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April 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:16
Another Week Of Waiting | Ep. 990
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As local officials exercise their power over minute infractions, Europe examines ways to reopen, debate breaks out in the United States over how to reopen and when, and the New York Times faults President Trump for his coronavirus response while letting Joe Biden off the hook for an allegation of sexual assault.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Well, you may have noticed that the economy is a little bit volatile right now.
By the economy is a little bit volatile, I mean, nobody knows where the stock market is going.
Will it be down 20% next month?
Will it be up 15%?
Like, no one knows what the hell is going on.
And now might be a good time for you to think about diversifying into precious metals.
I mean, if you'd listened to me like a year ago, you'd be sitting pretty right now if you diversified A little bit into precious metals.
Over 10 million unemployment claims in March last week.
We had like another 7 million unemployment claims.
Up to 17 million unemployed added to the rolls in just the last month or so.
Even with the stock market having a slight recovery, we just don't know the long-term impact of any of this.
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Okay, so here is your coronavirus update.
I've been off for a few days thanks to Passover, which frankly was nice because one of the big problems with Twitter is that you're checking every five minutes to see if they have developed a vaccine.
And in fact, they have not developed a vaccine, nor have they developed any reliable treatments for coronavirus.
And so basically you're just spinning your wheels 24 hours a day, which is why disconnecting is actually kind of a good thing.
I hope that people did that A little bit over the beginning of Passover and did that also over Easter.
Right now in the United States we've seen approximately 22,000 total deaths.
A little over 22,000 total deaths.
We are starting to see the slow take place.
Actually yesterday was a little bit down according to worldometers which is gathered from the Johns Hopkins information.
They suggest that there were about 1,500 little over 1,500 new deaths yesterday.
The peak was already hit according to That University of Washington study.
It happened a couple of days ago.
And so this has got people talking as they should be talking about reopening the economy and what that looks like.
The big problem in reopening the economy and what that looks like is this great fear of a second wave.
And as I mentioned, I've been talking about this for a long time.
One of the things that's very irritating about the way the news is covered is the reduction to absolute simple stupidity.
It's really irritating.
So, for the last few weeks, we've been treated to flatten the curve, flatten the curve, flatten the curve, and I've been all in on that.
Flatten the curve, right?
Stay home, make sure that you are not going out, and make sure that if you are going out, you're socially distancing.
Masks are probably a good idea, right?
Here in Los Angeles, they now have rules that if you go into a grocery store or an enclosed area, you have to be wearing a mask.
They shut down pretty much every park in LA yesterday, which frankly seems to me like overkill.
You actually want people outside I've been all in on the measures that have been recommended by Dr. Fauci and by Dr. Birx in terms of the social distancing, but I've been saying all along that the big question here is going to be what happens when we are all released from our home confinement, because that's what this is.
What's going to happen when we go back out there?
Are we going to reinfect each other?
What's the plan for us not to reinfect each other?
How exactly do you plan for something like that when for the first week of having coronavirus apparently it is asymptomatic or at least not obviously symptomatic to people who are outside?
What happens when you have a slight cough that doesn't feel like coronavirus and you're being told that you're supposed to lock down for 14 days in the allergy season?
How is any of that supposed to work?
How are we supposed to work in economy?
Which is going to lose 40% of GDP, according to JP Morgan, just this quarter.
How are we supposed to get back into an economy when we don't know whether a second wave is going to break out or even what a second wave looks like at this point?
And so the only information that we have so far is looking to foreign countries and trying to see how they are doing it.
And the answer is that they are handling it in a variety of ways, and it is not clear which way is going to be the best.
So in Italy, actually, they are still extending their business lockdown despite pressure.
According to the Agence France-Presse, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Friday refused to bow to business pressure and extended the Mediterranean country's economically crippling lockdown until May 3rd.
Conte made the announcement after Italy's official COVID-19 toll climbed by another 570 fatalities to 18,849, more than any other country, but with the growth rate now just a fraction of what it was a few weeks ago.
So they have successfully begun to flatten the curve.
Media reports say business unions from regions responsible 445% of Italy's production and 80% of its coronavirus deaths had written to Conte warning that companies would be unable to pay wages if the shutdown runs on, but Conte said that Italy could not afford another spike in infections and needed to exercise caution in the face of new disease.
There's been talk in China of a spike in cases again.
Plus, there are new federal projections that show a huge spike in coronavirus infections in the summer in the United States if current lockdown and social distancing measures are lifted after the planned 30 days.
According to the UK Daily Mail, new U.S.
government figures show that a spike in coronavirus infections would occur in the summer if the current lockdown measures are lifted after 30 days as planned.
That would be at the end of April, presumably.
About 95% of the United States is currently on some form of lockdown after President Trump issued the guidelines calling for 30 days of measures to slow the spread of the virus.
The government projections obtained by the New York Times indicate that lifting the strict social distancing measures now in place will see a second wave surge in infections and deaths in about June and July.
If the current shelter-in-place orders are lifted on May 30th, the death toll is estimated to reach 200,000, according to the projections obtained from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.
So far, the United States has seen only about 22,000 deaths, which is a lot of deaths in a short period of time.
200,000 deaths by the end of the summer would obviously wildly exceed the numbers that are being put forth in, for example, that University of Washington study.
which was downgraded to about 60,000 deaths if we all stay home through the end of May.
The death toll could reach 300,000 without any restrictions imposed to contain coronavirus, including school closing, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing.
So as I've been saying for a long time, we may have been simply buying time for the medical system to ramp up its ICU beds and its ventilators to the point where at least you will have an ICU bed and a ventilator if you need one, but we can't actually save you.
We bought ourselves a few weeks time in order to develop some treatments.
We bought a few weeks time toward a vaccine, but there's a lot of talk about the idea that the vaccine is still not going to be developed for 12 to 18 months, which means that what are we going to do?
Lockdown for 12 to 18 months?
Have these periodic rolling lockdowns for 12 to 18 months?
Other countries are trying to struggle with exactly what this looks like.
During the White House briefing on Friday, President Trump said he and his advisors have not yet seen the new coronavirus projections.
He gave a different projection.
