Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman appeared on CNN, Wednesday, for a trainwreck of an interview during which she called for casinos and hotels to be reopened, argued there have been viruses in Vegas “for years,” and engaged in a constant battle with Cooper who described her positions as “ignorant.”

As the interview started, host Anderson Cooper asked Goodman, “You assume everyone has the virus is just asymptomatic. You want casinos open, Vegas back in business. Is that a responsible call to make?”

“That wasn’t the call that I was really making,” Goodman shot back. “It was to get people back to work. We have so many in our hospitality crew… We’re two-and-a-half million people down here in southern Nevada and we have so many out of work…”

“But you want the casinos open, yes?” questioned Cooper, prompting the mayor to respond, “Well, that’s a piece of it. I want the hotel rooms open. We have 155,000 hotel rooms and most of our people who live here and are part of the population are hooked to those hotel rooms in some way or ancillary way.”

Cooper pushed, “So you want hotel rooms, casinos, the theatres open? I mean you want Vegas back in business, no?”

“I want our restaurants open, I want our small businesses open, I want people back in employment,” Goodman declared. “We have so many families that can’t even afford to get the groceries for their family because they’ve been out of work for six weeks.”

Cooper again asked, “But casinos, you want them open? Because obviously, visitors are not going to come without casinos and shows and things.”

“Well, no, they’ll come because they love… We’ve got major league sports here,” the mayor answered. “I’d love everything open because I think we’ve had viruses for years that have been here.”

A few minutes later, Cooper noted that Goodman is “talking about encouraging hundreds of thousands of people to come to Las Vegas,” adding, “I get the financial losses people are suffering, which is awful, but you’re encouraging, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people coming there in casinos, smoking, drinking, touching slot machines, breathing circulated air, and then returning home to states around America and countries around the world.”

“Doesn’t that sound like a virus petri dish?” he asked.

“No, it sounds like you’re being an alarmist,” Goodman snapped.

Later on in the interview, as Cooper noted Chinese researchers “have shown how this virus spreads,” and put up a diagram of an infected restaurant, Goodman replied, “This isn’t China. This is Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Wow. Okay, that’s really ignorant,” claimed Cooper. “That’s an ignorant statement. That’s a restaurant, and yes it’s in China but they are human beings too.”

Watch above via CNN.

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