Ben Shapiro is back on The Ben Shapiro Show! Today, Ben talks about the return of the stock market, the coronavirus update, and why it might be a good time to diversify into precious metals. Ben also discusses the possibility of the Fed reopening the economy, and what that means for the economy and the Dow and S&P 500. Ben is joined by a special guest, Dr. Faucette Fauci, who is a cardiologist who has treated over 22,000 people with the deadly virus Coronavirus, which has ravaged the U.S. healthcare system for the past week and a half. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Podcast! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download our newest free epsiode. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN. Protect Your Online Privacy today at ProtectYourData.Vpn.com Ben Shapiro is a long-time contributor to the Financial Times and has written for The Financial Times, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast, and is the author of The Weekly Standard. The Daily Mail, The Hill, The Globe and Mail, and many other publications. His newest book is out now. Watch this video on how to protect your privacy online and keep your money safe. Learn more about your ad choices and get free financial tips and access to the best deals on the internet, wherever you get them. Enjoysays and get the best deal on the most affordable rates in the cheapest possible. Click here to get the most amazing deals and best deals in the world. Today's ad-free version of the latest episode of the podcast? Subscribe and subscribe to our newest episode is on the best vidsures and get 20% off of the show on the webcast FREE Training and more! Watch us on Audible Subscribe for exclusive discount codes to get 10% off the latest deals on our best deals and the most lucrative deals, including VIP access to our ad-only deal, the most personalized rates, the ultimate deal in the whole world, the world s best deal, and more. FREE FUTURE RATE AND MORE! FREE SUBSCRIBE TO BUY THE MOST AMAZING LINKED HERE!
00:00:00.000As local officials exercise their power over minute infractions, Europe examines ways to reopen, debate breaks out in the United States over how to reopen and when, and the New York Times faults President Trump for his coronavirus response while letting Joe Biden off the hook for an allegation of sexual assault.
00:01:46.000Text BEN to 474747 today to see how simple and straightforward the move is.
00:01:51.000Birch Gold, they're the people I trust with precious metals investing.
00:01:54.000You should call them right now, ask them all your questions, and find out why again.
00:01:58.000Text my name, Ben, to 474747 right now.
00:02:02.000Okay, so here is your coronavirus update.
00:02:06.000I've been off for a few days thanks to Passover, which frankly was nice because one of the big problems with Twitter is that you're checking every five minutes to see if they have developed a vaccine.
00:02:13.000And in fact, they have not developed a vaccine, nor have they developed any reliable treatments for coronavirus.
00:02:18.000And so basically you're just spinning your wheels 24 hours a day, which is why disconnecting is actually kind of a good thing.
00:02:23.000I hope that people did that A little bit over the beginning of Passover and did that also over Easter.
00:02:28.000Right now in the United States we've seen approximately 22,000 total deaths.
00:03:19.000Stay home, make sure that you are not going out, and make sure that if you are going out, you're socially distancing.
00:03:24.000Masks are probably a good idea, right?
00:03:26.000Here in Los Angeles, they now have rules that if you go into a grocery store or an enclosed area, you have to be wearing a mask.
00:03:31.000They shut down pretty much every park in LA yesterday, which frankly seems to me like overkill.
00:03:36.000You actually want people outside I've been all in on the measures that have been recommended by Dr. Fauci and by Dr. Birx in terms of the social distancing, but I've been saying all along that the big question here is going to be what happens when we are all released from our home confinement, because that's what this is.
00:03:58.000What's going to happen when we go back out there?
00:04:01.000What's the plan for us not to reinfect each other?
00:04:03.000How exactly do you plan for something like that when for the first week of having coronavirus apparently it is asymptomatic or at least not obviously symptomatic to people who are outside?
00:04:12.000What happens when you have a slight cough that doesn't feel like coronavirus and you're being told that you're supposed to lock down for 14 days in the allergy season?
00:04:21.000How are we supposed to work in economy?
00:04:23.000Which is going to lose 40% of GDP, according to JP Morgan, just this quarter.
00:04:28.000How are we supposed to get back into an economy when we don't know whether a second wave is going to break out or even what a second wave looks like at this point?
00:04:35.000And so the only information that we have so far is looking to foreign countries and trying to see how they are doing it.
00:04:41.000And the answer is that they are handling it in a variety of ways, and it is not clear which way is going to be the best.
00:04:45.000So in Italy, actually, they are still extending their business lockdown despite pressure.
00:04:49.000According to the Agence France-Presse, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Friday refused to bow to business pressure and extended the Mediterranean country's economically crippling lockdown until May 3rd.
00:04:59.000Conte made the announcement after Italy's official COVID-19 toll climbed by another 570 fatalities to 18,849, more than any other country, but with the growth rate now just a fraction of what it was a few weeks ago.
00:05:11.000So they have successfully begun to flatten the curve.
00:05:14.000Media reports say business unions from regions responsible 445% of Italy's production and 80% of its coronavirus deaths had written to Conte warning that companies would be unable to pay wages if the shutdown runs on, but Conte said that Italy could not afford another spike in infections and needed to exercise caution in the face of new disease.
00:05:31.000There's been talk in China of a spike in cases again.
00:05:35.000Plus, there are new federal projections that show a huge spike in coronavirus infections in the summer in the United States if current lockdown and social distancing measures are lifted after the planned 30 days.
00:05:45.000According to the UK Daily Mail, new U.S.
00:05:47.000government figures show that a spike in coronavirus infections would occur in the summer if the current lockdown measures are lifted after 30 days as planned.
00:05:54.000That would be at the end of April, presumably.
