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March 31, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:17:57

#Coronavirus Update with Dr Kevin Wacasey and Stefan Molyneux - Bring Questions!

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	All right, there we go. We are live now.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
	I'm here with Dr.
	Extraordinaire, the love doctor.
	He's also known as Dr.
	Kevin Wacasey, who is going to, well, talk to us quite a bit about coronavirus, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
	And, you know, because I've had some people on who have been like, incipient doom is upon us.
	Rev up your zombie chainsaws.
	We're going into the apocalypse.
	Welcome to my show!
	And to also get your questions about what might be going on in your life about these areas and questions that you might have about risk factors and preparedness and, you know, how often, how long is it going to be until you're eyeing your hamsters with a pitchfork and a bag of ketchup?
	So thanks, Dr.
	Casey, for coming on today. Thank you.
	I appreciate it. I don't think I'll be able to get that visual out of my mind before the show's over.
	Let's go. Let's rock.
	All right. So we're just letting the room fill up here.
	And why don't you tell me a little bit about...
	Your history with coronavirus and what you've been seeing as an ER doc with multi-decades of experience, what's been going on, at least, or maybe what you've heard about.
	And just a reminder, of course, none of this is any kind of medical advice.
	This is just two guys jawboning about the biggest history tsunami to hit in our lifetime since the turn of this century.
	So what's been your progress in this area?
	Well, so yeah, unlike President Trump, who does apparently, according to the mainstream media, give out medical advice by telling people that chloroquine is okay in fish tank cleaner, I think it was.
	Yeah, then none of this shall be construed as medical advice, folks, please.
	But I am an emergency physician, and I work in a small town hospital in Central Texas, where the population is a little less than 20,000 for the entire county.
	So the particular hospital where I work, we have had a couple of coronavirus cases show up in the past couple of weeks.
	One of those came through the hospital emergency department, and the She was put on quarantine and is doing well as far as I know.
	But other than that, I haven't really seen a whole lot of it where I am.
	But we are taking precautions and we should get into that.
	Well, I'll tell you right now that what has happened is you hear all this hype about The hospitals are going to be overwhelmed.
	And in certain areas, they are.
	I mean, there's no question they're going to be overwhelmed.
	And they are being overwhelmed.
	But in, you know, Central Texas, the hospital has taken such precautions that it's kind of a, it's difficult to get into the hospital now.
	You have to go through a screening process and answer a questionnaire and wear a mask, etc.
	And I do want to dive into that a little deeper later on, if we may, and I want to get into that right away.
	But I have some reservations about what we're telling patients and what we're telling people to do to shelter in place and to stay at home.
	I guess that's what this whole thing is about, is my reservations about this, what I call coronavirus panicademic of 2020.
	I think the technical term is plandemic.
	So yeah, so the numbers that were coming out of the mainstream organizations early on were, you know, R0s of between 4 and 5, the reproductive rates of 4, 5 and 6.
	I even saw eight as high at one point and mortality rates at 3.3, 3.4 percent compared to 0.1 percent for the annual flu.
	So you, well, I'll link the video below, but you did a breakdown of some of these numbers that I think is well worth letting our audience know about because it does put things in a bit of a different perspective.
	Well, thank you. I hope people can get through the weeds and that there was a lot of statistics.
	And let me say, I'm not an epidemiologist.
	I'm an emergency physician, and I ain't a statistician either.
	I mean, I think I remember square roots being important in statistics or something like that.
	But I can't remember if I got a D or a D minus in statistics in college.
	But anyway... You know, when coronavirus, and by the way, this is not the only coronavirus.
	This is COVID-19 we're talking about.
	That is one of several members of the coronavirus family.
	This happens to be a new virus.
	That's why they call it novel.
	Novel means new. And it's something that we've apparently never seen before.
	Virologists have never seen this before.
	We can get into this a little bit later, too, whether this thing was actually manufactured as a weapon or tweaked with in that Wuhan laboratory, or whether this is just something that naturally occurred and made its way into humans.
	You know, I don't know that we'll ever know the answer to that.
	I strongly agree with your suspicion that this thing is a product of the Wuhan laboratory that somehow got out into the population.
	But when I started seeing this about COVID-19 back a couple of months ago when it first hit the news, I was pretty concerned, the numbers coming out of China, you know, and I guess I was naive.
	I kind of trusted those numbers, but I understand now that we can't really trust what China's putting out.
	I get that after watching your stuff.
	Thank you, Steph. Well, it's a tragic cliche.
	Of course, when you think about Asians being good at math, it is a little bit of that, you know, we all have a couple of the odd stereotypes floating around in our brain, and yeah, that happens.
	Yeah, so the bottom line, yeah, I mean, coronaviruses or COVID-19, when it started occurring a couple of months ago, I have to say I was never wigged out about it because these things happen.
	I mean, we come across these viruses all the time, and that's going to happen in the future, as I point out in my video.
	This is inevitable.
	This is the predictable emergence of a new virus because these viruses mutate.
	They change. They're nothing but little pieces of DNA or RNA, and these are the very bottom.
	This is the ones and zeros that make up computer code.
	DNA and RNA are the genetic components that make up all life.
	Now, viruses aren't technically alive, but they are very nasty in that they change all the time.
	They mutate. And so when this thing came around, I just was kind of like, okay, here we go again.
	This is going to be another Ebola or another West Nile or...
	Zika virus, that's my favorite one, Zika.
	But the bottom line with that is that when coronavirus came out or when COVID-19 came out, I was watching it very carefully.
	And watching your stuff that you put out and very concerning, you know, obviously this is a new thing.
	We haven't seen this before. What's it going to do in the population?
	But now, two months later, I have to take a sober look at this.
	And one of the things that really tweaked my interest in this is, as you often say in your program, Steph, if the media is not talking about it, then you should be looking at it, right?
	And I totally agree with that.
	But there's a corollary to that.
	If the media is telling you not to do something, We're good to go.
	I was like, why can't I? And why are you telling me I can't?
	It made me very curious very quickly.
	And then I started looking at these statistics and I saw an article in the Gateway Pundit about a week and a half ago, I guess it was.
	That slammed the head of the World Health Organization, the Ethiopian politician, doctor.
	He's not a physician. I believe his technical term is China's hand puppet.
	That's what it would seem, right?
	From what we now know. Tedros, I can't even begin to pronounce his last name.
	No offense to him, but he deserves a try, but I'm not going to massacre it.
	But Dr. Tedros, as I call him in my video, This guy just rather complacently stated in a March, I think it was March 7th meeting of the WHO, the World Health Organization, which is this supposedly respectable body, you know, and world experts, hey, they're the WHO, right? Who are we to argue with the WHO? The World Health Organization, not the other guys.
	And I'm like, you know, I'm looking at this and I read this article and they absolutely correctly, 100% slammed him because he compared, as I say in my video, what he did was statistically compare apples to onions.
	He compared the coronavirus, what's called the case fatality rate, which it's the measure of how lethal this virus is.
	He compared that to From two points of data, confirmed cases and confirmed deaths.
	He compared that to influenza, but he did a little, you know, one, two, keep your eye on the birdie type thing.
	He compared the coronavirus confirmed cases to confirm deaths to the estimated number of deaths versus the estimated number of cases for influenza.
	Now, on the surface, it's not a bad idea to do that comparison, just generally speaking, because we don't know the actual numbers of deaths and actual numbers of cases of influenza.
	It's too high to count. This virus infects Hundreds of millions of people around the globe every year.
	In the U.S. alone, the CDC so far this season estimates that there's anywhere from, I think it was 38 million to 59 million cases of influenza.
	They have no idea how many there really were.
	It's all estimated.
	Well, if you're going to compare that rate, that case fatality rate, to the confirmed data, the hard data that you have on coronavirus...
	And you come up with this crazy number that coronavirus is hundreds of times more lethal than the flu, Based upon what he said, that it kills 3.4% of those that it infects, versus the flu kills less than 1% of those that it infects.
	Well, that's a 300-time average, 300 times greater.
	That's very scary, right?
	And that's what set off the global panic-demic.
	Maybe it was a plan-demic.
	I'm sorry, if it's 0.1 to 3, I got 30 in my head.
	Oh, okay.
	Sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry to be an annoying arts guy.
	Hey, look, a history degree. Rise to the rescue.
	Yeah, there you go. You crushed it when you said we were good at math.
	So that's 30 times more lethal than the flu.
	That's still a very scary number.
