin: We
call it "social distancing." The army calls it "tactical dispersion."
>> Collins: We have been executing socially distanced enabled training
since week two. >> Martin: Either way, lieutenant colonel Patrick
Collins tells general mcconville it's a problem. >> Collins: Day
to day our biggest problem is keeping them in that
six feet. Cause, you tend to tell them," o.K. Separate.
Get your six feet." You know, a couple minutes later,
you know, just kind of natural human behavior. They start
clustering again and you, and you, you've got to tell
them again. >> Martin: Nothing at fort Jackson is natural
any more. The army likes to say it has the
best dressed soldiers in the world, but tailors who usually
alter uniforms for a better fit are now turning out
face masks. >> Mcconville: These just got here. These are
brand new. >> Martin: Brand new? And the single most
important equipment mcconville saw on his tour was a pair
of high speed covid-19 test machines. >> Koenig: That'd give
us the ability to test 750 plus in one day
with a one day turnaround. And then they go and
we can then test that bubble also. We can continue
to expand the bubbles of testing so that we can
make sure we can cut it off right at the
source, rather than watch it spread through a unit. >>
Martin: The chief of staff's job is to get the
army ready to fight. But these days general mcconville told
us he spends three quarters of his time trying to
fight coronavirus to keep his soldiers healthy. Just six weeks
ago he was sending heavy armor to Europe for one
of the largest exercises since the cold war. >> Mcconville:
The toughest decision that, that we had to make was
to cancel defender 20. >> Martin: Defender 20 meant sending
an entire division-sized force and its equipment to Europe just
as the virus was assaulting the continent. >> Mcconville: We
just started war gaming what would happen if we had
15,000 or 20,000 soldiers in a very close environment and,
you know, and the virus broke out? How would we
take care of them? And did we want to put
our soldiers at that much risk for a training exercise?
And we chose not to. >> Martin: You have to
curtail training. You have to postpone Major exercises. That's got
to take a toll on the readiness of the army.
>> Mcconville: From where I sit, I'm looking at the
long game, and the long game is that we have
to protect the force to protect the nation. >> Martin:
How big a price have you paid so far? >>
mcconville: I don't think we've paid a huge price yet.
Am I concerned long term? Absolutely. >> Pete fesler: I'll
be honest. It's been a little bit intimidating thinking about
it. You train in your career to fight an enemy
that you can see. This is one that you can't.
>> Martin: Air force brigadier general Pete fesler, a fighter
pilot, is about as far removed from basic training as
it gets, underneath 1500 feet of granite at this command
post inside Cheyenne mountain, Colorado. >> Fesler: It is a
secure location that we intend to operate out of in
wartime. >> Martin: Well, this is wartime, isn't it? >>
fesler: It is, but it's really a different kind of
war. >> Martin: Cheyenne mountain was built to withstand a
nuclear blast but every time a watch team makes this
half-mile walk into the mountain, they risk bringing the virus
with them. Which is why each team spends 14 days
in quarantine before going on duty. When their watch starts...
>> Fesler: The first step you do is you start
wiping down every surface, your computers, your telephones, your desk
surfaces, door handles, etcetera, to make sure that all those
are clean as well. It's a bit like an obsessive
compulsive disorder. But we have to be able to make
sure that there's no exposure to that virus. >> Martin:
Because our "60 minutes" team had not been quarantined, our
cameras were not allowed inside the mountain. This footage was
shot by the military. The interview was conducted from the
Pentagon. >> Fesler: When occasionally we have to bring somebody
from outside into our bubble for work on an it
system, for example, we scatter like cockroaches. It's as if
this is the most dangerous thing we've ever done in
our careers. It's not being shot at. It's not flying
combat. It's actually having somebody from outside the bubble arrive
inside of here. >> Martin: This command center performs what
fesler calls a zero fail mission- a 24/7 watch against
a missile or bomber attack on the United States. Since
the pandemic began, Cheyenne mountain has scrambled jets to intercept
Russian aircraft off the coast of Alaska three times. You
think they were testing you at all to see if
anybody was home at Cheyenne mountain. >> Fesler: I suspect
that the way that they look at those sorties probably
is related to understanding our ability to operate in a
covid environment. >> Martin: Cheyenne mountain was ready for the
Russians but not for coronavirus. >> Fesler: This is something
new. This is something that we had to invent on
the fly as our adversary was not exactly like the
one we had planned to fight. >> Terrence o'shaughnessy: There
are so many aspects of what's going on now that
are not things that we expected that we would be
doing. >> Martin: General Terrence o'shaughnessy, head of the U.S.