00:05:57.000About 95% of the United States is currently on some form of lockdown after President Trump issued the guidelines calling for 30 days of measures to slow the spread of the virus.
00:06:05.000The government projections obtained by the New York Times indicate that lifting the strict social distancing measures now in place will see a second wave surge in infections and deaths in about June and July.
00:06:15.000If the current shelter-in-place orders are lifted on May 30th, the death toll is estimated to reach 200,000, according to the projections obtained from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.
00:06:25.000So far, the United States has seen only about 22,000 deaths, which is a lot of deaths in a short period of time.
00:06:31.000200,000 deaths by the end of the summer would obviously wildly exceed the numbers that are being put forth in, for example, that University of Washington study.
00:06:38.000which was downgraded to about 60,000 deaths if we all stay home through the end of May.
00:06:41.000The death toll could reach 300,000 without any restrictions imposed to contain coronavirus, including school closing, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing.
00:06:49.000So as I've been saying for a long time, we may have been simply buying time for the medical system to ramp up its ICU beds and its ventilators to the point where at least you will have an ICU bed and a ventilator if you need one, but we can't actually save you.
00:07:03.000We bought ourselves a few weeks time in order to develop some treatments.
00:07:06.000We bought a few weeks time toward a vaccine, but there's a lot of talk about the idea that the vaccine is still not going to be developed for 12 to 18 months, which means that what are we going to do?
00:07:28.000He said he thinks the United States will lose fewer than the 100,000 lives initially projected to be lost to coronavirus, suggested the country is nearing its peak infection rate.
00:07:36.000But you've heard Dr. Fauci say things like, well, maybe we'll reopen the schools in fall.
00:07:41.000I have no idea how you are going to reopen the schools in fall if this thing is still around and then not reinfect everybody.
00:07:46.000OK, I have three kids who are under the age of seven.
00:07:49.000My six-year-old and my soon-to-be four-year-old, if they go back to school, they're going to reinfect each other.
00:07:53.000That's just the way this is going to work.
00:07:57.000Grandma and grandpa will have to stay home, presumably for the duration, or grandma and grandpa run a significant likelihood of being infected.
00:08:04.000Schools will become a wellspring for this sort of stuff, unless you end up with a strategy that maybe we should have attacked in the first place.
00:08:11.000Which would have been to keep the most old and most vulnerable home and let everybody else go back to work, including social distancing and masks.
00:08:16.000Maybe that should have been the program from the very beginning, because that looks, in all likelihood, like what's going to have to happen here over the course of time.
00:08:24.000Now, there are certain ways that we can alleviate some of those burdens.
00:08:28.000There's been talk about widespread testing that would allow people to go back to factories and social distancing measures and apps that will allow us to warn people if somebody is infected with coronavirus and lock things down in hotspots.
00:08:40.000But that doesn't solve the problem for people who are most vulnerable.
00:08:42.000It doesn't solve the problem for people who are elderly.
00:08:44.000It doesn't solve the problem for people who have pre-existing conditions.
00:08:47.000Dr. Fauci warned that if the United States prematurely end social distancing measures, they're right back in the same situation.
00:08:54.000So that second wave that apparently only I was talking about, or very few people were talking about, is very much real.
00:08:59.000And this is what drove me nuts throughout the entire conversation.
00:09:02.000People were saying, okay, we got a lockdown, we got a lockdown, we got a lockdown, and they weren't being clear with the American public what exactly we were attempting to do.
00:09:07.000If the idea was we were locking down just so we can ramp up our medical resources, then okay, our medical resources are now ramped up.
00:09:13.000There is no, really, there are no forewarnings that the United States medical system is going to be overrun at this point.
00:09:19.000In New York, the medical system was not, in fact, overrun.
00:09:21.000I mean, Governor Cuomo said this last week.
00:09:29.000Or at least if they were, it was in rare circumstances where there were holdups in the supply chain.
00:09:33.000We'll get to more of this in a second, because there are no easy decisions to be made here, and I'm getting kind of sick of people who are pro-shutdown, suggesting the easy decision is just to lock things down indefinitely, and people who are anti-shutdown, suggesting that the easy decision is just to go back to everything as normal.
00:09:46.000Because I don't think that's right, and I think there are costs and benefits on each side, and I don't think this is easy in any way.
00:09:52.000And anybody who's telling you it's easy is lying to you.
00:09:54.000Anybody who's telling you this is an easy calculation is not looking what's happening in other parts of the world.
00:09:58.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:10:00.000First, let's talk about the fact that there are things that we each look back on and we think, how could I possibly have gotten it so wrong?
00:10:06.000Like, for example, over Passover, you just eat tons of matzo without any foresight as to how this is going to affect your digestive system.
00:10:12.000Well, perhaps there are many things in life you've gotten wrong, but One thing you can't afford to get wrong is your life insurance.
00:10:19.000You need to get your life insurance right.
00:10:21.000Shop for life insurance at PolicyGenius.
00:10:22.000PolicyGenius makes finding the right life insurance a breeze.
00:10:25.000In minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers and find your best price.
00:10:28.000You could save $1,500 or more a year by using PolicyGenius to compare life insurance policies.
00:10:32.000Once you apply, the Policy Genius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape for free.
00:10:36.000And Policy Genius doesn't just make life insurance easy.
00:10:39.000They can also help you find the right home and auto insurance or disability insurance.
00:10:42.000Like, if you're a responsible human being, you want to make sure that your family is taken care of in case, God forbid, something should happen to you.
00:10:47.000Life insurance policies are a really good idea all the time, and they are especially a good idea right now.
00:10:51.000Go check out policygenius.com right now.
00:11:10.000Well, a bunch of different sort of measures being taken by different countries.