	Well, I looked at that, I read this article in the Gateway Pundit, and I was like, oh my gosh, man, this guy, of all people, now he's not a physician, but he has a PhD, he's got to have something on his shoulders worth talking about.
	And I mean, he must know when he's the head of the World Health Organization, who fed him this data?
	Who gave him this as the mouthpiece to speak out loud to the universe?
	Because it's totally wrong.
	It's totally wrong.
	And I can't help but think, you know, in my conspiracy theorist mind, that this is propaganda.
	This was a plant.
	This was something that was put out there to make people panic.
	The panicdemic.
	It really enraged me when I saw this.
	And so I decided to do this video and really do some comparisons of the actual numbers.
	So when I did this, I was shocked because it's estimated that about 80% of these COVID-19 cases just aren't detected.
	You know why? Because like every other coronavirus out there, they cause the cold.
	They cause common colds.
	And so it's estimated that in 80% of people who come down with this virus, they never seek medical attention.
	They don't get tested.
	Voila. There you go.
	There you have it. We have a missed opportunity to catch this and get a larger number of confirmed cases versus confirmed deaths.
	Well, when you do some math on that, And you take the confirmed number of deaths and multiply it times 5, because, you know, 80%, and start doing these statistics, you really quickly get down to where the case fatality rate of coronavirus or COVID-19, depending on which statistics you're looking at worldwide, the latest one I calculated for my video was 0.89%.
	In other words, less than 1% of people who come down with COVID-19 will die from it.
	Well, if you look at the estimated number of flu cases, it's about 0.1%.
	Now that's still, correct me if I'm wrong here, 0.1 to 0.9, that's a nine times greater chance of dying from COVID-19 than you have from the flu.
	But it's nowhere near as deadly as they were putting out there.
	there.
	It's nowhere near as scary.
	And so, okay.
	So, so let me sort of get, I get the big, we're getting in the weeds.
	Yeah, no, I get, I get the big view of that.
	I'm And I definitely want to sort of sort this one out.
	So one of the issues I have, we have a rolling scenario here, right?
	So COVID-19 is kind of new.
	And so you're just not going to have the kind of historical data, you know, like the flu is something that's, you know, I guess, fairly well tracked or fairly well understood.
	It's been with us as long as we've been.
	You know, been down from the trees and hairless butts and so on.
	But this being so new, the relationship between infections and mortality is a little more complex.
	So a lot of people who get the flu, they don't go to the hospital, they don't get tested, you know, they just lie and hold their stomach on a couch for three days and then get up.
	Whereas here, I think a lot of people who are doing or who get these kinds of symptoms, they probably are going to the hospital.
	So I think that you're going to get a much higher detection rate for COVID-19 than you would obviously for the flu as a whole.
	And if that's the case, then going to the estimated number of the flu as a multiple of the people who are actually detected of the flu compared to the there is no real estimated number.
	I think that's very accurate with regards to COVID-19 because it's such a new deal and nobody really knows yet.
	So I think that I'm guessing that's sort of their thinking behind that methodology is.
	It's like, well, we don't know. We've got no data, no historical data that we can look at with regards to COVID. So we can't, you know, do the flu thing totally.
	But, you know, best we can do is say, okay, well, who's been tested positive and who's died?
	Right. But keep in mind, we have no idea of the true number of people who died from COVID-19 either.
	That's a confirmed death.
	And I have to say this, that I read in the news the other day where 500 people in Iran, over 500 people in Iran, What did they do?
	They drank methanol. They drank wood alcohol, which is very poisonous, folks.
	Don't do that. Don't drink wood alcohol.
	It's bad for you. That's medical advice we're comfortable with, right?
	Yeah, that's medical advice I'll stand by.
	Yeah, they drank, apparently, the news is they drank wood alcohol, methanol, and it killed them.
	So my question, Steph, is, are they going to get lumped in as coronavirus deaths?
	I don't know. They're certainly related to COVID-19.
	That's where they were drinking this stuff.
	They were afraid of COVID-19.
	But yeah, in the video, I bring out the old quote, there are lies, damned lies in statistics.
	And that's where we get in the weeds.
	That's where we get lost in the shuffle.
	Take into account also that what the politicians and the media are constantly griping about is, we don't have enough tests.
	We don't have enough tests.
	We can't test for this COVID-19.
	I read an article the other day where some governor of a state, it was a leftist, of course, I can't remember which state it was, but he said, I want to have enough tests to test everybody in my state.
	I'm like, good. That's for today.
	Now, what about tomorrow?
	I mean, are you saying that nobody can get this next week?
	Well, I mean, this whole testing scheme that they're running on, I am a firm believer in testing people who are symptomatic, not testing general populations.
	Epidemiologically, you want to do that.
	You want to find out the prevalence of the disease, and that would give you a much better estimate of the true case fatality rate.
	But the reality is we'll never know what the true case fatality rate is.
	But I think this is being hyped.
	And so What really got me down this bandwagon was I started looking at the response, okay?
	And when people tell you that you can't compare coronavirus to the flu, oh, yes, you can.
	And what to me is important about that is not equating these diseases.
	They're two separate diseases.
	They cause deaths at two separate rates.
	I'll admit, I'll stipulate that coronavirus or COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu.
	There's no question in my mind.
	But how much deadlier than the flu is it?
	And I don't think that that is proportional to the response that we're seeing.
	The government shutdown, the government grab for power, the erosion...
	The government shutdown would be okay.
	No, no, I mean the government mandated...
	Yeah, the government mandated shutdown of businesses.
	And I bring up in my video how interesting it is that they're closing restaurants but leaving drive-thrus open.
	What's up with that?
	I mean, if you're going to shut down a society to stop the spread of a virus, shut it down.
	Never mind, you know, that's unconstitutional, really, in the U.S. But, you know, these half-assed measures that they're taking to close certain businesses, certain states are allowing alcohol sales and marijuana sales in California.
	Other states are shutting down alcohol sales.
	I mean, you know, What?
	Anheuser-Busch or whatever that company's name is now is giving away beer for three months or something like that to people who adopt a dog.
	I mean, it's nuts, this response.
	And I want to say this before I forget, too, is if you ever needed proof that the government is corrupt, inept, and totally incapable of solving a major problem, look around, folks.
	You got it. It's right here, right now.
	Oh, yeah. No, I mean, anybody who retains their faith in experts after this is part of the cult of expertise that has characterized the life since the priests fell from grace.
	Right. Myself included, folks.
	So a couple other points here.
	The one thing also, of course, that is driving up the death rate, so to speak, is that everybody who dies...
	After being diagnosed with COVID-19 is, I believe, assumed to have died from COVID-19.
	Now, whether that's a straw that breaks the diabetic, obese person's camel's back, so to speak, whether it is directly causal or just the last push into the grave, is that unusual?
	That seems odd to me that they wouldn't look at comorbidity and say, okay, well, which is the biggest demon in the room that took down this person?
	Let me say this. As medical records and the push, and I do have a point to this, I'm going to go off track a little bit, but as medical records have gotten more and more complicated, especially with the advent of electronic health records and these revisions to the ICD, the International Classification of Diseases, this is crazy now.
	When I go to fill out someone's chart in the emergency department, in the ER, And I come to diagnose them.
	I can't just put down there sore throat or what's called pharyngitis.
	I mean, it's very rare that I can do that these days.
	There are all kinds of modifiers.
	There's all kinds of information you can put on there.
	I mean, Steph, truly, there are diagnoses, official diagnoses for found dead on railroad tracks.
	There's another one found dead next to railroad track.
	I'm not kidding. These are real deal diagnoses.
	So when you get to that level of detail...
	I feel like we're just about to enter a Roadrunner cartoon, but all right.
	When you get to...
	Dead from TNT blowing up too early.
	When you get to that level of detail in making a diagnosis...
	You know, sometimes I just throw up my hands and say, what the...
	I mean, I just diagnose them with something that comes up because...
	And I'll admit that, that it's virtually impossible sometimes for me to pick through.
	It's going to take me 10 minutes to go through and find what I believe their diagnosis to be.
	So sometimes physicians have to fudge it nowadays, given this extreme, extreme specificity we have.
	That being said... There was a 17-year-old young man in California who was thought to be the first U.S. adolescent, the child under the age of 18, to die from COVID-19.
	Then I read a report after I filmed my video.
	In my video, I said he may have died from COVID-19.
	Then I read a report. This kid was sick.
	He had significant comorbidities.
	I'm not sure what they were. And bless him.
	Bless his soul, by the way. But, you know, the bottom line is that he, now the questioning whether or not he died with it or died from it, and there's significant question as to which it is, we may never know.