He said he thinks the United States will lose fewer than the 100,000 lives initially projected to be lost to coronavirus, suggested the country is nearing its peak infection rate.
But you've heard Dr. Fauci say things like, well, maybe we'll reopen the schools in fall.
I have no idea how you are going to reopen the schools in fall if this thing is still around and then not reinfect everybody.
OK, I have three kids who are under the age of seven.
My six-year-old and my soon-to-be four-year-old, if they go back to school, they're going to reinfect each other.
That's just the way this is going to work.
Kids are germ factories.
They'll reinfect each other.
They'll come on over.
Grandma and grandpa will have to stay home, presumably for the duration, or grandma and grandpa run a significant likelihood of being infected.
Schools will become a wellspring for this sort of stuff, unless you end up with a strategy that maybe we should have attacked in the first place.
Which would have been to keep the most old and most vulnerable home and let everybody else go back to work, including social distancing and masks.
Maybe that should have been the program from the very beginning, because that looks, in all likelihood, like what's going to have to happen here over the course of time.
Now, there are certain ways that we can alleviate some of those burdens.
There's been talk about widespread testing that would allow people to go back to factories and social distancing measures and apps that will allow us to warn people if somebody is infected with coronavirus and lock things down in hotspots.
But that doesn't solve the problem for people who are most vulnerable.
It doesn't solve the problem for people who are elderly.
It doesn't solve the problem for people who have pre-existing conditions.
Dr. Fauci warned that if the United States prematurely end social distancing measures, they're right back in the same situation.
So that second wave that apparently only I was talking about, or very few people were talking about, is very much real.
And this is what drove me nuts throughout the entire conversation.
People were saying, okay, we got a lockdown, we got a lockdown, we got a lockdown, and they weren't being clear with the American public what exactly we were attempting to do.
If the idea was we were locking down just so we can ramp up our medical resources, then okay, our medical resources are now ramped up.
There is no, really, there are no forewarnings that the United States medical system is going to be overrun at this point.
In New York, the medical system was not, in fact, overrun.
I mean, Governor Cuomo said this last week.
They did not run short on ICU beds.
They did not run short on ventilators.
They were not splitting ventilators.
Or at least if they were, it was in rare circumstances where there were holdups in the supply chain.
We'll get to more of this in a second, because there are no easy decisions to be made here, and I'm getting kind of sick of people who are pro-shutdown, suggesting the easy decision is just to lock things down indefinitely, and people who are anti-shutdown, suggesting that the easy decision is just to go back to everything as normal.
Because I don't think that's right, and I think there are costs and benefits on each side, and I don't think this is easy in any way.
And anybody who's telling you it's easy is lying to you.
Anybody who's telling you this is an easy calculation is not looking what's happening in other parts of the world.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that there are things that we each look back on and we think, how could I possibly have gotten it so wrong?
Like, for example, over Passover, you just eat tons of matzo without any foresight as to how this is going to affect your digestive system.
How did I get it so wrong?
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Okay, so what is going on in Europe?
Well, a bunch of different sort of measures being taken by different countries.
So Italy is still locked down because Italy was hardest hit and that is where they're most afraid that the medical system continues to be very fragile and possibly overrun.
Meanwhile, CNN reports people in the Czech Republic can now shop at hardware and bicycle stores, play tennis and go swimming.
Austria plans to reopen smaller shops after Easter.
Denmark will reopen kindergartens and schools from next week if coronavirus cases remain stable.
Children in Norway will return to kindergarten a week later.
These nations are the first in the West to start feeling their way gradually out of the limits on daily life imposed by governments to curb the spread of coronavirus.
For professional athlete Irina Gelorova from the Czech Republic, the easing of restrictions Thursday meant she could return to training at the Juliska Stadium in Prague for the first time since her country lockdown.
It was great, honestly.
I was full of excitement.
I feel great, she said.
Dr. Peter Drobak, a global health expert at Oxford Saïd Business School, told CNN, countries now easing their restrictions are important and hopeful examples for the West, but any loosening of limits will carry risk.
WHO Regional Director of Europe Dr. Hans Klug warned this week that the situation in Europe is still very concerning and insisted now is not the time to relax measures.
So it is unclear exactly how far the relaxation measures are going to go.
According to Drobac, who is one of the commentators on this particular issue, that global health expert at Oxford Saïd Business School, he said the countries preparing to ease restrictions had something in common.
They were among the first in Europe to implement lockdowns or severe social distancing measures and had rapidly scaled up coronavirus testing.
He said that the plans to relax restrictions look reasonable and they look smart.
It's a gradual process.
They'll be able to learn and track things in terms of new infections.
If they ease up too much and infections start to spike, they can pull back a bit.
That's how every country is going to have to do it.
So what we're going to have is basically a stop-start model.
First, they need to have bent the curve.
Second, their health system needs to be able to cope.
So far, that looks like the United States.
So sick people can be isolated before they infect others.
And that's what everybody sort of wishes that they had done from the beginning.
Denmark has plans to send kids back to school and kindergarten from April 15th.
If coronavirus cases remain stable, the life will still look far from normal.
Many restrictions will remain in place.
There's still a ban on gatherings of more than 10 people.
That's been extended until May 10th.
Church services, cinemas, shopping centers are remaining closed.
Festivals and large gatherings remain closed all the way until August.
Denmark's borders remain shut.
That was one of the first countries in Europe to shut its borders.
They did that on March 13th.
They closed schools, cafes, and shops, as well as banning gatherings of more than 10 people and visits to the hospital.
In Czech Republic, they moved swiftly to impose restrictions on travel, ban large events, and close non-essential businesses after declaring a state of emergency on March 12th.
Also, they required their 11 million people to cover their faces with masks or scarves when outside the home from March 19th.
Since Tuesday, people have been allowed to exercise alone without face masks.
Shops such as construction and hardware stores, bicycle stores, bicycle repair centers are allowed to reopen from Thursday.
Bikes are big, obviously, in the Czech Republic.
Outdoor facilities for individual sports are reopening, but only to some extent.
No more than two people can be in the same space.
They can't use the showers or the lockers.
And essential travel outside the Czech Republic will be allowed from April 14th alone.