00:11:14.000So Italy is still locked down because Italy was hardest hit and that is where they're most afraid that the medical system continues to be very fragile and possibly overrun.
00:11:22.000Meanwhile, CNN reports people in the Czech Republic can now shop at hardware and bicycle stores, play tennis and go swimming.
00:11:27.000Austria plans to reopen smaller shops after Easter.
00:11:30.000Denmark will reopen kindergartens and schools from next week if coronavirus cases remain stable.
00:11:34.000Children in Norway will return to kindergarten a week later.
00:11:37.000These nations are the first in the West to start feeling their way gradually out of the limits on daily life imposed by governments to curb the spread of coronavirus.
00:11:44.000For professional athlete Irina Gelorova from the Czech Republic, the easing of restrictions Thursday meant she could return to training at the Juliska Stadium in Prague for the first time since her country lockdown.
00:11:56.000Dr. Peter Drobak, a global health expert at Oxford Saïd Business School, told CNN, countries now easing their restrictions are important and hopeful examples for the West, but any loosening of limits will carry risk.
00:12:05.000WHO Regional Director of Europe Dr. Hans Klug warned this week that the situation in Europe is still very concerning and insisted now is not the time to relax measures.
00:12:16.000So it is unclear exactly how far the relaxation measures are going to go.
00:12:23.000According to Drobac, who is one of the commentators on this particular issue, that global health expert at Oxford Saïd Business School, he said the countries preparing to ease restrictions had something in common.
00:12:35.000They were among the first in Europe to implement lockdowns or severe social distancing measures and had rapidly scaled up coronavirus testing.
00:12:42.000He said that the plans to relax restrictions look reasonable and they look smart.
00:13:37.000They closed schools, cafes, and shops, as well as banning gatherings of more than 10 people and visits to the hospital.
00:13:42.000In Czech Republic, they moved swiftly to impose restrictions on travel, ban large events, and close non-essential businesses after declaring a state of emergency on March 12th.
00:13:50.000Also, they required their 11 million people to cover their faces with masks or scarves when outside the home from March 19th.
00:13:57.000Since Tuesday, people have been allowed to exercise alone without face masks.
00:14:00.000Shops such as construction and hardware stores, bicycle stores, bicycle repair centers are allowed to reopen from Thursday.
00:14:05.000Bikes are big, obviously, in the Czech Republic.
00:14:07.000Outdoor facilities for individual sports are reopening, but only to some extent.
00:14:11.000No more than two people can be in the same space.
00:14:12.000They can't use the showers or the lockers.
00:14:15.000And essential travel outside the Czech Republic will be allowed from April 14th alone.
00:14:20.000In Austria, they are also attempting a step-by-step approach.
00:14:24.000Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced this week the country is preparing for a resurrection after Easter, reopening some smaller shops, hardware, and garden stores from April 14th.
00:14:32.000They are requiring people to wear face masks to supermarkets and on public transportation from May 1st.
00:14:37.000All shops, shopping centers, and hairdressers will open.
00:14:39.000Meanwhile, restaurants and hotels will open from mid-May at the earliest in a gradual process.
00:14:44.000And he said that the The situation is not yet over, citing Singapore, because Singapore has seen a second wave of cases.
00:14:50.000In Norway, Norway is prioritizing reopening of schools.
00:14:53.000They're going to scale back their lockdown measures from April 20th.
00:14:56.000They're going to reopen kindergartens.
00:14:58.000The government believes the latest stats provide the basis for cautious optimism.
00:15:01.000Right now, there've only been 92 deaths in Norway.
00:15:04.000Germany is also attempting some new measures.
00:15:06.000And then what's really fascinating is that the world's largest scale counter example of all of this is Sweden.
00:15:13.000So there was a lot of talk early on about Sweden taking a very different model than everybody else.
00:15:18.000Sweden looking at the way everybody else was locking down and saying, okay, guys, you're locking down.
00:15:24.000What if we just kind of let everybody go about their business and then we told everybody who was old and everybody who had pre-existing conditions to stay home?
00:15:30.000Sweden took some measures, but not total measures.
00:15:34.000Like in restaurants, you just weren't supposed to eat at the counter.
00:15:36.000You were now supposed to eat at socially distanced tables, for example.
00:16:36.000Okay, so it'll be interesting to see over the course of the year whether Sweden ends up having done the right thing or whether they have done the wrong thing.
00:16:43.000So, all of this has ramifications for the United States because how exactly are we going to reopen?
00:16:50.000And as I'm going to discuss in just a moment, the answer is going to be data, data, and more data.
00:16:55.000Okay, while everybody is trying to kick the can down the road, when the data starts to roll in, it's time to make some tough decisions.
00:17:00.000And I'm sick of hearing that the decisions are not tough, that they're easy, and that anybody who suggests gradual reopening, or even serious reopening, is poo-pooing death, or that anybody who is calling for shutdowns is poo-pooing the economy.
00:17:13.000I don't think that's true, at least for the people who are in the decision-making positions.
00:17:16.000I think that's very true in the commentariat.
00:17:18.000I think in the commentariat, there are a group of people who basically have a stake in suggesting that anyone who says the word economy wants people to die, and a group of people who have a stake in the suggestion that anybody who says the word shutdown wants people to be unemployed.
00:17:29.000And the answer is we're going to have to draw a middle line here because there will come a point here where the costs do outweigh the benefits.
00:17:35.000President Trump is not wrong about that.
00:17:36.000That's what public policymaking is all about.
00:17:38.000And to pretend that even discussing the public policy is some sort of verboten sin is disgusting, frankly.
00:17:43.000This is the biggest public policy decision that not only Trump is ever going to have to make, but pretty much anybody's going to ever have to make.
