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July 8, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
09:14
Alex Berenson: Unreported Truths About Covid-19
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On the crisis, unreported truths about COVID-19 and lockdowns.
Well, welcome back to my show, Alex.
Dennis, it is a pleasure.
Although in some ways it's not a pleasure because why are we still talking about this?
That is exactly right.
Why haven't you moved on to, you know, talk about the election and stuff that I'm not as interested in, and you can, and I'll get back to working on drug policy books and stuff.
We should be back in, you know, in our, moving towards our normal life.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Let's make a sort of vow that when the panic ends, I'm not saying when the epidemic ends, when the panic ends, you and I will talk, but not even about drugs or politics.
You have a hobby?
You know, I used to have hobbies.
I used to read a lot and go hiking and stuff like that.
I haven't read a book since, although I read an old Le Carré novel that I love.
I haven't read a book in four months.
You know, I used to write spy novels.
These days, it's all COVID. That's correct.
All right, so I think I know the answer, but you're the one I want to hear it from.
Why is that headline in the LA Times?
Why is that headline?
Well, the most obvious reason is that, so if you look at deaths in the United States, and we'll see what happens today and tomorrow, but because there's some argument, well, maybe deaths were a little bit suppressed by the holidays, you know, and death reporting was suppressed is what I should say.
But if you look at deaths in the United States from COVID, they have now fallen more than 80%.
Since March and April, really since April, since the early to mid-April peak.
And so instead of celebrating this news and talking about how, you know, we've reopened and yet deaths are down dramatically, the media is looking for any negative fact that they can find.
And so last month they had nothing.
So they were completely speculating about, when I say last month, I mean May.
In May, they were speculating about Kawasaki disease, this sort of Kawasaki-like syndrome in children.
They're speculating about people in their 20s and 30s having strokes, and stuff that was at best minimally supported by the science, and that even pediatric disease experts were discouraging them from talking about.
Okay, so what happened?
What happened in June was we ramped up testing a lot, and there was some community spread.
In Texas and Florida and Arizona.
And California too, by the way.
A lot of communities spread in California.
Masks didn't seem to make any difference there.
And why is that?
That's a really good question, which I hope we will get the answer to soon.
It may be because people are going out a lot more.
It may be because of the protests.
We don't know.
But what we know is that most of the people who got positive test results in the last month, and by the way, it may be because we're testing more and better.
Most of those people are at very, very, very low risk from SARS-CoV-2.
Okay?
Being infected with this if you're 30 probably means a cold.
Being infected with this if you're 50 and in reasonably good health probably means a couple of bad days.
Maybe, you know, maybe a moderate fever.
You can be unlucky.
It can be worse than that.
But for most of the people who've recently been infected, they're not at not even high risk.
They're not at moderate risk.
They're very, very low risk.
So the media doesn't say any of this.
They just start talking about cases, cases, cases.
And what comes to my mind, what comes to everyone's mind when you hear a case is, this person's in the hospital.
This person might die.
That's right.
That's what people think.
I read that even Fauci has now acknowledged that it can no longer even be called scientifically an epidemic.
Is that accurate?
No, that's not quite accurate.
So what happened is the CDC has certain standards for the number or the percentage of deaths from pneumonia and influenza.
And if that rises above a certain level of a weekly basis, they call it an epidemic.
So if there's 10,000 deaths, let me use a real number, if there's 50,000 deaths in the United States overall in a week, which is about what there is, right now you would expect about 3,000 of those deaths to be pneumonia and influenza deaths.
Above that, it's technically an epidemic.
It doesn't matter whether it's 4,000 or 50,000.
They call it an epidemic.
So right now, the numbers have gone down so much from pneumonia and influenza and COVID that we are right at the top of that band.
So they're saying that, you know, in a week or two, it might not be an epidemic by that standard anymore.
Here's what I will say, and it's important for people to understand.
Death's lag.
Okay, so there is reason to watch very carefully what is happening in Texas and Arizona and Florida and California and the rest of the sundown.
We don't want those hospitals to get overrun.
We don't want, you know, ICUs.
We don't want field hospitals to open.
We don't want gyms, you know, being converted into hospitals.
We don't want any of that stuff.
But that stuff is not happening right now.
It is not happening, and it does not appear likely to happen.
I'm not going to say it...
I'm not going to say with 100.00% confidence that it won't happen by the end of this month, but it does not look like it is going to happen.
And that's what we should care about because I don't care how many people have positive tests for SARS-CoV-2.
I care about how many people develop COVID, the disease, and get really sick and wind up ventilated or dying.
That's what I should care about as a human being and as somebody who cares about our medical system and as somebody who cares about our economy and society.
Not how many people get a cold.
And right now, although there are some places where the hospitals have filled up, they are not overflowing.
Not anywhere.
And I will say that with confidence.
I look at the data every single day.
And the folks who are on the panicky side will say yes.
That is because we opened up too soon.
We were doing great while we were locked down.
Except we opened up in Georgia on April 24th.
We opened up in Texas on May 1st.
We opened up in Arizona in mid-May.
Why is it that all this stuff started to happen in sort of early to mid-June?
And we don't know the answer to that, okay?
And there's going to be some people who just say it's a protest.
I don't know if it was a protest.
I don't really believe that because the protests were everywhere and this hasn't happened everywhere.
It could be the weather, okay?
It could be that people are sort of congregating in restaurants with a lot of air conditioning and spreading this to each other.
It could be that this is the natural history of this illness everywhere and that New York went through it first and Paris went through it first and now Texas is going through it, only we're better at treating it now, so there's going to be many fewer deaths.
We don't know.
What we do know is that in the United States in the last week, Many fewer than 5,000 people, I'd have to go look at the exact number, probably 3,000 or something like that, died from this disease.
Of the 50,000 people who died last week in the United States.
So what are we doing?
Why are we letting this run our lives?
Well, 3,000 a week is 150,000 a year.
That's right.
Yes, and we have not even reached that yet.
That's correct.
And of those 150,000, however many people die, the best estimate is that one-half to two-thirds of those people would have died by year-end of something else anyway.
Again, nearly half the people who die from this are in nursing homes.
And that's not to say that every death doesn't matter.
No, I know.
We always have to add that as if we don't love people.
It's such a joke.
My aunt's in a nursing home.
I adore her.
I mean, it's absurd, but I know you have to.
It's the way that...
I mean, listen, my grandmother was in an Alzheimer's ward, a locked ward for several years, okay?
She had no mind.
She had no life.
Honestly, if she died a couple years earlier, it would have been a blessing for her.
That's right.
That is correct.
But I'm not allowed to say that on a societal basis, so I won't dare.
Right.
Okay, okay.
Exactly.
Of course not.
The fact is, this is a...
In the history of pandemics, This right now, it doesn't even, it's barely, whatever I say is going to get taken out of context, but we are overreacting.
We have been overreacting, we are continuing to overreact, and every time it seems like the media might admit the truth, they won't.
I'll ask you what I ask people like you, though you're unique.
If you were emperor, what policies would you pursue?
That's the $64,000 question.
I have been opposed to the lockdown from the beginning.
I understood two weeks, and I understood New York.
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