In Austria, they are also attempting a step-by-step approach.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced this week the country is preparing for a resurrection after Easter, reopening some smaller shops, hardware, and garden stores from April 14th.
They are requiring people to wear face masks to supermarkets and on public transportation from May 1st.
All shops, shopping centers, and hairdressers will open.
Meanwhile, restaurants and hotels will open from mid-May at the earliest in a gradual process.
And he said that the The situation is not yet over, citing Singapore, because Singapore has seen a second wave of cases.
In Norway, Norway is prioritizing reopening of schools.
They're going to scale back their lockdown measures from April 20th.
They're going to reopen kindergartens.
The government believes the latest stats provide the basis for cautious optimism.
Right now, there've only been 92 deaths in Norway.
Germany is also attempting some new measures.
And then what's really fascinating is that the world's largest scale counter example of all of this is Sweden.
So there was a lot of talk early on about Sweden taking a very different model than everybody else.
Sweden looking at the way everybody else was locking down and saying, okay, guys, you're locking down.
You're going to get a second wave.
What if we just kind of let everybody go about their business and then we told everybody who was old and everybody who had pre-existing conditions to stay home?
Sweden took some measures, but not total measures.
Like in restaurants, you just weren't supposed to eat at the counter.
You were now supposed to eat at socially distanced tables, for example.
So how's Sweden performing right now?
Well, Sweden has seen a grand total of 919 deaths out of some 11,000 cases in Sweden.
There's a lot of talk about Sweden spiking.
That was expected.
I was always bewildered by the media coverage of Sweden because the suggestion was that they had not expected some sort of spike.
No, they sort of did.
That was baked into the cake.
And the fact is that if you look at population by millions who have died, Sweden is not wildly outlying from other European countries.
Sweden has seen 91 deaths per million population.
Switzerland has seen 130.
Netherlands has seen 165.
Belgium has seen 337.
Now, of course, the number of deaths per million is largely reflective of the fact that they're very, very small populations.
If you look at Germany, Germany is still at 36.
The United States is still at 67.
But virtually every other country in Europe actually has a worse record in deaths per million than Sweden does.
So for all the talk about how Sweden blew it and Sweden looks worse than a lot of other countries, that's just not true.
It really is not.
Okay, so it'll be interesting to see over the course of the year whether Sweden ends up having done the right thing or whether they have done the wrong thing.
So, all of this has ramifications for the United States because how exactly are we going to reopen?
What is our strategy going to be?
And as I'm going to discuss in just a moment, the answer is going to be data, data, and more data.
Okay, while everybody is trying to kick the can down the road, when the data starts to roll in, it's time to make some tough decisions.
And I'm sick of hearing that the decisions are not tough, that they're easy, and that anybody who suggests gradual reopening, or even serious reopening, is poo-pooing death, or that anybody who is calling for shutdowns is poo-pooing the economy.
I don't think that's true, at least for the people who are in the decision-making positions.
I think that's very true in the commentariat.
I think in the commentariat, there are a group of people who basically have a stake in suggesting that anyone who says the word economy wants people to die, and a group of people who have a stake in the suggestion that anybody who says the word shutdown wants people to be unemployed.
And the answer is we're going to have to draw a middle line here because there will come a point here where the costs do outweigh the benefits.
President Trump is not wrong about that.
That's what public policymaking is all about.
And to pretend that even discussing the public policy is some sort of verboten sin is disgusting, frankly.
This is the biggest public policy decision that not only Trump is ever going to have to make, but pretty much anybody's going to ever have to make.
To pretend that there are no sort of stakes on either side is idiocy of the highest order.
We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about now being a very, very good time to take care of your mind and body.
So, I know, it's so tempting in the middle of this whole thing to sit home and just eat ice cream.
I know, it really is.
Like, right now, you're like, okay, I can't go to the gym.
It's hard to work out outdoors because now I gotta wear a mask.
Like, what the hell am I supposed to do?
I'm just gonna sit here and I need comfort food and I'm gonna watch old episodes of Friends.
Well, now actually is a good time if you can do it.
It's a great time to make your mood better.
It's a great time to make your body better.
It's a great time to actually improve your health.
And it's actually really important because if you actually fall down the well of, I'm going to watch old episodes of Friends all day and eat ice cream and do nothing but that.
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Okay, so the reason this is becoming increasingly urgent also is because whenever you have massive government interventions like this, petty tyrants feel the necessity to go overboard.
It's really an unfortunate thing, but petty tyrants feel the necessity to go completely crazy.
So over in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who was briefly considered a possible VP candidate for Joe Biden, she's basically been shutting down everything in the world.
According to the Detroit News, Bob King, 62, is a little bored these days.
That's because his business, B&R Lawn Care in Ferndale, has been shuttered since Governor Gretchen Whitmer's first stay-at-home order last month.
King runs his company with his son.
He has about 100 clients and four full-time employees, murdering peak summer and winter months.
This is the time of year when he's usually busy cleaning up the vestiges of winter and prepping yards for mowing.
No such luck this spring.
King, like hundreds of other small business owners around Michigan, had been hoping the governor would ease some restrictions on business operations in the latest iteration of her executive order, especially for jobs done largely outdoors that inherently comply with social distancing.
He says, if I'm working outside, I'm not working next to somebody, I'm working, like, on one side of the lawn, and this is true.
But Whitmer not only ignored common sense changes to her decree that goes through April 30th, she doubled down on her initial decree.
So, instead of changing and allowing essential workers to include people who are, you know, mowing lawns, for example, instead, she just sort of, she just insisted, essentially, that everybody go home.
To pretend that all non-essential activities are equivalently dangerous is absolute idiocy.
She was also raked over the coals, Whitmer was, for part of the order that basically suggested that non-essential areas of stores like Target ought to be shut off.
So instead of you just going to the Target and, hey, look, there's a toy section of Target.
I'm going to bring a toy home to my kid.
They actually shut off sections of those stores, including ones where you can buy baby seats.
And Gretchen Whitmer was like, I'm not barring the sale of baby seats.
No, you're just telling businesses that sell baby seats, as well as groceries, they have to shut off the baby seat section.