Northern command, is the man in charge of defending the
homeland. He had plans for dealing with all kinds of
disasters, including a pandemic, but nothing on this scale. >>
o'shaughnessy: Often we practice what we call the complex disasters,
where we might have an earthquake maybe that hit multiple
states and we consider those to be complex. And to
have a national-- actual disasters declared in the 50 states
and the responses happening with them, that is unprecedented. >>
Martin: So, you know the old saying about plans, no
plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. >> O'shaughnessy:
This plan did not survive contact with the enemy. >>
Martin: Despite all the top secret intelligence he sees, o'shaughnessy
did not have a good understanding of the virus. >>
o'shaughnessy: Having an enemy that you don't fully understand is
always a little bit frustrating. >> John hyten: We still
don't fully understand the virus. >> Martin: General John hyten
is the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, the number
two man in the military. Twice each day he holds
a video conference with the Pentagon's crisis management team located
two floors below in the national military command center. >>
hyten: We had so many assumptions of what a virus
would do, what a pandemic flu would do. And then
when you actually see what coronavirus does, what covid-19 does,
it's completely different. >> Martin: The nastiest surprise was the
aircraft carrier Roosevelt. Not only did the virus sideline one
of the most important ships in the Navy but the
majority of the more than 800 Crew members who tested
positive had no symptoms. >> Hyten: You think you finally
start to understand it, and then you get data off
the Theodore Roosevelt, of the very large number of asymptomatic
cases. And then you try to understand whether the asymptomatic
cases is contagious. How contagious are they? That's medical questions
that we still don't fully understand the answers to. >>
Martin: Many of the answers depended on testing and the
Pentagon had to use its transport planes to airlift millions
of test swabs into the United States from Europe. From
the outside looking in, it seemed like it was one
emergency stopgap shipment of medical supplies after another. Was that
what it was like on the inside looking out? >>
hyten: On the inside looking out I'll say it didn't
look like an emergency but it was difficult. It was
difficult to figure out exactly where to go. And then
when we decided to move-- we had to move quickly
to get it in the right place. But the one
thing that we do really well is we move stuff.
>> Martin: The army corps of engineers set up hospitals
like this one at Chicago's mccormick place convention center all
across the country, creating by last count about 15,000 beds
in case local hospitals were overwhelmed. Were those hospitals the
last line of defense? >> Hyten: We looked at it
as the last line of defense. >> Martin: Where would
the medical personnel to staff all those beds come from?
>> Hyten: I have to be honest, we were worried
about whether we'd run out of capacity early on when
we were looking at those big numbers. It was not
just space but, we were worried about doctors, nurses, corpsmen,
respiratory therapists. We were worried about all those things. >>
Martin: If this virus had not been slowed by social
distancing, would the U.S. military have had the capability and
capacity to defeat that virus? >> Hyten: That's what we
were worried about. A situation where we would have been
basically mobilizing everything we had. It would have been a
different world. And I can't tell you right now how
we would have closed that. >> Martin: It's a question
the American military rarely has to ask itself, but the
definition of what it takes to be a superpower has
changed forever. So what will it take to get the
military back to normal? >> Hyten: 2019 normal will never
exist again. We have to figure out how to operate
and fight through a world where coronavirus exists. If we
just wait for what, you know, everybody hopes is going
to happen, which is the disease goes away, and it
doesn't, and we haven't planned for the-- for the other
case, we're in a bad situation. (\ticking\) >> For more
on our coverage of the coronavirus, go to 60minutesovertime. Com.
>> Whitaker now, an update on a story from earlier
this month called "critical condition." Scott pelley visited "melba's," a
109 seat restaurant in Harlem, where owner melba Wilson had
laid off 24 employees after the pandemic shut down restaurant
dining rooms. Among them was alysha navarro, a 30 year
old single mother. Today, melba is preparing about 200 meals
a day, ordered and paid for by customers, then distributed
to medical workers, schools and first responders. Melba has begun
to call back some of her kitchen staff. Alysha navarro,
who didn't work in the kitchen, remains on unemployment, caring
full-time for her daughter. Alysha tells us she received $500
from "60 minutes" viewers. She spent 300 making sandwiches which
she gave out to public housing residents and the homeless
in her neighborhood. The rest covered groceries for her daughter
and herself. I'm bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week
with another edition of "60 minutes." (\ticking\)
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