00:17:49.000To pretend that there are no sort of stakes on either side is idiocy of the highest order.
00:17:54.000We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
00:17:56.000First, let's talk about now being a very, very good time to take care of your mind and body.
00:18:00.000So, I know, it's so tempting in the middle of this whole thing to sit home and just eat ice cream.
00:18:07.000Like, right now, you're like, okay, I can't go to the gym.
00:18:09.000It's hard to work out outdoors because now I gotta wear a mask.
00:18:12.000Like, what the hell am I supposed to do?
00:18:14.000I'm just gonna sit here and I need comfort food and I'm gonna watch old episodes of Friends.
00:18:17.000Well, now actually is a good time if you can do it.
00:18:20.000It's a great time to make your mood better.
00:18:22.000It's a great time to make your body better.
00:18:24.000It's a great time to actually improve your health.
00:18:26.000And it's actually really important because if you actually fall down the well of, I'm going to watch old episodes of Friends all day and eat ice cream and do nothing but that.
00:18:33.000Not only will you be disappointed with yourself on the other end, you're more likely to be depressed in the here and now.
00:18:38.000Noom is the habit-changing solution that helps users learn to develop a new relationship with food through personalized courses.
00:18:44.000You can also connect to other Noom users and build a healthy community.
00:18:47.000Based in psychology, Noom teaches you why you do the things you do, empowers you with the tools you need to break bad habits and replace them with better ones.
00:18:53.000Now's the time when a lot of your good habits are being broken.
00:18:55.000Instead, why not break those bad habits and create new good habits?
00:18:58.000Noom has one of the biggest, most accurate food databases available, lets you track meal habits, visualize portion sizes, see calorie density at a glance.
00:19:05.000Everybody is strapped for time and oddly feels like you have no time, even though like literally nothing is going on in the world.
00:19:10.000Noom just asks you to commit 10 minutes a day to taking care of yourself.
00:19:37.000Okay, so the reason this is becoming increasingly urgent also is because whenever you have massive government interventions like this, petty tyrants feel the necessity to go overboard.
00:19:48.000It's really an unfortunate thing, but petty tyrants feel the necessity to go completely crazy.
00:19:53.000So over in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who was briefly considered a possible VP candidate for Joe Biden, she's basically been shutting down everything in the world.
00:20:04.000According to the Detroit News, Bob King, 62, is a little bored these days.
00:20:07.000That's because his business, B&R Lawn Care in Ferndale, has been shuttered since Governor Gretchen Whitmer's first stay-at-home order last month.
00:20:25.000King, like hundreds of other small business owners around Michigan, had been hoping the governor would ease some restrictions on business operations in the latest iteration of her executive order, especially for jobs done largely outdoors that inherently comply with social distancing.
00:20:37.000He says, if I'm working outside, I'm not working next to somebody, I'm working, like, on one side of the lawn, and this is true.
00:20:42.000But Whitmer not only ignored common sense changes to her decree that goes through April 30th, she doubled down on her initial decree.
00:20:51.000So, instead of changing and allowing essential workers to include people who are, you know, mowing lawns, for example, instead, she just sort of, she just insisted, essentially, that everybody go home.
00:21:06.000To pretend that all non-essential activities are equivalently dangerous is absolute idiocy.
00:21:10.000She was also raked over the coals, Whitmer was, for part of the order that basically suggested that non-essential areas of stores like Target ought to be shut off.
00:21:18.000So instead of you just going to the Target and, hey, look, there's a toy section of Target.
00:21:21.000I'm going to bring a toy home to my kid.
00:21:23.000They actually shut off sections of those stores, including ones where you can buy baby seats.
00:21:26.000And Gretchen Whitmer was like, I'm not barring the sale of baby seats.
00:21:29.000No, you're just telling businesses that sell baby seats, as well as groceries, they have to shut off the baby seat section.
00:21:34.000I'm sorry, this whole thing is ridiculous.
00:21:38.000When I say the whole thing, I don't mean all shutdowns.
00:21:39.000I mean the whole attempt by governments to shut down obviously safe areas is insane.
00:21:46.000Again, I drove around LA yesterday, and number one, it's a ghost town.
00:21:50.000And number two, I mean, is there a reason why large public areas should not be open?
00:21:56.000Seriously, like people need to see the sun.
00:21:58.000If you want to create an impetus for people to get out of the house and just disobey government orders, I can't think of a better way to do it than shutting down every public park in California.
00:22:36.000I don't want them coughing on my parents.
00:22:38.000But it's not just restricted to blue states.
00:22:41.000Cops in Mississippi shut down a drive-in church service over the weekend held by Reverend James Hamilton of the King James Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi.
00:22:52.000Greenville Mayor Eric Simmons bans all in-person church services as part of the state's shelter-in-place order to stop the spread of coronavirus.
00:23:39.000For the same reason people are watching Trump's Trump's press conference, not because he's so popular, but because they want to have the information so they do not die.
00:23:45.000People are taking voluntarily the measures necessary so they do not die.
00:23:48.000Can we rely on the American people at least a little bit when it comes to matters of common sense?
00:23:54.000In just a second, we'll get to the new war that apparently is breaking out between President Trump and Anthony Fauci.
00:24:03.000And then we're going to talk a little bit about what preliminary steps would look like, like what exactly needs to happen here and what the data is.
00:24:10.000Because I think that by the end of the week, I'm optimistic that by the end of the week, we are going to have much more information, much more data to input into our decision-making model.
00:24:34.000The idea of civil unrest is not out of the realm of possibility as this thing continues for long periods of time and as people aren't getting their government checks and stuff.