I'm sorry, this whole thing is ridiculous.
When I say the whole thing, I don't mean all shutdowns.
I mean the whole attempt by governments to shut down obviously safe areas is insane.
Again, I drove around LA yesterday, and number one, it's a ghost town.
And number two, I mean, is there a reason why large public areas should not be open?
Seriously, like people need to see the sun.
If you want to create an impetus for people to get out of the house and just disobey government orders, I can't think of a better way to do it than shutting down every public park in California.
It's basically insane.
It's basically insane.
And if you want to make sure that people are socially distancing at those parks, then fine!
Have a cop at the park telling people to socially distance.
Sir, first of all, I don't know who in the world is like, I'm gonna get right up on top of other people at the park right now.
Is there anybody who wants to do that?
Like two Sundays ago, I took my kids out for a picnic.
And there were people at the park.
And you know what we all did, naturally?
We spread out like 40 feet apart from each other.
Nobody wants to be on top of each other.
I don't know those people.
I don't want them coughing on my parents.
But it's not just restricted to blue states.
Cops in Mississippi shut down a drive-in church service over the weekend held by Reverend James Hamilton of the King James Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi.
This is total insanity.
Greenville Mayor Eric Simmons bans all in-person church services as part of the state's shelter-in-place order to stop the spread of coronavirus.
But this is a drive-in service.
People were in their own cars.
What the hell are you doing?
What are you even talking about?
People were parked end-to-end, okay?
So that means that they are, even if their windows are open, they are six feet apart.
And the cops came and they shut it down, suggesting that this was some sort of danger.
Can we use a little bit of seychel here?
Seychel is the Yiddish word for common sense.
Can you use a little bit of common sense here?
Or are we going to be doomed to the petty tyranny of idiots?
Is that what we're going to do here?
And again, the stronger these measures get, the more people are just going to ignore them.
You actually want people to pay attention to the measures?
Don't be stupid about it.
Like when I go to the grocery store, people have been voluntarily putting on the masks before anybody was saying anything.
Because you know what people don't want to do?
Die.
It turns out.
For the same reason people are watching Trump's Trump's press conference, not because he's so popular, but because they want to have the information so they do not die.
People are taking voluntarily the measures necessary so they do not die.
Can we rely on the American people at least a little bit when it comes to matters of common sense?
In just a second, we'll get to the new war that apparently is breaking out between President Trump and Anthony Fauci.
It is a dumb war.
It is stupid.
There is no purpose to it.
And then we're going to talk a little bit about what preliminary steps would look like, like what exactly needs to happen here and what the data is.
Because I think that by the end of the week, I'm optimistic that by the end of the week, we are going to have much more information, much more data to input into our decision-making model.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact that now would be a great time to own a gun.
Like seriously, now's a great time to own a gun.
When there's great uncertainty, when there's great volatility, now's a great time to feel like you are safe in your home.
Because you just don't know what the hell is going to happen next.
I mean, let's be frank about this.
The idea of civil unrest is not out of the realm of possibility as this thing continues for long periods of time and as people aren't getting their government checks and stuff.
Beyond that, you've got local governments that are shutting down local jails and letting criminals out of jail because they don't want COVID spreading in jail.
Once you've got crime rates that are going up, businesses being hit, I mean really, like it's really bad.
Now would be a good time for you to exercise those Second Amendment rights.
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Okay, so.
In the midst of all of this, the dirty little secret has been, and I've been saying this for weeks, the experts don't know that much.
They don't.
They know what they don't know, but they're not conveying to us what they don't know.
And that's a problem, because once they know what they know, then we can actually start expecting some hard facts from them.
We've seen the models change.
We've seen the numbers come down.
But they're not telling us what they don't know and what further inputs they need.
We don't know what inputs they are using for case fatality rate.
We keep hearing case fatality rate being reported.
The one thing we do know is that that case fatality rate is not real.
We know that the denominator is wrong because many more people have coronavirus or coronavirus antibodies than have been tested.
And we also know that the numerator is probably not correct.
That the number of people who are dead from coronavirus is probably too low.
So we don't know anything.
Okay.
We don't know any of the statistics that we need to know.
And this makes a huge difference because remember that Imperial College model, this is the one that was used as sort of worst case scenario, lock it all down, suggested that over the course of the next year, 2.2 million Americans could die if we all do nothing.
Or if we all just go out and no social distancing, no nothing.
Right?
And then it said, okay, well, if you socially distance, then it won't be anything close to that.
The Imperial College model was used as the basis for the Trump administration shutting things down.
But that was based on certain assumptions about the level of infection in the population, as well as the level of death from that infection.
They were using statistics from Italy and Wuhan in large part.
And so the question becomes, okay, well, what if?
What if this thing is more transmissible than the flu, but maybe twice as deadly as the flu, as opposed to 10 times as deadly as the flu?
What then?
What are we going to do at that point?
Is that a situation where we basically say to everybody who is in the least likely populations to be effective, go back to work?
Because one thing that we do know is that the death rates for people who are young and healthy is significantly lower than people who are old and have pre-existing conditions.
If you're above the age of 80, this thing is really bad.
If you have pre-existing conditions, this thing is truly awful.
Now, that doesn't mean there aren't outlying cases of young healthy people dying from it.
There are.
One of the big questions about this thing is whether it is actually COVID that is driving the respiratory syndrome that leads to death or whether it's the immune response to COVID that's actually driving this.
There are some scientific theories out there that suggest that it might be an immune response that is too strong and you get a I believe it's called a cytokine storm.
You get a cytokine storm, a storm in which basically your body attacks itself effectively because the immune response is so strong to COVID.
That might explain why there's such a differential response among different people because there's a biological response agent that is different in every single human being.
Your immune system differs from person to person.
Okay, with all of that said, We don't know a lot of that information, but that information I think this week is going to be forthcoming.
There's some preliminary guesstimates that are sort of fascinating, and I want to get to those.
According to Reason Magazine over the weekend, Preliminary results are out from a COVID-19 case cluster study in one of the regions worst hit by Germany's coronavirus epidemic, and they are, in fact, somewhat reassuring.
One often heard statistic is the case fatality rate.