	We may genuinely never know.
	So I think there's a fair amount of that, too, that if someone dies with coronavirus, it's like prostate cancer in men.
	Most men don't die from prostate cancer.
	They die with prostate cancer.
	There are some men who die from prostate cancer, but statistically, that's not many.
	But the same thing can apply, could possibly apply to COVID-19.
	How many of these are dying from pneumonic or pneumonia illness caused by COVID-19?
	I don't have those numbers.
	I don't know that they're being published.
	But that would be a very interesting statistic versus someone who has, let's say, a heart attack.
	And they test them because I guarantee you they're testing everybody who dies these days.
	And they have a heart attack.
	Oh, well, they had COVID-19.
	Well, did that contribute to their heart attack?
	I'm not sure. So that's a fudge factor, too, we have to take into account.
	Yes. I mean, you take a silly example of somebody with coronavirus falls down the stairs at the hospital, dies of a concussion, but they take COVID. I mean, obviously that's a sort of extreme example, but...
	Or drinks methanol. Yeah, yeah.
	So, okay, here's the big challenge as well for me.
	Okay. So just looking at the latest numbers, this is the Johns Hopkins...
	University map, we got total confirmed at 784.
	It still looks like it's going up fairly exponentially these days.
	But anyway, so here's the thing, right?
	So break this out for me, brother, because this gets my jimmies in a twist.
	Okay, total recovered, 165,288.
	Yay! Right? Total deaths, 37,638.
	Now that is a very bad ratio.
	We've got almost 23% Of death versus recovery.
	So when we're talking, you know, less than 1% to close to 23%, I think that's the kind of spread where people don't know what the hell to think at this point.
	Well, to me, the more suspicious number is, I looked at it this morning, what did you say it was, 784?
	I think it was 770 when I looked at it this morning.
	784, 314 at the moment, most in U.S., Italy, Spain.
	China has locked out of the coronavirus that they created.
	But anyway, yeah, but it's the total recovered versus the total deaths, which is close to 23% of the ratio.
	I would say define recovered.
	What do you mean by recovered?
	Because now I just read an article before we went on air talking about how people are having relapses.
	This virus doesn't necessarily go away.
	I don't know if it stays in the body.
	Some viruses stay in the body forever.
	Chickenpox virus stays in the body forever.
	Herpes, the gift that keeps on giving, stays there forever.
	Chickenpox is a herpes virus.
	Aside from that, I don't know if this thing sticks around or not and can cause mischief later on.
	Like, you know, the chickenpox virus can cause shingles later on.
	So we don't know if this thing's going to stick around or not.
	Maybe it was engineered to. If Paul Cottrell is right, and it was engineered, bioengineered.
	So, bottom, or I guess what I'm trying to say is that the bigger spread to me is that difference between the confirmed cases and the recovery rate.
	That's a half a million. 180, what'd you say?
	180,000 versus 784?
	Yeah, sorry. I think I just, I history mastered the math here.
	So, because I divided total deaths into total recovered, which is not Not particularly bad.
	Sorry about that. I'm back.
	I had my 8th grade math teacher waving.
	I won't give her even her name.
	She may still be teaching for all I know, although she was being ancient back then.
	Sorry, that is not the correct ratio.
	I just realized that.
	You want to do total recovery plus total deaths and then ratio of total deaths.
	I got like 5.4% or something like that, whatever it is.
	When I ran the numbers this morning, I did it...
	I did it in the U.S. and the number that I came up with was in the U.S. I think there was 2572 deaths versus, I can't remember the top number, the confirmed cases in the U.S. I did this this morning and I memorized it and now I've forgotten it.
	The case fatality rate, which is the lethality of the virus, Well, I can tell you, it was 3%.
	It was 3 point something percent.
	But if you multiply that, if you carry it out again to the estimated number of cases, do some just generic math...
	That number goes way, way, way, way, way down to something that's, again, comparable to the flu.
	It's still worse than the flu.
	It's still more lethal than the flu, but it is not something that's out there eating people left and right and melting them.
	And this is where I really question the government's response.
	I will say this.
	I'm not certain what the numbers are.
	I'm not certain whether this virus was man-made or whether it was natural.
	I'm not certain about much, except I am certain That we are not being told the whole story by the government and certainly by the media.
	I'm not sure the media is being told the whole story.
	We are not being told what's really going on because there has to be a reason behind this hyped-up, hyperdrive, panic-demic, quarantines, closing schools, etc., If you compare coronavirus to the flu, COVID-19 to the flu, and you compare the reaction, that's where it really gets, you know, hey man, you know, I was going to mention this too.
	In cancer, as you're well aware, Steph, chemotherapy is something that kills cancer cells.
	Well, guess what it also does?
	It kills normal cells.
	Those drugs are toxic to normal cells.
	We haven't perfected it yet so that only the cancer cells get destroyed.
	So when you're undergoing chemotherapy, I mean, my goodness, you have to be careful.
	You have to dose it correctly.
	You have to base it on a lot of different variables so that you don't kill the person who has the cancer, who has the tumor.
	Yes, I do remember mentioning that.
	Yeah, you know that very well.
	And I'm sorry you do.
	But in this case, we have a saying in medicine, is the cure worse than the disease?
	Yeah. And that's my real question.
	Is it worth killing the best economy that we've had ever in the U.S.? Is it worth doing this for a virus that, you know, just from what I've been told, from what I see, from the simple math that I can do...
	It doesn't seem like it's that big of a threat.
	And really, if I could carry this on and just say that my biggest problem with this coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is not the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
	It's what happens the next time a new virus comes around.
	What's going to happen then?
	What if the flu mutates into the swine flu again or into this H1N1 or whatever that was, the really bad one that was killing lots of people?
	What are we going to do? Are we going to shut it down?
	Is this going to become a regular occurrence?
	You know, in Latin American countries, they have what's called siesta.
	And every afternoon, they go to sleep.
	They close up shop. They board up the windows.
	They go home and sleep for a couple hours and then come back and open late.
	Are we going to do that every mid-November through mid-February for the flu?
	I don't know. This is a very, very high bar they've set indeed for something that I just don't think deserves it.
	Yeah, so just to recover my math credentials here, I added the dead to the recovered and then did a ratio of the dead to the recovered.
	We got 18.5% of the totals of dying and recovered, 18.5%.
	But again, the recovery thing, you could say that there are 784,000 people in recovery because they haven't died from it.
	That's right. I don't know that that's a valid statistic.
	I'll be honest with you.
	I don't know that that's something I would put any stock and faith in.
	Again, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics.
	In baseball, it's a wonderful sport. No, no, but come on.
	Look, with regards to the flu, there's no way you'd see those numbers.
	And that's what I mean because it's a rolling situation.
	We just don't have – we haven't gone through the bulge and the decline.
	Well, true, true. So that's the big challenge.
	Like, you'd never say, okay, well, there's, you know, 200,000-odd people who had the flu, and of those 200,000-odd, 37,000 and change died.
	Like, there would never be that situation.
	I mean, even the Spanish flu wouldn't be that bad.
	So that's the challenge, because, of course, the people who dragged themselves up to the hospital early, we assume, are the sickest.
	The people who are getting hit earliest are the sickest.
	And so we don't know where we are in the role, right, in the bell curve.
	True. But, you know, when it comes to the flu, let's take the worst case scenario for the U.S. that 50, I think it was 55,000 people die in a given year.
	That's the estimate for this year.
	But 59 million people have it.
	Which means that 58,945,000 people recovered from the flu.
	So yeah, the 55,000 compared to that is nothing.
	You're right. But we just don't have the information regarding COVID-19.
	We don't have everything in yet.
	And the ultimate thing for me is...
	I know about the millions of cell phones that have gone missing in China.
	That's quite concerning, maybe.
	And the crematory that we're going 24-7, that's pretty concerning stuff, if it's true.
	And it could indicate a death rate far, far higher than what the Chinese...
	Truly global emergency, if that's the case.
	Yeah, and I mean, to contrast that to Canada's, somebody just posted these numbers here.
	As of 9.45 a.m.
	Pacific Standard Time, total case is 6,081.
	Total death, 67.
	Therefore, death rate equals 1.1%.
	Right. So that's...
	Yeah. So that's the big question that I have.
	Dr. Wakesi is...
	Why is there this Old Testament-style, plague-a-locus, end-of-the-world panic coming out of things?
	Now, I've heard good arguments as to why.
	I mean, what do I know?
	They seem like good arguments to me.
	Again, I, like you, am not an epidemiologist.