00:24:41.000Beyond that, you've got local governments that are shutting down local jails and letting criminals out of jail because they don't want COVID spreading in jail.
00:24:49.000Once you've got crime rates that are going up, businesses being hit, I mean really, like it's really bad.
00:24:54.000Now would be a good time for you to exercise those Second Amendment rights.
00:24:57.000Started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago, Bravo Company Manufacturing builds a professional-grade product built to combat standards.
00:25:03.000That's because BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American Regardless if they're a private citizen or a professional.
00:25:10.000The people of BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life or death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas, so every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested to a life-saving standard.
00:25:22.000The people of BCM feel it is their moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail when it is not just a paper target.
00:25:28.000BCM also works with leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's Special Ops Forces, from Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to U.S.
00:25:36.000Army Special Ops Forces, Teaching you the skills necessary to defend yourself, your family, or others.
00:26:48.000We don't know any of the statistics that we need to know.
00:26:50.000And this makes a huge difference because remember that Imperial College model, this is the one that was used as sort of worst case scenario, lock it all down, suggested that over the course of the next year, 2.2 million Americans could die if we all do nothing.
00:27:01.000Or if we all just go out and no social distancing, no nothing.
00:27:04.000And then it said, okay, well, if you socially distance, then it won't be anything close to that.
00:27:08.000The Imperial College model was used as the basis for the Trump administration shutting things down.
00:27:13.000But that was based on certain assumptions about the level of infection in the population, as well as the level of death from that infection.
00:27:22.000They were using statistics from Italy and Wuhan in large part.
00:27:26.000And so the question becomes, okay, well, what if?
00:27:28.000What if this thing is more transmissible than the flu, but maybe twice as deadly as the flu, as opposed to 10 times as deadly as the flu?
00:27:36.000What are we going to do at that point?
00:27:38.000Is that a situation where we basically say to everybody who is in the least likely populations to be effective, go back to work?
00:27:44.000Because one thing that we do know is that the death rates for people who are young and healthy is significantly lower than people who are old and have pre-existing conditions.
00:27:50.000If you're above the age of 80, this thing is really bad.
00:27:52.000If you have pre-existing conditions, this thing is truly awful.
00:27:55.000Now, that doesn't mean there aren't outlying cases of young healthy people dying from it.
00:27:59.000One of the big questions about this thing is whether it is actually COVID that is driving the respiratory syndrome that leads to death or whether it's the immune response to COVID that's actually driving this.
00:28:08.000There are some scientific theories out there that suggest that it might be an immune response that is too strong and you get a I believe it's called a cytokine storm.
00:28:18.000You get a cytokine storm, a storm in which basically your body attacks itself effectively because the immune response is so strong to COVID.
00:28:30.000That might explain why there's such a differential response among different people because there's a biological response agent that is different in every single human being.
00:28:36.000Your immune system differs from person to person.
00:28:39.000Okay, with all of that said, We don't know a lot of that information, but that information I think this week is going to be forthcoming.
00:28:45.000There's some preliminary guesstimates that are sort of fascinating, and I want to get to those.
00:28:49.000According to Reason Magazine over the weekend, Preliminary results are out from a COVID-19 case cluster study in one of the regions worst hit by Germany's coronavirus epidemic, and they are, in fact, somewhat reassuring.
00:29:01.000One often heard statistic is the case fatality rate.
00:29:03.000This afternoon, that figure stands at 3.5% for COVID in the U.S., but that rate is really inflated, as I say, because it doesn't count asymptomatic cases or undiagnosed people who are recovering at home.
00:29:13.000Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80% of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they had been previously infected by the coronavirus.
00:29:21.000Around 15% had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37%.
00:29:29.000The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a little while.
00:29:36.000infection fatality rates from the 1957-1958 flu epidemic was about 0.27%.
00:29:41.000For the flu epidemic in 1918, it was about 2.6%.
00:29:45.000For seasonal flu, the rate typically averages around 0.1%.
00:29:49.000Basically, the German researchers found that the coronavirus kills about four times as many infected people than seasonal flu viruses do.
00:29:55.000So as I say, you would have a higher death rate than flu, but not an exponentially higher death rate or an order of magnitude higher death rate as people were originally suggesting.
00:30:05.000That doesn't mean a lot of people won't die.
00:30:06.000It also doesn't mean that some young people won't die.
00:30:09.000It does mean that we would have to think about different segments of the population very differently.
00:30:15.000Also, there's a study over the weekend that suggests that perhaps the COVID-19 deaths were actually hitting California in January and February.
00:30:26.000According to Dr. Jeff Smith, a physician who is the chief executive of the Santa Clara County government, he told county leaders in a recent briefing that there might have been a dramatic viral surge in February in California.
00:30:38.000He said that maybe COVID-19 was actually in California a lot longer than we first believed, maybe like back in December.
00:30:44.000He said symptoms are very much like the flu.
00:30:46.000If you got a mild case of COVID, you didn't really notice.
00:30:49.000The doctor maybe didn't even do it because they presumed it was the flu.
00:30:53.000So in January and in February, there was very little community testing.
00:30:55.000So one of the things we have to find out is how far this thing has gone in California.
00:30:59.000If it turns out that community infection is too far gone for us to do sort of hotspot testing at this point, that the lockdown will not prevent community reinfection because it's going to be hard to trace everybody and we're not going to get the systems out in place, then perhaps our best hope is that a lot of people out there Actually have this thing so we are closer to herd immunity than originally thought.
00:31:17.000Now I know herd immunity has become a dirty word except for Sweden where they're actually attempting to push it.
00:31:21.000In the UK they tried the herd immunity strategy and then they realized they were going to overrun their hospitals.