This afternoon, that figure stands at 3.5% for COVID in the U.S., but that rate is really inflated, as I say, because it doesn't count asymptomatic cases or undiagnosed people who are recovering at home.
Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80% of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they had been previously infected by the coronavirus.
Around 15% had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37%.
The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a little while.
For comparison, U.S.
infection fatality rates from the 1957-1958 flu epidemic was about 0.27%.
For the flu epidemic in 1918, it was about 2.6%.
For seasonal flu, the rate typically averages around 0.1%.
Basically, the German researchers found that the coronavirus kills about four times as many infected people than seasonal flu viruses do.
So as I say, you would have a higher death rate than flu, but not an exponentially higher death rate or an order of magnitude higher death rate as people were originally suggesting.
That doesn't mean a lot of people won't die.
It also doesn't mean that some young people won't die.
It does mean that we would have to think about different segments of the population very differently.
Also, there's a study over the weekend that suggests that perhaps the COVID-19 deaths were actually hitting California in January and February.
According to Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of the Santa Clara County government, he told county leaders in a recent briefing that there might have been a dramatic viral surge in February in California.
He said that maybe COVID-19 was actually in California a lot longer than we first believed, maybe like back in December.
He said symptoms are very much like the flu.
If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn't really notice.
You didn't even go to the doctor.
The doctor maybe didn't even do it because they presumed it was the flu.
So in January and in February, there was very little community testing.
So one of the things we have to find out is how far this thing has gone in California.
If it turns out that community infection is too far gone for us to do sort of hotspot testing at this point, that the lockdown will not prevent community reinfection because it's going to be hard to trace everybody and we're not going to get the systems out in place, then perhaps our best hope is that a lot of people out there Actually have this thing so we are closer to herd immunity than originally thought.
Now I know herd immunity has become a dirty word except for Sweden where they're actually attempting to push it.
In the UK they tried the herd immunity strategy and then they realized they were going to overrun their hospitals.
But if our hospitals are not going to be overrun, and if the alternative is 18 months of a near shutdown, then people are going to have to start talking about whether that is plausible or not.
Now we're not going to know that based on the data.
We're not going to know that until the data is in.
There's some studies that are supposed to come out later this week.
I personally know scientists who are working on this right now.
We're attempting to establish how many people have actually gotten this thing in California, in New York.
Once we know the actual case fatality rate, then we as a society are going to have some decisions to make about how we deal with this.
Let's say, for example, that the case fatality rate is 0.37% like it is in Germany.
Let's say that that's the actual case fatality rate.
And let's say that that's an average of all the people who are dying.
But let's say that the real case fatality rate for people who are above the age of 80, the case fatality rate is 17% or 18%, which is what it sort of has been so far.
Let's say that it is, let's say that basically everybody who gets it when they're 80 is identifying it.
There are very few asymptomatic 80 year olds.
Let's say that everybody who, let's say it's a 15% case fatality rate among 80 year olds.
Let's say it's a 10% case fatality rate among 70 year olds.
Let's say that it's a 3% case fatality rate among 60 year olds, and let's say that it's a 0.1% case fatality rate among people under 40.
So the same as the flu.
At that point, do we say to everybody who's under 40 and healthy, go to work?
And everybody else?
You know, gauge your own level of risk?
That's a serious question, because again, huge industries are being shut down now.
We're not just talking about local restaurants.
We're talking about the entire airline industry.
No one is getting into a canister in the sky with 200 strangers right now.
The airline industry is going to be shut for the foreseeable future, and masks are not going to do a damn thing about it.
And so, if you want to restart the economy at a certain point, these tough decisions are going to have to be made.
Now, none of this is being forwarded by our acclaimed media, who have an interest in sort of the Not the hard questions, but the questions of the political ramifications.
You know, how is this going to hurt Trump?
And how is Trump handling all this stuff?
If your lodestar is still Trump in the middle of all this, if Trump is the first thing that comes to mind in the middle of a pandemic, I think that you're doing being human and being an analyst wrong.
That is not the way that you should be thinking about this stuff.
And we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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So what would be really wonderful at this point is the straight scoop from our public health professionals.
What information do they lack?
What information do they need?
And what information, when input into their thought-making processes, would lead to what sort of solutions?
And we're not getting any of that.
Honestly, I think Dr. Fauci is great in a lot of ways.
This is one area where I think he has really been bereft.
I think the same thing is true, basically, of Dr. Birx.
I think that our public health professionals need to be fully honest with us as to what they don't know.
Now, I think that they are saying it, right?
I think that in their writings, they're saying it.
I think that when they speak long form, they're saying it.
But I think that they need to be saying, listen, right now, like, be honest with us.
Just be honest, okay?
Here's the data we're missing.
Here's the data we need.
We can't make a decision to reopen until we have this data.
That's what's happening here.
Right?
So Dr. Fauci said over the weekend, this has been his constant refrain, that the virus just hides when we reopen.
That's not true.
We decide when we reopen.
Right?
We do.
Now, we could make a horrible decision.
We could make a great decision.
But we are the ones who decide.
We take in all the... The virus doesn't decide a damn thing.
The virus is not a decision-making tool.
Right?
The virus is not the one who's sitting in the White House.
The virus is not The virus is a horrible, horrible thing that is happening right now.
And we are going to have to deal with that and the other horrible thing that's happening right now, which is the destruction of tens of millions of American jobs and hundreds of thousands of American businesses.
We are going to have to make those calls.
And frankly, I think it's manifestly irresponsible for people to consistently go around saying things like, it's going to become eminently clear when we can reopen based on the virus.
No, it is not.
If it were, then Europe wouldn't be struggling with it right now.
China wouldn't be struggling.
Singapore wouldn't be struggling.
Everyone is struggling with this right now.
You know why?
Because these are tough decisions.
And there are no good answers.
Sometimes all the answers are crappy.
The kind of ease, like, this annoys me.
The virus is not making the decision.
Now, I know what Fauci is trying to say, which is that we don't have enough data.
So just say that.
Say we don't have enough data.
Once we have the data, then we can start making some tough calls about what is the best possible way for us to decide between risk to life, on the one hand, and risk to quality of life and freedom, which turns out is kind of an important thing in America.