	But there are these really, really good arguments.
	Which is, you know, well, this thing could be engineered, in which case its lethality is going to be pretty long.
	Well, you know, it's going to race through the population pretty harsh.
	Flatten the curve. Yeah, the flatten the curve stuff, that the overwhelmingness.
	I certainly have been receiving, you know, this is not a scientific study and it's not even possible to verify.
	And I'll bring up one of these emails in a couple of minutes.
	But I have been getting a lot of emails from people saying, we're not even close to ready.
	I had a conversation with a nurse last night.
	She said 25% of the nurses had got infected.
	20-25%, right?
	I'm getting other emails from people saying, we don't have any masks.
	The masks haven't been fitted, which they're supposed to be every year.
	We are way away from being prepared.
	And so that's my sort of big concern.
	That if this thing does race through the population and there is a bulge to the point where you can't get enough ventilators or, you know, it's funny because everyone talks about ventilators, but the people who operate the ventilators aren't exactly a dime a dozen.
	This is not like a morning training course to do CPR. I mean, to learn how to do a ventilator with somebody who's half flatlining and is intubated, like that's a very, very skilled, big, complicated task.
	And, you know, estimates are you need like 10,000 to 15,000 more of those people, but you can't just crank them out like school children in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie.
	And so I think that is the big issue.
	And my concern has not necessarily been the fatality of the illness itself, although that, of course, is a big concern.
	system, pushing other stuff aside and that being the big problem.
	I mean, look, this thing's out.
	It's going to be part of our permanent human landscape and probably like the flu, everyone's going to get it at some point or another.
	Can we get a vaccine?
	Can we get a treatment?
	Can we flatten the curve?
	What do you think about that kind of approach to things?
	Well, I think it's valid.
	I do think it's valid. But again, if you want to, and here's what's confusing to me, if you want to stop a virus's spread, You shut it down.
	I mean, you absolutely shut it down.
	By doing what I call, again, half-assed measures, you can go to a bank, but not a baseball game.
	What's up with that? You're far more likely to catch us in a bank.
	What would that look like to you?
	Martial law, which again, the question is, would that be something constitutional in the U.S.? Is that too much of an erosion of civil liberties to protect public health?
	I don't know. I don't know the answers to these questions.
	The only way you contain a virus, as they did with SARS and MERS, which were very deadly viruses, they eclipsed the virulence, the lethality of this COVID-19.
	Bad bugs. If SARS or MERS gets out amongst the general population, hey man, I'm staying in my house.
	I'm not going to work. I'm going to stay in my house, tend to my vegetables.
	Maybe I'll get some rats, but I'm not going anywhere.
	Because those are killers.
	Those are true killers. To get back to your point, to your question, how we handle this, I like to say this, and I don't mean to be obtuse, but I work in an emergency department, and the one I work in now is not that busy, I have to say.
	It can get busy at times, but in busy, busy emergency departments in inner cities, etc., It's always understaffed.
	It's chronically understaffed.
	And why is that? Because you can never schedule appropriately for unscheduled, unforeseen care or catastrophes.
	You just can't.
	I mean, you can do all the planning in the world that you want to do.
	And then, boom, you never know what's going to hit you.
	The variables are too great.
	And pretty soon, quicker than, sooner than later, the system gets overwhelmed.
	Your plans get overwhelmed.
	That's an expected. I mean, that's just an expected.
	So I thought, maybe this is a test run.
	Maybe this is something the government is saying, okay, China, you unleash this virus on us, and we're just going to have a test run.
	We'll see how it goes. We'll shut down our economy.
	I could be wrong.
	I hope I'm wrong about that. But, you know, to answer the question about making more ventilators and the people who do them You know, interestingly, New York, I read where New York City had closed down 16 hospitals since 2003.
	Don't do that, New York City.
	Don't do that. I mean, it's a city of 8 million people.
	My gosh, that's a small country.
	You can't afford to lose hospitals.
	You need to build more hospitals.
	Yeah, I think that if anything good comes out of this stuff, And again, I don't mean to jump around, but there are many reasons why our healthcare system is in danger of being overwhelmed.
	Not the least of which is something called, have you ever heard of certificate of need laws?
	Believe it or not, I am ridiculously familiar with those based upon a presentation I did about 10 years ago.
	Why don't you tell people why there are so few hospitals in this time of need?
	Right. Because these certificate of need laws that exist, I believe it's still, I can't, I'm not going to lie.
	Most states still have these things in place.
	And they were passed 40, 50 years ago with the idea that we don't want to build too many hospitals.
	We want to have certain hospitals in certain areas, etc., etc.
	And the intention, like with many things, started off good.
	But very quickly it became abused.
	And so what happens with the certificate of need laws, if I want to go build a hospital, okay, if I want to build a hospital in Timbuktu, I have to, and that state has certificate of need laws, I have to go and petition a committee.
	To see if there is a need for my hospital on the east end of Timbuktu or wherever I want to place it.
	I have to ask permission from a local committee.
	And guess who's on that committee?
	Members of the other hospitals in town.
	It's amazing how these things hardly get passed.
	Because you have to petition the existing businesses in town to join their club.
	And how often do you think they say, nope, we're going to...
	And now they could build another hospital at the end of town.
	But you are shut up from doing that.
	It's not free market at all.
	I love it when people say, look what the free market in healthcare is doing.
	Folks, we don't have a free market in healthcare, and that is just the tip of the iceberg, the whole certificate of need thing.
	But that explains in large part why we don't have hospitals dotted all over the place where they might do well, they might thrive.
	Because of certificate of need laws.
	There are other considerations to be had as well, of course, but those are a biggie.
	If we got rid of those, who knows what the free market would do, right?
	I mean, the free market tends to provide.
	So we wouldn't have hospitals where we need them everywhere, in rural areas, etc., even in some urban areas.
	But I think, you know, given if the free market were let rain, were let, you know, let free and unfettered, I think we'd have a lot better situation regarding this.
	And also, you know, I'm amazed at...
	How people are pointing to President Trump and saying he's not providing enough ventilators, he's not providing enough masks.
	I mean, I'm not even sure that President Trump knew what a ventilator was before all this, and it's certainly not his job to provide them.
	But then they pointed out that Cuomo, the governor of New York, And I don't know, again, how responsible he was for this, but apparently they had stockpiled and pigeonholed thousands, if not millions, of Basques.
	I'm getting my numbers wrong on that.
	And if that's true, then it's like, why is the government involved in this?
	I mean, I could see having an emergency supply, sort of like they have an emergency supply of oil, emergency reserve, or whatever.
	But the government shouldn't be involved in the free flow of these things at all.
	This should be a free market.
	And these companies, you know...
	One of the things that Trump is outstanding at, as I've heard and read, is deregulation.
	They need to take some large scythes to the regulations involving healthcare and get rid of a lot of these things so that companies like MyPillow can start manufacturing masks.
	Any company that sees a profit in doing something is going to do that.
	And if there's money to be made with this $2 trillion out of thin air we just got, I think that the free market would reign.
	So not to be obtuse on your question, but I think that that is a consideration So regarding the curve and overwhelming existing hospital facilities, of course, it's always a consideration.
	But you can't schedule for that, A. And B, is it worth really...
	What about the damage that's going to be done from shutting down all these businesses, the mental illness that's going to occur, the depression, the suicide, the substance abuse, etc.
	The exacerbation of physical ailments based upon the mental stress that people are undergoing.
	So none of this is good in any way.
	It's funny, you know, I... I sort of hate to put it this way because it's very easy to misinterpret this kind of stuff, but it's almost like the universe is just telling us to grow the hell up because everybody is so used to not having to make tough decisions.
	We have a tough decision right now.
	And the tough decision is, as you point out, okay, do we go back to work?
	Because, you know, people are hurting, they're stressed, they're worried, they're upset.
	You know, some, you know, they always call them elective surgeries, like it's just a hobby.
	But I mean, this stuff is important.
	You know, people need this stuff.
	Gallbladders didn't stop going bad because of this.
	No way. There's still appendices too, appendices.
	So yeah, so we have this big issue and we're just really out of the habit of making tough decisions.
	You know, like you got the mayor of New York saying, you can't put a price in human life.
	Of course you can. You do all the time.
	Sure. Has he never heard of triage?
	I mean, of course you put a price on human life.
	Life insurance. Life insurance. Right.
	You name it, right? I mean, so this It's like a big wake-up call.
	We've been kind of living in this dream world where you can just print more money to solve problems.