00:31:25.000But if our hospitals are not going to be overrun, and if the alternative is 18 months of a near shutdown, then people are going to have to start talking about whether that is plausible or not.
00:31:33.000Now we're not going to know that based on the data.
00:31:35.000We're not going to know that until the data is in.
00:31:38.000There's some studies that are supposed to come out later this week.
00:31:40.000I personally know scientists who are working on this right now.
00:31:43.000We're attempting to establish how many people have actually gotten this thing in California, in New York.
00:31:49.000Once we know the actual case fatality rate, then we as a society are going to have some decisions to make about how we deal with this.
00:31:54.000Let's say, for example, that the case fatality rate is 0.37% like it is in Germany.
00:31:59.000Let's say that that's the actual case fatality rate.
00:32:01.000And let's say that that's an average of all the people who are dying.
00:32:04.000But let's say that the real case fatality rate for people who are above the age of 80, the case fatality rate is 17% or 18%, which is what it sort of has been so far.
00:32:14.000Let's say that it is, let's say that basically everybody who gets it when they're 80 is identifying it.
00:32:18.000There are very few asymptomatic 80 year olds.
00:32:20.000Let's say that everybody who, let's say it's a 15% case fatality rate among 80 year olds.
00:32:25.000Let's say it's a 10% case fatality rate among 70 year olds.
00:32:28.000Let's say that it's a 3% case fatality rate among 60 year olds, and let's say that it's a 0.1% case fatality rate among people under 40.
00:32:42.000You know, gauge your own level of risk?
00:32:45.000That's a serious question, because again, huge industries are being shut down now.
00:32:48.000We're not just talking about local restaurants.
00:32:50.000We're talking about the entire airline industry.
00:32:52.000No one is getting into a canister in the sky with 200 strangers right now.
00:32:56.000The airline industry is going to be shut for the foreseeable future, and masks are not going to do a damn thing about it.
00:33:01.000And so, if you want to restart the economy at a certain point, these tough decisions are going to have to be made.
00:33:07.000Now, none of this is being forwarded by our acclaimed media, who have an interest in sort of the Not the hard questions, but the questions of the political ramifications.
00:33:18.000You know, how is this going to hurt Trump?
00:33:20.000And how is Trump handling all this stuff?
00:33:21.000If your lodestar is still Trump in the middle of all this, if Trump is the first thing that comes to mind in the middle of a pandemic, I think that you're doing being human and being an analyst wrong.
00:33:29.000That is not the way that you should be thinking about this stuff.
00:33:31.000And we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
00:33:33.000First, being locked inside right now requires double the excitement.
00:33:36.000And what could possibly be more exciting than, wait for it, Two leftist tears tumblers.
00:34:13.000You get an ad-free website experience, you get access to all of our live broadcasts, our show library, the full three hours of The Ben Shapiro Show, access to the mailbag, and now exclusive Election Insight op-eds from me.
00:34:22.000Daily Wire members also get to ask us questions during backstage.
00:34:24.000Our new All Access tier allows you to join in live online Q&As with me and the other hosts.
00:35:57.000The virus is not the one who's sitting in the White House.
00:35:59.000The virus is not The virus is a horrible, horrible thing that is happening right now.
00:36:05.000And we are going to have to deal with that and the other horrible thing that's happening right now, which is the destruction of tens of millions of American jobs and hundreds of thousands of American businesses.
00:36:13.000We are going to have to make those calls.
00:36:15.000And frankly, I think it's manifestly irresponsible for people to consistently go around saying things like, it's going to become eminently clear when we can reopen based on the virus.
00:36:47.000Once we have the data, then we can start making some tough calls about what is the best possible way for us to decide between risk to life, on the one hand, and risk to quality of life and freedom, which turns out is kind of an important thing in America.
00:37:00.000Like, I don't know about you, but I don't want to live like this for another 18 months.
00:37:04.000Anyway, here's Dr. Fauci suggesting the virus decides when we reopen.
00:37:08.000The virus kinda decides whether or not it's gonna be appropriate to open or not.
00:37:13.000What we're seeing right now are some favorable signs, as I've discussed with you a few times on this show.
00:37:19.000It's looking like that in many cases, particularly in New York, we're starting to see a flattening and a turning around.
00:37:25.000We would wanna see, I would wanna see, a clear indication that you are very, very clearly and strongly going in the right direction.
00:37:33.000Because the one thing you don't wanna do is you don't wanna get out there Prematurely, and then wind up your back back in the same situation.
00:37:43.000Right, of course nobody wants that, but that presumably is why you're ramping up the ICU beds, why you're ramping up the ventilators, why you're ramping up the treatments.
00:37:49.000And again, nobody has offered a path out of this that doesn't involve second wave infections, barring massive testing regimes.
00:37:55.000Like, I'm still confused about that particular policy, okay?
00:37:58.000Like, there's been a lot of talk about, we need massive testing, and then we need contact tracing.
00:38:28.000Or do we wait for the symptoms to crop up and once the symptoms crop up, then we go back and we trace every contact that you've had over the past two weeks?
00:38:34.000At which point, in places like New York, it's going to be a little bit too late.
00:38:37.000That may be possible in some smaller areas that are more spread out.
00:38:40.000That is not nearly possible in New York, as they've found out.
00:38:44.000Now Fauci, again, Fauci then adds to that, loosening restrictions can get us infected again.
00:39:13.000Right now, in places like New Orleans and in New York City, we're in mitigation.
00:39:18.000So, you know, I have confidence that with the help that we can do federally, from the federal government, to the fact that the states are really committed to doing it right.