Like, I don't know about you, but I don't want to live like this for another 18 months.
I don't think many people do.
Anyway, here's Dr. Fauci suggesting the virus decides when we reopen.
The virus kinda decides whether or not it's gonna be appropriate to open or not.
What we're seeing right now are some favorable signs, as I've discussed with you a few times on this show.
It's looking like that in many cases, particularly in New York, we're starting to see a flattening and a turning around.
We would wanna see, I would wanna see, a clear indication that you are very, very clearly and strongly going in the right direction.
Because the one thing you don't wanna do is you don't wanna get out there Prematurely, and then wind up your back back in the same situation.
Right, of course nobody wants that, but that presumably is why you're ramping up the ICU beds, why you're ramping up the ventilators, why you're ramping up the treatments.
And again, nobody has offered a path out of this that doesn't involve second wave infections, barring massive testing regimes.
Like, I'm still confused about that particular policy, okay?
Like, there's been a lot of talk about, we need massive testing, and then we need contact tracing.
Is that realistic?
I mean, serious question, is that realistic?
Are we going to have tests available, like now, on demand?
Five minute tests that can test you for antibodies?
Because you don't have to have a fever, you don't have to be running a fever to be carrying coronavirus.
Are we going to test everybody?
Like once a day?
Once every two days?
300 million people?
165 million people in the workforce?
Like what does that actually look like?
Is that a realistic thing?
Or do we wait for the symptoms to crop up and once the symptoms crop up, then we go back and we trace every contact that you've had over the past two weeks?
At which point, in places like New York, it's going to be a little bit too late.
That may be possible in some smaller areas that are more spread out.
That is not nearly possible in New York, as they've found out.
Now Fauci, again, Fauci then adds to that, loosening restrictions can get us infected again.
Yes, I know.
So how do you plan to accomplish this thing?
If you start, and when one starts, to relax some of those restrictions, we know that there will be people who will be getting infected.
I mean, that is just reality.
The critical issue is to be able to, in real time, identify, isolate, and contact trace.
That's called containment.
Right now, in places like New Orleans and in New York City, we're in mitigation.
So, you know, I have confidence that with the help that we can do federally, from the federal government, to the fact that the states are really committed to doing it right.
I think that combination, hopefully, is going to get us to where we want to be.
Okay, where we want to be is the question.
What does where we want to be look like?
So Fauci finally is asked this question, and he says, well, I hope maybe next month the country can take some steps to reopen.
What the hell does that?
Okay, so what does that look like?
Can we hear it?
Like, what's the plan?
What's the plan?
I think it could probably start, at least in some ways, maybe next month.
And again, Jake, it's so difficult to make those kinds of predictions because they always get thrown back at you if it doesn't happen.
Not by you, but, you know, by any number of people.
We are hoping that at the end of the month we could look around and say, OK, is there any element here that we can safely and cautiously start pulling back on?
If so, do it.
If not, Then just continue to hunker down.
Okay, so what does that even look like?
What does that even look like?
Okay, then Fauci says, I hope voters will be able to go to the polls in November.
Based on what?
Okay, we've not even heard a plan.
What the hell are we talking about?
Like, I'm fine with a plan.
Can we have a plan?
I feel like giving the Joker speech in the dark night, right?
Everybody's okay so long as there's a plan.
We need an app, but he's right.
I mean, like we actually need some form of plan here and we need to know how realistic the plan is.
It can't just be people screaming, widespread testing and contact tracing.
Yes, I can say those words too.
It's magical, but that doesn't solve anything.
What system is going to be in place to make this stuff happen?
Here's Fauci saying he hopes voters will be able to go to the polls in November.
So he's already said he thinks that schools could open in September and polls could be open in November.
How?
Okay, let me, like, really, how?
My kids, as I've said before, are six and three.
Do you think my kid is gonna wear a mask in the classroom, my three-year-old?
I can't even get the kid to wear pants.
You think he's gonna wear a mask in the classroom?
It's not going to happen.
Okay, like, I took him to the doctor recently, and they asked him to wear a mask, and the first thing he did was he reached off and he pulled the mask, and I put it back on, he pulled it off, and I just put it on.
You think you're gonna be able to deal with classrooms full of four-year-olds?
How?
How?
And then here's Fauci saying that he hopes that we'll be able to go to the polls in November.
Listen, I hope lots of things.
I do.
But like, how about your input?
How about how we are making these decisions?
It is frankly annoying to me that nobody is even asking the question as to how these decisions get made.
What metrics are you using?
What additional data do you need?
Tell me so we can help.
And don't tell me the only way to help is just to stay home because I don't think that's right.
You're asking people to give up their livelihoods for good.
In order for you to not have any sort of plan, in order for you to not tell us how the formula works, here's Fauci saying that he hopes voters will be able to go to the polls in November.
I hope so, Jake.
I can't guarantee it.
I believe that if we have a good, measured way of rolling into this steps towards normality, that we hope by the time we get to November, that we'll be able to do it in a way which is the standard way.
However, and I don't want to be the pessimistic person, there is always a possibility as that as we get into next fall and the beginning of early winter that we could see a rebound.
Okay, so, okay.
I mean, alright.
Thanks for this complete level of uncertainty.
Now, again, if there's uncertainty, you're the expert.
Tell us how we alleviate the uncertainty.
That's what experts do.
Experts don't just say, I know the level of uncertainty.
They say, here's what we can do to alleviate the uncertainty.
Or alternatively, there's no way to alleviate the uncertainty.
In which case, we now have to make a hard decision in the presence of the data.
The assumption is the data is what the data is, what the data are, what the data are.
What are you going to do now?
Instead, we're not hearing what we need to know.
We're not hearing how we get the information we need.
We're not hearing how the decision gets made because we cannot continue like this.
It cannot continue.
Now, what are the media concerned with?
They're concerned with Fauci being mean to Trump.
So, Fauci was on with Tapper on CNN.
And Tapper says, OK, well, should we have locked this thing down earlier, like in February, like South Korea did?
And Fauci says, I think it's kind of unfair to compare us to South Korea.