	And, you know, and the deaths caused by, say, the FDA, which run into the millions by the FDA banning treatments and therapies and drugs that are perfectly legal and safe in other countries, killed millions of Americans since the thalidomide scared in the 60s.
	That's all hidden, right? But now, you know, we need something in a hurry.
	And the FDA is like, oh, yeah, you can just, you know, No problem.
	Two months, we're done. And it's like, well, what happened to the 10-year thing?
	It's like, oh, well, no, now, see, it's really important, so we're doing it now.
	We'll fast-track it. People are just getting a chance to see just how fast things can be when necessary, and I think it's giving them a sense of just the kind of slow-motion sickness that we're stuck into medically the rest of the time.
	Well, thank you, President Trump.
	I mean, deregulate. Get rid of these burdensome regulations.
	You know, this nanny state that exists is a huge nanny state, and people have come to rely on it way too much.
	And I put out a tweet the other day.
	I would challenge your viewers to answer my tweet.
	I said, Americans, choose one.
	A, The government gets to tell you where to sit, stand, and sleep.
	But your medical care, if you come down with coronavirus, is taken care of.
	Or B, the government lets you be.
	You live your own life.
	But if you come down with coronavirus, you're on your own, pal.
	And the majority of people who answered the question said, of course, B. I want my freedom, of course.
	But somebody answered it realistically, and they said, B, until I need A. And that is, you know, when the poop hits the fan, I get to turn to the government, they get to take care of all my needs.
	And this illustrates a larger problem that I'm very frustrated with regarding health care and health insurance, etc.
	And when it comes to, like, not to get too far off the topic here, but when it comes to this concept of universal health care or Medicare for all or single-payer health care system, you cannot let people live life In the manner they choose.
	They can't live life by their own terms.
	They can't smoke and be obese and get diabetes and have these lifestyle choices that lead to significant illness.
	You know, being 200 pounds overweight and pounding your knees day in and day out.
	Those knees are going to need to be replaced one of these days.
	You cannot let people live life on their own terms.
	It's sort of like what you say with the welfare state and the open borders.
	We can't maintain that.
	You cannot, likewise, within the healthcare system, maintain a system where people get to live life the way they choose to do, and then when the shit hits the fan, they get to turn to the government, they get to turn to others who then get to pay for all their care.
	We're not going to be able to afford that.
	As sooner or later, the mathematics of it, as you again say, the mathematics of it are going to come crashing down.
	So I've got a couple of questions coming in from the audience here, and thank you so much to the close to 3,000 people who are dropping by to have a look.
	So ask him, that's you, about the relationship between a sick population like obese America, weak immune systems versus healthy population with good immune systems as it relates to the Wu flu.
	Oh, great question.
	I would say that regarding immune systems, okay, people...
	I'm not a big believer in colloidal silver and things like that and supplements and stuff, I gotta say.
	And half the people are going to turn me off right now, I'm sure.
	But I think that scientifically, a lot of that stuff has yet to be proven.
	I would say that unless you have an immune system compromised, unless you have an autoimmune disorder or HIV or SCID, which is the Severe Combined Immune Deficiency, your immune system is probably...
	Puddling along just fine.
	And now, as we get older, and I'm 51, so I'm waiting for the day.
	As we get older, our immune systems do wear out, just like brake pads, etc., on a car.
	So your immune system isn't functioning properly.
	The best advice I would say for boosting your immune system is...
	Eat right. Get plenty of exercise.
	Get plenty of sleep. Don't smoke.
	Don't drink. Well, drink, you know, don't drink outside of moderation.
	Avoid drugs. Try to stay level-headed.
	Don't get angry a lot. Don't get depressed.
	So those things will help keep your immune system optimal.
	The obesity question.
	Great question. I was hoping to answer this, hoping I didn't forget it.
	Let me explain the dynamics.
	You mentioned ventilators earlier, and I'm going to go a little bit into detail in this explanation, too.
	I've seen where some companies, I think the MIT crowd has built this ventilator that you can MacGyver up out of a few, you know, two old Bibles and a hot water bottle or something like that.
	Those are not going to work.
	I got to tell you right now, they're not going to work.
	Ventilators are sophisticated pieces of equipment.
	We have this thing called PEEP, which even when you breathe out all the way, you still have some pressure in your lungs, some air pressure that maintains these little alveoli, these little bitty teeny tiny microscopic air sacs.
	That keeps them open.
	If they weren't kept open, they have glue coating the inside of them.
	They would stick together and enough of them collapse.
	You get what's called atelectasis.
	That puts you at risk for pneumonia, for increased mucus secretions, all kinds of stuff.
	So even when you breathe all the way out, You still have some air in your lungs popping up like a balloon.
	Your balloons will never deflate entirely in your lung, or they shouldn't.
	So these ventilators are good.
	They're great. And we can adjust this PEEP. It's called positive end expiratory pressure.
	How much pressure is remaining in your lungs at the end of an expiration when you breathe out.
	That's a key component of ventilation, especially if you're going to ventilate somebody long-term for days or weeks.
	Now, let's talk about obesity.
	If you need to ventilate somebody long term, if you are obese, if you're carrying around a person and a half on your body, no offense folks, you need to lose that as soon as possible.
	Because if you ever wind up on a ventilator, be it at 16 or at 65, You are in for a world of hurt because every time you breathe, that machine has to push that much harder.
	Imagine bench pressing, you know, somebody like Shania Twain versus somebody like Andre the Giant.
	I mean, you're going to put a lot more force into that.
	And the ventilator machine has to work a lot harder to inflate your lungs if you're obese, if you're carrying around a lot of extra weight, than, say, somebody who's not obese, like my lungs, for instance, or yours, Steph.
	What's the problem there?
	We use our muscles all the time to breathe.
	The breathing muscles and the heart are the most active muscles in the body because you're using them all the time.
	Stop using them, you're dead, okay?
	So bottom line is you're using these muscles all the time.
	They're very well conditioned to breathing for you.
	As soon as a machine takes over that breathing function for you, what happens with muscle?
	Use it or lose it, right?
	And so people, when you're ventilated someone on a ventilator, it's not as easy as saying, oh, just put them on a ventilator for a couple of weeks and pull them off and it'll all be right.
	No, it's not that simple at all because it takes a long time to take someone, we call it weaning them off the ventilator when they've been on a ventilator for a while.
	Because those muscles have atrophied.
	They have shrunken down. Your diaphragm shrinks down.
	It just doesn't have the capacity to breathe for you like it once did.
	The problem there is with this COVID-19, it looks like it is requiring prolonged ventilations for those who need it.
	And so if you're obese, you're going to have a lot harder time.
	And you're going to have a lot harder time recovering from that, getting off the ventilator.
	Your risk of death goes way up.
	I have no idea what it is, because guess what?
	They're not putting this out there.
	They're not really talking about this.
	When they say comorbidities, I love how they say diabetes and smoking and high blood pressure.
	Diabetes can lower your immune system, by the way.
	Diabetes lowers your immunity.
	So if you're diabetic, you want to keep very good control of that to help your immune system.
	But high blood pressure, I'm not too sure what that and how that interacts unless you have organ damage from long-standing hypertension, high blood pressure.
	But asthma, I'm asthmatic.
	You think I want COVID-19?
	Hell no, I don't want COVID-19.
	But asthma predisposes you to this.
	But if you're obese, you're in for a heck of a ride.
	And they're not putting that statistic out there.
	They're not saying that these people have obesity.
	But I suspect that a large number Pun intended, of the people who are dying from COVID-19 after being ventilated, or probably one of their risk factors is obesity.
	It's so prevalent in the American population.
	It's huge. Well, maybe not for long.
	It's almost like the evil planet is going to die.
	So this is something from another listener.
	Please ask him about tonic water.
	It is already known to prevent malaria and dengue.
	Chloroquine is made of synthetic quinine, the same stuff used to make tonic water.
	Can soda save us?
	How did that play out?
	I'm not even going to go where Trump did.
	I'm going to say, as my friend from high school would have said, not no, but hell no.
	I don't think that's going to do much at all.
	Why have there been some governors preventing?
	Is it because it's an off-label use of the medicine?
	Is it chloroquine that is being used to this?
	Why those wacky leftist governors are seeking to announce their power over their population?
	You tell me, Steph. You're the philosopher, not me.
	I don't think it has anything to do with medicine.
	I know that there's an uproar about their practicing medicine without a license.
	Well, guess what, folks? The government does that all the time.
	Bureaucrats do that. Corporate bosses in the healthcare setting do that.
	I like to say that physicians, in an ideal world, physicians should never be employed.
