He discusses that lockdowns are not a primary method of dealing with it, but they are good when you need to buy time.

China says, oh, there were five cases in Wuhan. Oh, you'd not leave your house now. So now we are, oh, we can't open up either. China say second wave comm. They're all open for business, but we can't.

That's the likely outcome of trying to force a reopening of many places where people congregate in large numbers prematurely. It's very likely that the number of cases will go up if states reopen everything before it's safe to do so.

Experts in the field are pretty universally warning about this phenomenon and how it's pretty much inevitable that if we loosen things up prematurely and irresponsibly, we could see case numbers explode. According to an article in the Denver Post, one of the most important benchmarks for knowing that it could be okay to ease restrictions is a, quote, 14-day downward trajectory in new illnesses and infections, which we do not have. And even if we did, easing restrictions in that scenario is only advisable if there's also a robust testing system in place to be able to catch new outbreaks before they become big new outbreaks. We don't have either of those basic components for doing this safely.

Are we looking at living with some sort of social distancing guidelines essentially until there's treatment or a vaccine? For example, people looking forward to the summer talk about going to baseball games, going to concerts. We have political conventions over the summer. Are things like that possible or safe without a vaccine or a treatment in place?

And so, yeah, and even those are, you know, who knows? The 18-month number that Alex is talking about is specifically related to the UK. Boris Johnson had previously announced that their strategy was going to be trying to develop a herd immunity to the virus by people just going on living their lives, which epidemiologists roundly said was a very bad idea. I really think that we shouldn't elect lunatic reality TV show stars/slash magazine commentators to our highest offices. I think it's a bad idea. It's not productive. I don't think it's a good idea, Dan. According to an article in Time, modeling of that strategy of the herd immunity strategy found that it would quote exceed healthcare systems' maximum capacities many times over. So, I thought that's what he was talking about because there was an article about Boris Johnson having to be like, Wow, this is going to take a long time. But it's still not 18 months in lockdown. This wave may last that extent of time. So I thought that's what it was, but that's not where the 18-month number comes from. That's the estimated time it will take to develop and get approval for a vaccine, at which point all the restrictions for social distancing and similar measures would not be necessary. This is not a statement that anyone is going to be in lockdown for 18 months. It's merely a reflection that we will need to have some sort of containment considerations probably until there's a vaccine. And that's the estimated timeframe for that. 12 to 18 months, yeah. It's also inaccurate to say that these things will only last a few weeks. That's a slight misunderstanding of statements from health officials about the lengths of things like stay-at-home rules, like we have here in Illinois, which lasts until April 7th. There is a possibility that it'll extend after that, maybe, probably. But that's the period where things can be reassessed and experts will know a little bit more at that point. So when people are saying it'll last two weeks, they're not saying that, hey, we're all good in two weeks. Right, right. It means that's the period and then we'll reassess and know more from that point. It's them all trying to be like, can we please hit pause on this? We're going to try and test everybody and get a full idea of where exactly we are and then we can move forward instead of being like, I guess we're just going to go for it. Let's see what happens. Yeah, write it out. Herd immunity, why not? I wrote in a newspaper for a bit. It's probably pessimistic to assume that social distancing measures will last 18 months, but it's also probably naive to assume it'll only last two weeks. It's probably a good idea to expect worse than the best case scenario, but if people take this seriously and we get lucky on the medical side of things, the worst case scenario doesn't have to come to pass either. The other thing that this is based on is a post on Michael Snyder's Economic Collapse blog, which Alex has reposted on Infowars, titled, quote, the U.S. government is preparing for an 18-month pandemic and critical shortages. The subheadline is, quote, are you prepared for the nationwide shutdown that's happening now to last 18 months? No. This blog post is based on a 103-page health and human services document that the New York Times released titled U.S. Government COVID-19 Response Plan. The only place in this document that 18 months comes up is in the section that lists the assumptions that this plan was based on. And number two is, quote, a pandemic will last 18 months or longer and could include multiple waves of illness. It would be important to also point out that assumption number three is, quote, the spread and severity of COVID-19 will be difficult to forecast and characterize. So that's even kind of a caveat to assumption number two. This is a document that's primarily about government agency responsibility for various considerations. It's an organizational document more than anything else. And I think it would be a real stretch to assume that you can take this document to prove that even the government is planning for an 18-month lockdown. The thing that's important to remember is that this 18-month number is an assumption of how long the pandemic may have an effect on the country that requires a plan. But that doesn't mean the same thing as there's going to be a year and a half lockdown. One key point is that this is a full plan, and it involves a stage after the active pandemic in its timeline. The phase where we'd be returning to what they call a, quote, pre-epidemic posture. That's part of the 18-month lifespan of the plan, of whatever they're assuming. This doesn't say that there will be an 18-month lockdown. And in fact, one of the most critical considerations of the document is, quote, revisions in the scenarios, modeling, and projections used to inform planning and consequent changes in planning should be made to accommodate changes in knowledge about COVID-19 characteristics affecting the parameters used for this modeling.