00:39:28.000I think that combination, hopefully, is going to get us to where we want to be.
00:39:32.000Okay, where we want to be is the question.
00:39:35.000What does where we want to be look like?
00:39:36.000So Fauci finally is asked this question, and he says, well, I hope maybe next month the country can take some steps to reopen.
00:39:47.000I think it could probably start, at least in some ways, maybe next month.
00:39:51.000And again, Jake, it's so difficult to make those kinds of predictions because they always get thrown back at you if it doesn't happen.
00:39:58.000Not by you, but, you know, by any number of people.
00:40:01.000We are hoping that at the end of the month we could look around and say, OK, is there any element here that we can safely and cautiously start pulling back on?
00:41:14.000Okay, like, I took him to the doctor recently, and they asked him to wear a mask, and the first thing he did was he reached off and he pulled the mask, and I put it back on, he pulled it off, and I just put it on.
00:41:21.000You think you're gonna be able to deal with classrooms full of four-year-olds?
00:41:42.000And don't tell me the only way to help is just to stay home because I don't think that's right.
00:41:46.000You're asking people to give up their livelihoods for good.
00:41:49.000In order for you to not have any sort of plan, in order for you to not tell us how the formula works, here's Fauci saying that he hopes voters will be able to go to the polls in November.
00:41:59.000I believe that if we have a good, measured way of rolling into this steps towards normality, that we hope by the time we get to November, that we'll be able to do it in a way which is the standard way.
00:42:16.000However, and I don't want to be the pessimistic person, there is always a possibility as that as we get into next fall and the beginning of early winter that we could see a rebound.
00:43:08.000And Tapper says, OK, well, should we have locked this thing down earlier, like in February, like South Korea did?
00:43:14.000And Fauci says, I think it's kind of unfair to compare us to South Korea.
00:43:17.000Actually, that comparison doesn't hold.
00:43:18.000Here's Fauci attempting to defend the president.
00:43:20.000Now, the reason that I bring this up is because the headline yesterday was Fauci rips Trump.
00:43:23.000I'm going to show you the clips that people are talking about.
00:43:26.000Fauci is deliberately attempting to avoid ripping Trump.
00:43:29.000Because he knows that if he pisses off Trump, then Trump is just going to get pissed off and not listen to him.
00:43:34.000So here is Fauci trying to avoid ripping Trump.
00:43:36.000The media then printed the headline, Fauci rips Trump.
00:43:38.000And predictably enough, Trump then retweeted a call to fire Fauci because everything is idiotic and everyone's a moron.
00:43:43.000Here is Fauci being asked about South Korea and attempting to avoid the comparison.
00:43:48.000If you look, could you have done something a little bit earlier?
00:43:50.000It would have had an impact, obviously.
00:43:52.000But where we are right now is the result of a number of factors.
00:43:57.000The size of the country, the heterogeneity of the country.
00:43:59.000I think it's a little bit unfair to compare us to South Korea, where they had an outbreak in Daegu and they had the capability of immediately, essentially shutting it off completely in a way that we may not have been able to do in this country.
00:44:14.000So obviously I would have been nice if we had a better head start, but I don't think you could say that we are where we are right now because of one factor.
00:44:34.000And if you'd shut down the entire economy in December, then you would have saved a lot of lives, but that's not how political decisions get made.
00:44:39.000This was printed in the papers as Fauci ripping Trump.
00:44:42.000He's working so hard not to rip Trump here.
00:44:56.000It's the what would have, what could have.
00:44:58.000It's very difficult to go back and say that.
00:45:01.000I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.
00:45:10.000Obviously, no one is going to deny that.
00:45:12.000But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated.
00:45:16.000I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different.
00:45:22.000But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
00:45:27.000Okay, so that is him attempting to not rip Trump.
00:45:29.000The media prints, he rips Trump, and then Trump immediately tweets out how he wants to, he retweets somebody saying that Fauci should be fired.
00:45:36.000He said, somebody tweeted out, Deanna for Congress, I don't know who that is, tweeted out, Fauci is now saying that Trump, had Trump listened to medical experts earlier, he could have saved more lives.
00:45:45.000Fauci was telling people on February 29th there was nothing to worry about, it posed no threat to the U.S.
00:45:49.000public at large, time to hashtag fire Fauci, and Trump retweeted that.
00:46:03.000I understand that everybody is geared up for the, is Trump at fault game here.
00:46:08.000I understand the media are very into it.
00:46:10.000The New York Times ran an extraordinarily long piece today about how Trump, or over the weekend, about Trump's failures on the virus and how he was warned by a bunch of people inside the administration.
00:46:20.000Dr. Carter Metcher writing on the night of January 28th in an email to the Department of Medical Affairs, any way you cut it, this is going to be bad.
00:46:27.000The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.
00:46:30.000Somebody, there was a whole group that called itself Red Dawn because they were figuring this thing was going to get really bad after the 1984 movie.
00:46:42.000And then Trump apparently didn't take any of this stuff seriously.
00:46:44.000The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus.
00:46:51.000Despite Trump's denial weeks later, he was told about a January 29th memo produced by Peter Navarro laying out the potential risks of the pandemic.
00:46:59.000The Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, warned Trump of the possibility of a pandemic on January 30th.
00:47:05.000By the third week in February, the administration's top public health experts concluded they should recommend that Americans be warned to social distance and stay home from work.
00:47:13.000The White House instead focused on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by the wayside.
00:47:26.000Local officials were also ignoring all of this because it was so unthinkable.
00:47:30.000We've done something unprecedented in American history.
00:47:32.000A more important piece over at Politico that's being ignored is called Inside America's Two-Decade Failure to Prepare for Coronavirus.