	Because my duty, my primary duty should be to the patient.
	Well, if I'm employed, I have a moral and an ethical or legal and an ethical duty to my employer.
	And I can tell you firsthand, we'll get to this in another video podcast someday, what happens when those two paths cross?
	The employer wins virtually every time.
	But yet the practice of medicine goes on all the time.
	But yeah, these governors are wacky.
	I mean, why would you? I can't understand the motivation other than just...
	Here I am. Look at me.
	I'm a big man or big woman, you know, and it's crazy what they're doing.
	Crazy. Because this chloroquine has shown promise.
	It's not well studied yet.
	It's not a panacea.
	It's not something that I'd advise, you know, you taking without a physician's supervision because it has some dangers associated with it.
	But, you know, it looks promising so far.
	So it's well worth studying. It's well worth pursuing as a treatment.
	But drink all the tonic water you want if you like tonic water.
	I'd personally throw some flavoring in there.
	But, you know, it's not going to help you prevent coronavirus or cure it.
	Now, what about this strategy of herd immunity?
	Some of the British government approach has been, let's ride it out.
	You know, let's get some herd immunity in here.
	And of course, the flu has been around forever.
	This COVID-19 is new.
	And so the issue is with flattening the curve is due to a lack of herd immunity.
	Okay, so herd immunity is when enough members of the population have been exposed to or somehow acquired immunity to a particular agent that the risk of transmission, the R0, as you talked about earlier, the level of contagiousness Of something that gets passed from human to human goes down significantly.
	So let's be clear about that.
	That's what herd immunity implies is that, you know, if I sneeze on you and we're at a baseball game and you are immune to whatever I just gave you by sneezing on you, and then you turn around and sneeze on somebody else, you're not going to pass it on because you have immunity.
	And when enough people in a population have this, it's called herd immunity, it can seriously slow down, if not stop, the spread of a disease.
	That being said, I wanted to bring this up too, and I guess this is a good point to do it.
	I don't know how many members of your audience have episodes every few years where they get sick, they get castroenteritis, they vomit, sometimes have diarrhea.
	This happens to me regularly every two to three years, man.
	It comes on like clockwork and I'm like, oh no, here we go.
	Because there's few things I like worse or hate worse in the world than vomiting.
	But I get it. And it's because it's typically caused by another virus called the Norwalk virus or Norwalk agent or norovirus.
	And this thing we don't have lasting immunity to.
	The immunity typically lasts two to three years.
	And then for some reason, the immunity wanes.
	It goes away. So you're immune from this stuff for a couple of three good years that you enjoy life.
	And then at some point you lose your immunity, it comes around again.
	So this may ultimately happen with COVID-19.
	My point about this is, is how is this stuff spread?
	This norovirus, there's a famous experiment, not an experiment, but a study done where a woman in a restaurant yakked, she vomited.
	And when she did so, 90% of the people at that table also came down with the same illness, vomiting and diarrhea, within a few days.
	Across the room, a good six meters away from her, 25% of the people still came down with that same illness.
	They never came in contact with her, with her vomit or diarrhea or anything like that.
	She didn't have diarrhea, but they never came in contact with any of her fluids.
	But this stuff is so contagious and so readily spread that it infects massive numbers of people.
	Hopefully with herd immunity, we could slow down, if not stop, the spread of coronavirus, of this COVID-19.
	So to answer the question, herd immunity is important.
	It's going to be a while before we get there, though.
	Unless they come out with a vaccine.
	Right. That people take.
	I've got to tell you, this is just my particular personal opinion, again, not any kind of medical advice, but you know how they say, don't run version 1.0 of anything?
	I've got to have some questions about this vaccine they're going to come out with.
	It's like, hey...
	Do you get to put on your guinea pig outfit and become a furry when it comes to taking 1.0 of an incredibly rushed vaccine during a time of crisis?
	I think I'll just let, you know, after you, I'm going to be very polite, you know, after you, after you, please, let me see how this plays out for a while.
	I can stay home if I have to.
	Well, I'm not sure that this vaccine is going to be rushed.
	They have definitely, I'm certain, been working on this for, when I say they, the colloquial they, drug companies, I'm sure, have been working on this for quite a while.
	Because again, coronaviruses in humans mostly cause the common cold.
	Now, if you could put out a vaccine that protects against the common cold, man, print your own ATM. You got your own ATM machine there.
	And they're not the only viruses that cause colds, by the way, okay?
	But they account for about 15% of them.
	So, the vaccine that's going to come out, you know, the trickiness, I'm not sure the ins and outs of why they haven't been able to design a vaccine for this.
	It could be as simple as it has been, which I'm kind of defeating my own argument I just made.
	But it could be, you know, many of these medicines haven't been explored and researched simply because there's no money to be made in it.
	There's not much money to be made in whatever they're trying to seek.
	So it may be rushed.
	I'm not sure where they are in vaccine development on coronaviruses.
	I haven't read up on that. But I would say that the FDA... It's heretofore has been very rigorous in its trials and sometimes too rigorous, as you point out.
	It's not allowed medications in that have shown efficacy around the world and other countries.
	So I don't know how this process is going to get affected with the, you know, putting it on turbo mode and getting rid of some of these hoops and jumps that they've got to go through.
	So I don't know. I'd probably take it myself.
	I'm a bit of a cavalier in that regard, but...
	I'd probably do it. I definitely would do it since I work with it, yeah.
	Let's talk testicles, as always.
	Have you heard anything about a study showing COVID-19 attacks testicles and kidneys?
	And this is, sorry, somebody I had on a while ago was talking about how it doesn't just go for the lungs, like it plugs in just about everywhere you've got tissue, which is pretty much everywhere.
	Right, right. I have not heard of that study.
	I'm not surprised at all.
	These viruses are so small, and they wreak havoc on all kinds of cells.
	A guy I went to medical school with, who's still around, he's still a physician, in his mid-30s, he came down with a virus called Coxsackievirus.
	Now, in 99% of people who contract Coxsackie virus, it's not that big of a deal.
	They just might have a cold, might have sniffles, and get over it.
	Nope. This stuff went for his heart, and it caused what's called a viral cardiomyopathy.
	It infected the tissues of his heart, and he was very sick for a while, for a couple of months there.
	Looked like he might even need a heart transplant at one point in his mid-30s, this guy.
	But he recovered the virus, which there is no treatment for this, no antibiotic, so to speak, to kill most of these viruses, including COVID-19.
	He got over it.
	He is doing fine, as far as I know.
	I haven't talked to him in a few years. But yeah, these viruses are capable of attacking any one of a number of different tissues.
	And it's interesting, what I have heard about is a loss of taste and a loss of smell, which would go with it infecting the upper respiratory tract.
	But I heard of one woman, at least, who came down with hearing loss in one ear.
	Uh, as a, as a, what's called a prodrome symptom, uh, at the very beginning of her illness with COVID-19.
	So yeah, anything's possible, I think.
	Uh, Stefan and or Kevin, actually, I'm going to lob this one over to you.
	It's a bit technical, uh, and maybe you can sort of explain why this is a relevant question.
	Could all the sanitization we are doing and that all the stores are going through bring on a superbug?
	Oh, that's a great question.
	You know, I used to, doing what I do, working with germs all the time, I still do it occasionally.
	I would shower with, you know, I don't have that much hair.
	I don't use hair products or anything.
	So I would use what's called chlorhexidine.
	The trade name for this stuff is Hibiclens.
	It's the pink liquid that we use in hospitals.
	And I literally would take it and put it all over my body, head to toe, and wash it down the drain.
	And then they used to make antibacterial soaps with this ingredient called triclosan in them.
	And of course, and I think that's been banned.
	I think triclosan in the U.S. has been banned because they're finding that it was getting washed into the sewage system, which ultimately goes into rivers.
	And this is a molecule, this is a drug that will escape the sewage treatment plant, you know, where water gets turned from sewage into nice clean water again.
	And once this triclosan was getting out into the environment, it was doing things, you know, and this is what I've read and this is what I understand, of course.
	Could be all hyperbole on the part of the EPA, so I have to doubt this.
	I have to take this with a grain of salt.
	But it's apparently killing fish and killing wildlife, so they banned this stuff.
	So to answer the question, I guess anything is possible, but the way these hand sanitizers work...
	Soap is great at disrupting fatty things because soap undergoes a process called saponification and it literally disrupts cell membranes that have a lot of fat in them.
	So soap is great at getting rid of bacteria, but the largest The biggest mechanism by which you wash bugs off of you is by washing them off of you.
