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July 8, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
07:24
Reopen Restaurants or Hold Off? Investigative Journalist Alex Berenson Talks to Dennis
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And you can do anything you want, what would you do?
Or for that matter, Governor of, where do you live, in New York?
New York.
New York is different, so California.
Sure.
So what I would do has not changed in the last, really, two and a half to three months.
I would reopen schools.
That is the number one thing.
And by the way, I saw that Governor DeSantis in Florida...
He has announced that schools are going to reopen.
He's ordered them open for five-day-a-week instruction, as it should be, as is happening all over the world.
And that is leadership.
Whether or not you agree with it, he's saying, I know what this spike in positive tests means and doesn't mean, and we are going to reopen schools.
And I'm really impressed with that.
So I would reopen schools that's kindergarten, that's elementary, that's high school, that's colleges.
I do not care if those kids wind up getting positive tests.
They are at zero risk.
Look, I say zero, it's near zero.
But I've said that for three months, and it remains true today.
There are greater risk of being in a car accident on the way to school.
There are much higher risk.
There are much higher risk of drowning.
There are much higher risk of child abuse.
There are much higher risk of the flu.
B, you know, offices should be open.
Public transportation and hotels should be open.
If people want to wear masks, that's fine.
There's not a lot of evidence that masks do anything either way.
I wouldn't require them.
The only thing that I would hold off on a little bit in places where there's a lot of community transmission is if you want to say big indoor events, we should hold off on.
If you want to say bars, because there is evidence in Japan where they really didn't have much of an epidemic at all.
They concentrated on just a couple of places, places like literally karaoke bars and bars, places where people are close together, you know, in each other's faces.
A lot of strangers for a long time is speaking loudly.
That can drive spikes.
So if spikes are what we care about, then, you know, in places where there's been a lot of transmission...
So you would open everything except bars and hockey games?
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, indoor dining, I'd be more careful about, yes, those things.
Well, more careful is not the same as clothes.
Right.
I would probably separate restaurants a little bit, you know, separate the tables and stuff like that.
Bars, it's very hard.
People get drunk.
They don't want to socially distance.
So the other thing I would do, and we've done this.
This is one thing that I think we have done in this country, is we stand up the hospital.
Okay, so we make sure they have enough PPE. They do.
We make sure that if there are short-term surges, we rotate, you know, nurses and doctors in.
Ideally, people who have had some experience with this over the last couple months, which we now have some people like that who know what they're doing.
Okay, and we try to protect nursing homes.
That means temperature checks.
Ideally, that means you try to find people who had positive antibody tests to work there.
I don't think you want to lock these people up.
For months on end because there's negative aspects to that too when their families can't see them.
It's bad for them.
It's bad for the care they receive.
That is a problem.
But do we want to try to make sure that we're not, you know, letting sick people wander into nursing homes?
Yes.
So, I mean, these are all practical, common sense things.
None of them require test, trace, isolate.
We're way, way past that.
We can't possibly isolate enough people to make a difference.
None of them require contact tracing apps on your phone.
That stuff is a joke.
Most people will not respond to those calls.
People are already complaining about that in states where they have contact tracing going on.
And we should be doing testing of treatments, whether that's HCQ, whether that's dexamethasone, whether that's the Gilead drug.
We should be doing randomized controlled tests to see what works.
None of this requires us to blow up society.
It's blocking and tackling.
It's stuff we're good at in the United States.
The lack of concern by the media and the Democrats with the consequences of the lockdown, as if, oh, it's money versus lives, that's the simpleton view, is appalling to me.
I read a piece From the Wall Street Journal to my listeners yesterday, developing world loses billions in money from migrant workers.
I mean, this is just one example.
And in El Salvador, there are now white flags outside homes to signal they're hungry.
Right.
Why is that preferable to allowing people to work?
I don't know.
Why can't kids go back to school?
Because some teachers are afraid of this thing when the reality is the school is probably a safer place for them to be because kids don't seem to spread this very much based on all the evidence we have.
Why has the media been baying about Arizona and Texas for the last three weeks when there is no evidence of hospital overrun?
I don't know.
I don't know what has happened to the media in our society.
Well, you do know.
I do, but I don't like to talk about it because it's not helpful for me to focus on that.
I prefer to focus on the data about COVID. Why is it not helpful to you?
Look, I don't want to be pegged as a right-winger or a left-winger or anything but somebody who looks for the truth.
Okay, that's fine.
I'm not arguing with you.
We all have different roles in life, and I understood.
At a very early time in my life, though I know that I share 90% of liberal values with liberals, I was pegged a right-winger, and I have lived with it, and so be it.
I mean, they can call me a giraffe.
There's nothing I can do about it.
But I appreciate that, and I understand.
Since you look at the data, what is your take on second wave?
Well, I think this is the second wave right now.
I think it's very interesting.
That, you know, the states that got hit in March and April are not getting hit.
And it is going to be – we need more than anything in this country.
And, Dennis, I think I said this to you two months ago.
This is how long this has been going on.
We need a national randomized serology test.
That will tell us how many people have been infected and recovered because the numbers are kind of all over the map.
But you heard the CDC last week, or either last week or the week before, say that they thought at least 10 times the number of people have been infected from this and recovered as we've had active tests.
There are other people who think it's 20 to 30 times.
All right, how do people get your book?
We have no time.
I want them to get your book.
So the book is called Unreported Truths on COVID-19, about COVID-19 and lockdowns.
This is part one.
It's about deaths and how we count them.
Part two, which I'm working on desperately, is going to be about lockdowns.
You get this on Amazon.
You get it on Apple.
Alex Berenson.
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