Actually, that comparison doesn't hold.
Here's Fauci attempting to defend the president.
Now, the reason that I bring this up is because the headline yesterday was Fauci rips Trump.
I'm going to show you the clips that people are talking about.
Fauci is deliberately attempting to avoid ripping Trump.
Because he knows that if he pisses off Trump, then Trump is just going to get pissed off and not listen to him.
So here is Fauci trying to avoid ripping Trump.
The media then printed the headline, Fauci rips Trump.
And predictably enough, Trump then retweeted a call to fire Fauci because everything is idiotic and everyone's a moron.
Here is Fauci being asked about South Korea and attempting to avoid the comparison.
If you look, could you have done something a little bit earlier?
It would have had an impact, obviously.
But where we are right now is the result of a number of factors.
The size of the country, the heterogeneity of the country.
I think it's a little bit unfair to compare us to South Korea, where they had an outbreak in Daegu and they had the capability of immediately, essentially shutting it off completely in a way that we may not have been able to do in this country.
So obviously I would have been nice if we had a better head start, but I don't think you could say that we are where we are right now because of one factor.
It's very complicated, Jake.
Okay, now that is him attempting to avoid the, we should have just been South Korea.
Then Fauci was asked about whether lives could have been saved with WTO implementation.
He says, well, I mean, sure.
And if you'd shut down the entire economy in December, then you would have saved a lot of lives, but that's not how political decisions get made.
This was printed in the papers as Fauci ripping Trump.
He's working so hard not to rip Trump here.
I mean, just listen to it.
He's working desperately hard not to rip Trump because he knows what's going to happen.
You rip Trump and then Trump threatens to fire you.
Every single person in the administration knows the formula here.
And he's attempting to avoid it.
Unsuccessfully.
It's the what would have, what could have.
It's very difficult to go back and say that.
I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.
Obviously, no one is going to deny that.
But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated.
But you're right.
I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different.
But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
Okay, so that is him attempting to not rip Trump.
The media prints, he rips Trump, and then Trump immediately tweets out how he wants to, he retweets somebody saying that Fauci should be fired.
He said, somebody tweeted out, Deanna for Congress, I don't know who that is, tweeted out, Fauci is now saying that Trump, had Trump listened to medical experts earlier, he could have saved more lives.
Fauci was telling people on February 29th there was nothing to worry about, it posed no threat to the U.S.
public at large, time to hashtag fire Fauci, and Trump retweeted that.
And then he said, sorry, fake news.
It's all on tape.
I banned China long before people spoke up.
Thank you, OANN.
Come on.
Just come on.
Come on.
I understand that everybody is geared up for the, is Trump at fault game here.
I understand the media are very into it.
The New York Times ran an extraordinarily long piece today about how Trump, or over the weekend, about Trump's failures on the virus and how he was warned by a bunch of people inside the administration.
Dr. Carter Metcher writing on the night of January 28th in an email to the Department of Medical Affairs, any way you cut it, this is going to be bad.
The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.
Somebody, there was a whole group that called itself Red Dawn because they were figuring this thing was going to get really bad after the 1984 movie.
They started doing that.
You know, fairly early.
And then Trump apparently didn't take any of this stuff seriously.
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus.
Despite Trump's denial weeks later, he was told about a January 29th memo produced by Peter Navarro laying out the potential risks of the pandemic.
Half a million deaths.
The Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, warned Trump of the possibility of a pandemic on January 30th.
By the third week in February, the administration's top public health experts concluded they should recommend that Americans be warned to social distance and stay home from work.
The White House instead focused on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by the wayside.
Okay, all of that is true, right?
All of that is true.
Trump's people were saying a lot of things in the middle of all of this.
You know what else was happening?
Local officials were also ignoring all of this because it was so unthinkable.
We've done something unprecedented in American history.
A more important piece over at Politico that's being ignored is called Inside America's Two-Decade Failure to Prepare for Coronavirus.
And they talk about how basically every administration for several decades has been failing on this stuff, not just Trump.
And so it feels a lot like the 9-11 Commission.
Here was the immediate failure, and then here are all the failures that led up to that failure.
There's an article in the New York Times last week about how de Blasio and Cuomo didn't shut down the state until the end of March, basically.
So, listen, I'm all up for the, what did government do wrong, and my going theory, which is that everyone in government sucks at everything, and that the chains of bureaucracy are extraordinarily long, and that it is more likely that things go wrong than go right in government.
That theory has yet to be defeated.
But with that said, the media's focus in on Trump like a laser beam, like this is what everybody cares about right now, is just bizarre.
It's absolutely bizarre.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then we'll get to a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
You know, my comfort food is a baseball book.
So there's a really good new baseball book out by Jared Diamond, who's the baseball reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
It's called Swing Kings, and it's all about the hitting coaches who have completely reshaped the game of baseball and how they have really focused on swinging up on the ball.
You were always taught when you were a kid that you're supposed to swing down on the ball.
You're supposed to hack the top half of the ball, try and hit line drives.
And Swing Kings basically changes that.
It basically talks about how Ted Williams, maybe the greatest hitter ever, had always thought you're supposed to swing up on the ball.
The ball's coming downhill from a mound.
You're supposed to try and swing up into the ball.
The reason you've seen a skyrocketing home run rate without steroids is because people have been shifting their swings dramatically.
It answered some questions I had about some players that you saw come out of nowhere, and you're like, that's gotta be Royds, right?
But it turns out, no, they just retooled their swings dramatically.
To check it out, it's a fun book, it's an easy read.
Swing Kings, the inside story of baseball's home run revolution.
So if you're a sports person like I am, and you are missing sports right now, then this can kind of fill the gap.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So the U.S.
Surgeon General is a man named Jerome Adams, he happens to be black, and he has been giving these pressers and answering questions about what Americans should do.
Well, in the middle of one of these pressers, he was asked specifically about the African American communities, about Latino communities.
Now, there have been tons of articles recently, like lots of them, about the disparate health impacts of COVID-19.
Those articles have been focused heavily on the fact that black and Latino populations have been harder hit by coronavirus than other populations.
And this has led people like AOC to suggest that there is a disparity in healthcare in the United States.