	I mean, when you wash your hands, it's not a simple question of, you know, just...
	You really want to scrub your hands.
	There's a great video by a British physician, John Campbell, I think his name is.
	He's on YouTube. And he undergoes...
	He literally shows you how to wash your hands and scrub the fingers like this, get your thumbs and things like that.
	Wonderful accent he has.
	But I watched that video and I'm like...
	Shit, I just learned a few things.
	I've washed my hands for, oh gosh, years.
	And also, viruses are shrouded in this fact, and that disrupts the whole thing.
	Correct. So soap is known to destroy coronavirus.
	Now, hand sanitizers work much the same way.
	Any of these things disrupt cell membranes.
	They disrupt viral envelopes, capsid envelopes, which are the containers that viruses are in.
	So I would say do it.
	The risk is definitely...
	Outweighed by the potential benefit that you get.
	So I definitely, I don't think it's a concern for the environment.
	Have you had any thoughts, Kevin, about the wide disparity in outcomes between different countries such as Korea versus Italy versus France, Canada, the US and so on?
	Well, of course, the disease is the disease, right?
	The treatment is the difference.
	How do we treat these people?
	And I think In South Korea, you know, and a big part of this outcome has to do with shutting down borders, getting serious about keeping illness out.
	You know, Russia, I understand, has had very few cases because they literally closed their borders.
	I've been across the Soviet Union's border between the Soviet Union and Finland one time.
	It was kind of a scary process.
	I'll tell you all about it sometime later.
	I actually had to go across there twice.
	But yeah, when they close the borders and keep the disease out, that's a big factor.
	But it all depends on the healthcare system that you have in place as well.
	And in Italy, I want to address this.
	My understanding is that in Italy, lots of people died.
	And I think, if I'm reading it correctly, the reason that a lot of these people died is because, well, number one, they didn't have enough equipment, but they were also apparently making the decision that I can see Father Guido Sarducci making this pronouncement at bedside that, you know, who's going to live and who's going to die.
	I think they came down to that.
	And so when you do that, when you arbitrarily start withholding treatment, people are going to die who wouldn't otherwise die.
	So that's why I think a lot of the disparity is.
	And in the U.S., let's face it, man, we got the greatest healthcare system in the world, as I've said time and again.
	In the U.S., we got the best going on in the world right here, baby.
	The only problem is how we buy it, how we sell it, and how we pay for it.
	But that's for another talk. All right.
	Okay. So I wanted to bring something up here, which is I'm going to anonymize the heck out of this for some fairly obvious reasons.
	But this is the kind of stuff that I'm getting from people.
	In hospitals.
	And it is, well, a smidge alarming when it comes to preparedness.
	And let's see here.
	Okay, so this is a fellow.
	I'm a RRT, which is a registered respiratory therapist.
	So he's the one who intubates patients and manages the ventilator.
	He's done this for a long, long time.
	And he's shocked at my hospital's isolation procedures for COVID. I talked to my boss before, and they said, oh, all of the steps the hospital has taken.
	So what do you need? You need designated areas.
	You need negative areas. Pressure rooms.
	Now, I think I understand this.
	Correct me if I'm wrong. You obviously know better, but if you've got a balloon with holes and you blow into it, then it's going to blow out all the stuff through the sides of the holes of the balloon, right?
	So a negative pressure room means that you've got to have lower air pressure in the room than outside so that air comes in rather than being pushed out.
	And PPE, which is personal protective equipment and so on.
	He says Wuhan Corona is a highly infectious airborne virus.
	Airborne isolation procedures have been well established, I guess, particularly since SARS and all of that.
	So he's cared for patients to rule out tuberculosis, which is also airborne.
	Airborne ISO requires a negative pressure room, an N95 or PAPR.
	Do you know what that is?
	No. Some personal apparatus for protection from, I don't know, regicide I'm going to go with.
	Gowns, gloves, eye protection and so on.
	My hospital was using surgical masks, basically a placebo for airborne virus.
	Droplet isolation is very different from airborne.
	Pushing patients with suspected or possible COVID in public hallways.
	riddling public elevators with two registered nurses in surgical masks pushing a bed with a COVID patient spreading it all over the hospital.
	He said, I had ICU that night.
	My coworker had ER, the ICU intensive care unit, ER emergency room, of course.
	They were getting calls to give breathing treatments to those patients.
	No N95 mask.
	Oh, did I mention, you must be yearly fit tested for the N95.
	I want to address that.
	but go ahead. Yeah, yeah.
	That's the big Darth Vader mask, right?
	No, no. Go ahead.
	If you have a beard or the mask doesn't fit tight enough, you fail the fit test and must wear PAPR for airborne ISO. Oh, I see.
	Nobody in the hospital had even been fit tested.
	Sorry, all caps, but this was maddening to me.
	So much I could tell you about this.
	I haven't been back left a while ago.
	Still today, they're not doing proper airborne ISO, even though it is a well-known and established procedure.
	They also say MRSA and C.
	diff ISO don't need gloves now.
	Did these diseases become less contagious or infectious at the same time corona hit?
	I think you know the answer. The mess has me so upset.
	I'm so mad at my hospital, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and so many other people.
	I really want to let people know what is happening so something will change.
	All the staff will get sick at the same time the population gets sick.
	It's going to be worse than you can imagine.
	I just want to scream.
	I hope you see this. Thanks. Love your show.
	And then this is the man and or woman who has mentioned that.
	And I just wanted to mention one other thing, and I'll turn it back over to you.
	He said, there's a point every moment is missing.
	This is what I mentioned earlier.
	They can have 100,000 ventilators, but unless you have an additional 20,000 to 25,000 more registered respiratory therapists to manage the patient on them, they're pointless.
	These people go into ARDS. I think that's acute respiratory distress syndrome, I'm going to assume.
	They are incredibly difficult to oxygenate and ventilate.
	They need to be paralyzed and heavily sedated.
	Yeah, the nurse mentioned that, that paralysis helps, of course, take down the amount of oxygen their muscles need.
	Because of the bed settings needed to oxygenate, they need inverse ratio, pressure control, highly phi-02, high peep.
	They are prone face down, their eyes bulge out from the pressure, men's scrotums swell.
	Hey, we're back there. Very difficult to manage.
	Just having one of these patients along with a normal assignment means I'm probably not getting a lunch or peeing until I get home after my shift.
	My hospital has a total of about 40 ventilators available to use.
	We only have four to five registered respiratory therapists.
	Not all are even capable of managing patients on these settings.
	So that would be 10 of these patients per RRT. Impossible.
	Patients in this condition are also one-on-one for an experienced ICU registered nurse.
	This will be a major problem.
	And add that the isolation for use is subpar.
	This will not go well. Thank you again.
	So he just wanted to get this information.
	Now, I'm not trying to shoehorn it in here, but it's not just about the machinery.
	I mean, as I said before, you know, it's not much point having planes if you haven't got any pilots.
	Yes, that's absolutely true.
	And everything he said, if it's he, everything that person said, I totally agree with.
	I have a joke that I've put out.
	What do you call 500 hospital administrators learning how to empty bedpans?
	Hopeless. Because they just can't be, you know, they have no idea, they have no clue.
	Nevertheless, how to handle a healthcare emergency.
	Hospitals are coping the best they can.
	I'm not making an excuse for that, but this is territory where we've never been.
	It's territory. It's totally new for everybody.
	I'm as shocked as anybody is at the steps that are being undertaken.
	Mistakes are going to get made. And that's not a cop-out.
	That's not an excuse. Like I said, if there's anything, I'm an optimist, so I try to look at the positive of things.
	Maybe this will be a great test run to see for when the big one really hits and we really have something that is truly deadly, like Ebola, you know, that will melt you from the inside out.
	Not something that kills, you know, less than 1% of those it infects.
	So this is a wake-up call as to what really is going on, what really needs to happen.
	And our healthcare system needs to be boosted at every conceivable level.
	Politicians need to get out of it.
	They need to stop mucking around with it and let us do what we need to do and give us the support we need, not just money, but the support and regulations.
	I have a hashtag on Twitter, Don't Stop Repealing, like the Journey song, Don't Stop Repealing.
	Oh no, now that's going to be stuck in my head.
	That song is the real virus I just wanted to mention.
	Well, they need to repeal many, many, many laws and regulations.
	The HMO Act of 1973, HIPAA, ERISA, all these laws that were put in place that are just terrible, terrible.
	Terrible, terrible for healthcare and the proper practice of healthcare.
	Anyway, as long as I'm adding to my wish list.
	I wanted to say that this, again, illustrates how complicated these ventilators are.
	He mentioned FiO2, which is how much oxygen you're putting into someone, and the inverse ratios.
	These things are not just hooking up a bellows, you know, to some dude, to squeeze box, a rusty old squeeze box, pushing it together.
	These ventilators are very complicated.
	They're complicated machinery, and in fact, they're so complicated, Steph.
	I don't run them. I turn to the RT. I go, what do you think?
	And they DM me what they want to do.
	And I say, great, let's go with that.
	And then we fine tune it. I just wanted to point out how enjoyable it is that we've talked about the who and squeeze boxes.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	There's an ancient guy joke of music, but sorry, go ahead.
	So, you know, I mean, we tailor, we tweak the ventilator based upon how the patient's doing.
	That's another thing is that you have to watch those minute by minute, hour by hour to see how things are going.
	Yeah, there was something else I was going to say in there.
	But, you know, you can't plan for an emergency.
	I mean, you cannot adequately schedule for that which you cannot foresee.
	It just is impossible. Well, and the annoying thing is, though, this was kind of foreseeable.
	Right. But the thing is, because we have a fairly low-educated population, what happens is, if you say there's going to be a disaster and you act to remediate it, and then the disaster doesn't happen because you remediate it, everyone says, hey, man...
	There was nothing, you know, there was nothing, right?
	You know, jump out of the way, a car's going to hit you, and you jump out of the way.
	Hey man, the car didn't even hit me.
	Why did I have to jump? It's like, I don't know, it's just one of these kinds of things that, okay, so let's close it off here, because it looks like the chat is devolving into a certain amount of jokes that I can't repeat here on air, which actually can be kind of funny, but anyway.
	Let's talk about them later. So one comment, and then a little speech, then tell me what your sort of closing thoughts are.
	So the first is that here's an example of just how delicate this whole healthcare system is.
	So there's something that came out of the Canadian media today, where they said, whatever you do, don't leave the cities to go to your cottage to wait out the quarantine.
	Except for Trudeau.
	Except for Trudeau's family, of course.
	The first thing they do, oh good, now we're going to go out to the cottage and wait out the quarantine.
	And the reason for that is that everybody plans.
	The amount of spreadsheets and data analysis that goes into trying to provide healthcare is really complex.
	So these communities, they're dead in the winter and they're crazy busy in the summer, like 20 or 30 times the population.
	So of course in the winter, in March or whatever, nobody's really thinking, or April, nobody's really thinking that much of going up to the cottage, at least not in big numbers.
	So, you know, if you get hundreds of thousands of people pouring out of the cities and going to their cottages, not only do the hospitals not have enough resources to deal with, even if there's nothing in particular, just the increased requirements of those extra people in the winter where they don't have people, But even things like the grocery stores aren't going to be prepared.
	I mean, they can obviously gear up maybe fairly quickly, but with everything kind of half shut down, it's a little bit tricky.
	So this is how finely calibrated things are.
	And this kind of monkey wrench, we should have a little bit more give in these kinds of systems.
	And I wanted to bring you on here, A, because I respect your opinion, of course, enormously, and B, because I did want to provide some counter to some of the people who are kind of alarming in what it is that they say.
	Right.
	I'm like, pretend it's a disaster.
	Pretend it's a disaster.
	Pretend it's as bad as people say.
	What's the worst that can happen?
	It's like prepping.
	If you have a bunch of food in the basement, well, you're going to eat it sooner or later, and it's way better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
	I say that all the time to people.
	If you're a prepper and you've got stuff around, you get to eat your mistakes, but if you don't have that stuff, what are you going to eat?
	You regret? So, you know, to me, I am an optimist in the long run, but I'm definitely a pessimist in the short run in that I'm going to go with the worst-case scenario here because, well, it's a northern European trait to be afraid of winter, and it really does seem like winter is coming.
	But I will certainly give you the final thoughts on attitudes and what people should be doing.
	Well, let me say this.
	I should have said this earlier.
	As an emergency physician, we are taught how to triage cases.
	Let's say that I drive up and there's a plane crash.
	And I get out of my car and run over to the area where people are lying around.
	We are taught to triage people based upon their chances of survival.
	And this is much like what happened in Italy.
	I would imagine that if it's clear that someone's beyond the pale, I mean, if they have a non-survivable injury, you skip them and you move on to the next person and you're just rapidly assessing.
	That being said, the reason I bring that up is once again to illustrate the point that you cannot take care of all those people.
	You just can't. I mean, any system in the world is going to get overloaded.
	Look at toilet paper, of all things.
	Well, I don't know, but look at toilet paper.
	People... We went, pun intended, batshit crazy and started buying all this toilet paper.
	And now there's no toilet paper on aisles around stores around town.
	It's crazy. And the toilet paper manufacturers are going, well, how do we plan for this?
	You can't. I mean, those shelves were all full of toilet paper the night before, I guarantee you.
	Now there's been a mass run on it, boom, it's all gone.
	So I don't think we can ever adequately plan for these things, and the response is always going to be bad.
	When the problem is bad, the response is always going to be bad because we just can never plan for this.
	So what can you do as an individual at an individual level if there's one, again, share your optimism long term, If there's another good thing that will come out of this is that hopefully people will start having a newfound respect for these viral contagious illnesses, namely the flu.
	I know that you and I talked about it and it's like, man, I highly recommend people get vaccinated against the flu every year.
	I got vaccinated against the flu back in September.
	A month ago, right now, four weeks ago, I was laid low with the flu.
	So it's not 100%.
	I like to say neither are bulletproof vests.
	And yet, I don't know a police officer worth his or her weight in salt that would not go out without a bulletproof vest on when they're on duty.
	So, you know, these are things that we can do to protect ourselves against known variables that are out there lurking, waiting to kill you.
	Namely, influenza virus.
	So if anything, hopefully, I don't think social distancing is a bad idea at all.
	Not all the time.
	But if you see someone coughing or sneezing in a grocery store, beforehand, you would have just walked right past them, followed them with your shopping cart behind them down the bread aisle and not a worry in your mind.
	Now maybe you will say, hey, that guy's coughing.
	I'm going to go over to the Kool-Aid section now and then I'll be back for the bread.
	Let that stuff die down out of the air or whatever.
	And so if anything comes out of this good, it's hopefully a heightened awareness of just how contagious, just how deadly these things can be and how common they are.
	They're out there. So if you can take steps, good hand washing, good hygiene, social distancing, you know, maintaining a healthy respect for that and not touching your face, which I've touched my face several times throughout this program.
	You know, if you can do those things, a heightened awareness out of it, then hopefully we'll see some bump in survival regarding influenza and other common ailments.
	Yeah, and hopefully people will remember that obesity isn't something that could cause you trouble years down the road, but it's something that, depending on what happens in the immediate environment, could cause you problems.
	Lose weight, folks. Lose weight, for sure.
	I also wanted to thank everyone who was pointing out that Kevin appears to have the same outfit as somebody who has a red vest in Star Trek, so it is actually completely remarkable that he made it to the end of the movie.
	The alien tentacle is supposed to yank him off the screen way before this, so...
	Well, thanks everyone for, I guess, you know, people aren't going to watch this.
	They're just going to watch the chat replay because it was actually pretty funny.
	But yeah, thanks Dr.
	Wacchese. Really, really appreciate it.
	Could you just give people your vital statistics on the web to make sure they can get a hold of your excellent material?
	Sure. I have a blog, healthcareonomics.com.
	It's healthcareonomics.com.
	The link will be below, I'm sure. I've written a couple of books.
	The Guide to Buying Health Insurance and Healthcare is the first one.
	It helps you save money on health insurance and healthcare.
	You can also look at my second book.
	It is called Healthcareonomics, The A Thousand Crazy Ways the American Health Insurance Industry Has Taken Over American Healthcare.
	I have an app that we're just revising.
	It should be released this week.
	Once Apple approves it, we're going to get the Android version out.
	It's called Dr. W's Equation.
	It will help you save money on your health insurance plans.
	And, of course, I'm on social media.
	I'm on Twitter. I'm on Parlay or Parler.
	And I'm on Gab. You can look me up under Healthcareonomics on all of those.
	And I have a YouTube channel, Healthcareonomics, as well.
	We'll put links to those below.
	And I can, of course, completely guarantee, based upon the content of this conversation, that Dr.
	Wacase's app will be entirely virus-free.
	All right. Thanks so much, man.
	Really, really appreciate it. We'll talk again soon.
	Thank you, sir. Have yourself a great evening.

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