That's not what's going on here.
It's led people to suggest that disparities in wealth have led to disparities in health conditions.
Some of that has been going on here.
The idea is that America's pre-existing racism has led to these health conditions and there is Maybe some evidence that, thanks to the wealth gap, that people are poorer, and if you're poorer, then you tend to eat less well, you don't eat as good food.
But here's the reality of the situation.
Right now, in America, if you want to eat healthy, you should be able to eat healthy.
People do have welfare, people do have food stamps, people do have access, generally, to a grocery store.
Even if, yes, you have to take a bus over to the grocery store that is not located in your four block radius.
In any case, Jerome Adams gets up and he's talking about some of the contributing factors to lack of health in some minority communities.
He says, we need to eat healthier.
We need to exercise.
We need to stop, if you're taking drugs, you need to stop taking drugs.
If you're doing alcohol, you need to stop drinking alcohol.
You need to do all these things.
And he's not specifically directing that at black and Latino people, but this is taken as though he is a racist for Jerome Adams, that he is a racist.
He has internalized racism for suggesting that their differential health Outcomes between black and Latino people in the United States and white people in the United States.
Which, again, is, I thought, what the message was for the past several weeks.
The message for the past several weeks was the New York Times headline, right?
Asteroids hit Earth tomorrow.
Women and minorities hit hardest.
That's been the headline from the New York Times for a while, which is COVID-19 affecting everyone.
Women and minorities hit hardest.
Although in this case, it would be men and minorities hit hardest.
In any case, here is Jerome Adams.
Here's what he said.
And then the reaction was just outsized and ridiculous.
Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs.
And call your friends and family.
Check in on your mother.
She wants to hear from you right now.
And speaking of mothers, we need you to do this, if not for yourself, then for your abuela.
Do it for your granddaddy.
Do it for your big mama.
Do it for your pop pop.
We need you to understand, especially in communities of color, we need you to step up and help stop the spread so that we can protect those who are most vulnerable.
He said, he said, pop, pop, and he said, big mama or grandma.
How dare he?
How dare he?
So he's suggesting that maybe if everybody exercise personal responsibility, including in the black community, and then he uses some, some language that he has heard in his own upbringing, right?
He said this, he said, I used to call my grandpa pop, pop, like, and people were like, oh, he's a racist.
So Yamiche Alcindor, who can always be trusted to, for a hot take, she says, That Adams was being racist when he said all of this stuff.
That he's being a racist for pointing out health disparities.
Again, you can't have it both ways.
Either you want tremendous focus on the health disparities, which would include looking at things like personal behavior inside communities and how that is actually contributing to health disparities.
Like if you eat a lot of fast food, right?
People in minority communities are eating much more fast food than people who are not in minority communities, for example.
Well, it depends on the minority community.
Minority communities in like Los Angeles, for example.
In the American South, lots of people eat fast food, like all the time.
Just by studies.
But overall, it has been shown that black Americans tend to eat fast food more than white Americans.
Just broadly speaking.
Does that contribute to obesity, which contributes to health effects, which actually have a problem for COVID-19?
Yes.
Is it bad for Adams to mention this?
Apparently you're only supposed to mention health disparities when you're going to blame the system at large or American racism at large.
But when you're talking about personal activity and what you can do to change your risk from COVID-19, it's very bad and it makes you a racist.
So here's Yamiche Alcindor doing this routine.
You said that African-Americans and Latinos should avoid alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.
You also said do it for your abuela, do it for big mama, and pop pop.
There are some people online that are already offended by that language and the idea that you're saying behaviors might be leading to these high death rates.
Could you talk about whether or not people, could you I guess have a response for people who might be offended by the language that you used?
Okay, again, if you are super offended, I just want to know, are we supposed to discuss the racial disparity or are we not supposed to discuss the racial disparity?
And if we do discuss the racial disparity, is your chief complaint going to be that this black surgeon general is a racist for using language with regard to With regard to Latino grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles, and like, really?
That's where you're gonna go?
It seems to me you might be missing the point.
Deliberately, actually.
It seems to me that you might be deliberately missing the point in order to focus in on narratives that confirm your priors, which is that American racism is everything when it comes to health disparities in the United States, and personal behavior has nothing to do with anything.
Now let me just say this.
White, black, or green.
If you would like to live through COVID-19, here are a few things that you can do.
You can exercise.
You can eat better.
You cannot drink alcohol.
You cannot do drugs.
And if you are among a group of people who are doing that more often, particularly young people, don't do it.
Okay?
How about that?
And if he's asked about health disparities and he answers about health disparities and he uses statistics to back it up, I don't, again, if you're focused in on the racism narrative at this point in time, I think that you're completely missing the boat.
It's so funny.
For five seconds it was, the virus unites us all.
And then it went to, the virus is terrible for black and Hispanic people.
And if you mention that there might be differentials in behavior, statistically speaking, with regard to some behaviors, then that's very, very bad.
Or if you use language specifically to appeal to black and Hispanic people for issues that affect everybody, because you're talking to black and Hispanic people, that's also very bad.
What a stupid world we live in.
Seriously stupid.
Okay, so a little bit later this afternoon, apparently there will be an announcement on a regional reopening plan with governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.
Expect that to be, we're not reopening ever.
Expect that to be the outcome there.
We will also be having some more, we're going to be having some more updates on data as it comes out a little bit later today.
We have two more additional hours of content later today.
Otherwise, show up later tonight.
If you are a member of any sort, you get access for now to the All Access Live.
I believe I'm doing the All Access Live tonight, so we'll be hanging out.
I'll be wearing a t-shirt as is now my All Access Live garb.
I promise.
So, if you've been itching for a sight of these guns, I know.
But if you were, then that would be the time.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Supervising producer Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
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Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
As the coronavirus doomsday models fall apart, the alarmists who pushed them are doubling down on their draconian policies.
We will examine the value of civil disobedience when power-hungry hypocrites get exposed and lash out.
Then, the former Biden staffer accusing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexual assault files a formal police complaint, and the mainstream media go into full cover-up mode to protect Joe.
Finally, we take a look at the glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the left's favorite coronavirus narrative.
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