00:47:38.000And they talk about how basically every administration for several decades has been failing on this stuff, not just Trump.
00:47:45.000And so it feels a lot like the 9-11 Commission.
00:47:47.000Here was the immediate failure, and then here are all the failures that led up to that failure.
00:47:50.000There's an article in the New York Times last week about how de Blasio and Cuomo didn't shut down the state until the end of March, basically.
00:47:57.000So, listen, I'm all up for the, what did government do wrong, and my going theory, which is that everyone in government sucks at everything, and that the chains of bureaucracy are extraordinarily long, and that it is more likely that things go wrong than go right in government.
00:48:28.000You know, my comfort food is a baseball book.
00:48:30.000So there's a really good new baseball book out by Jared Diamond, who's the baseball reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
00:48:35.000It's called Swing Kings, and it's all about the hitting coaches who have completely reshaped the game of baseball and how they have really focused on swinging up on the ball.
00:48:43.000You were always taught when you were a kid that you're supposed to swing down on the ball.
00:48:46.000You're supposed to hack the top half of the ball, try and hit line drives.
00:49:30.000Surgeon General is a man named Jerome Adams, he happens to be black, and he has been giving these pressers and answering questions about what Americans should do.
00:49:38.000Well, in the middle of one of these pressers, he was asked specifically about the African American communities, about Latino communities.
00:49:43.000Now, there have been tons of articles recently, like lots of them, about the disparate health impacts of COVID-19.
00:49:50.000Those articles have been focused heavily on the fact that black and Latino populations have been harder hit by coronavirus than other populations.
00:49:56.000And this has led people like AOC to suggest that there is a disparity in healthcare in the United States.
00:50:09.000The idea is that America's pre-existing racism has led to these health conditions and there is Maybe some evidence that, thanks to the wealth gap, that people are poorer, and if you're poorer, then you tend to eat less well, you don't eat as good food.
00:50:26.000But here's the reality of the situation.
00:50:28.000Right now, in America, if you want to eat healthy, you should be able to eat healthy.
00:50:32.000People do have welfare, people do have food stamps, people do have access, generally, to a grocery store.
00:50:39.000Even if, yes, you have to take a bus over to the grocery store that is not located in your four block radius.
00:50:45.000In any case, Jerome Adams gets up and he's talking about some of the contributing factors to lack of health in some minority communities.
00:51:02.000And he's not specifically directing that at black and Latino people, but this is taken as though he is a racist for Jerome Adams, that he is a racist.
00:51:10.000He has internalized racism for suggesting that their differential health Outcomes between black and Latino people in the United States and white people in the United States.
00:51:17.000Which, again, is, I thought, what the message was for the past several weeks.
00:51:20.000The message for the past several weeks was the New York Times headline, right?
00:52:00.000We need you to understand, especially in communities of color, we need you to step up and help stop the spread so that we can protect those who are most vulnerable.
00:52:10.000He said, he said, pop, pop, and he said, big mama or grandma.
00:52:16.000So he's suggesting that maybe if everybody exercise personal responsibility, including in the black community, and then he uses some, some language that he has heard in his own upbringing, right?
00:52:25.000He said this, he said, I used to call my grandpa pop, pop, like, and people were like, oh, he's a racist.
00:52:30.000So Yamiche Alcindor, who can always be trusted to, for a hot take, she says, That Adams was being racist when he said all of this stuff.
00:52:38.000That he's being a racist for pointing out health disparities.
00:52:42.000Either you want tremendous focus on the health disparities, which would include looking at things like personal behavior inside communities and how that is actually contributing to health disparities.
00:52:52.000Like if you eat a lot of fast food, right?
00:52:54.000People in minority communities are eating much more fast food than people who are not in minority communities, for example.
00:53:00.000Well, it depends on the minority community.
00:53:02.000Minority communities in like Los Angeles, for example.
00:53:05.000In the American South, lots of people eat fast food, like all the time.
00:53:24.000Apparently you're only supposed to mention health disparities when you're going to blame the system at large or American racism at large.
00:53:29.000But when you're talking about personal activity and what you can do to change your risk from COVID-19, it's very bad and it makes you a racist.
00:53:34.000So here's Yamiche Alcindor doing this routine.
00:53:37.000You said that African-Americans and Latinos should avoid alcohol, drugs, and tobacco.
00:53:42.000You also said do it for your abuela, do it for big mama, and pop pop.
00:53:48.000There are some people online that are already offended by that language and the idea that you're saying behaviors might be leading to these high death rates.
00:53:55.000Could you talk about whether or not people, could you I guess have a response for people who might be offended by the language that you used?
00:54:03.000Okay, again, if you are super offended, I just want to know, are we supposed to discuss the racial disparity or are we not supposed to discuss the racial disparity?
00:54:09.000And if we do discuss the racial disparity, is your chief complaint going to be that this black surgeon general is a racist for using language with regard to With regard to Latino grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles, and like, really?
00:54:29.000It seems to me that you might be deliberately missing the point in order to focus in on narratives that confirm your priors, which is that American racism is everything when it comes to health disparities in the United States, and personal behavior has nothing to do with anything.
00:55:00.000And if he's asked about health disparities and he answers about health disparities and he uses statistics to back it up, I don't, again, if you're focused in on the racism narrative at this point in time, I think that you're completely missing the boat.
00:55:10.000For five seconds it was, the virus unites us all.
00:55:12.000And then it went to, the virus is terrible for black and Hispanic people.
00:55:15.000And if you mention that there might be differentials in behavior, statistically speaking, with regard to some behaviors, then that's very, very bad.
00:55:21.000Or if you use language specifically to appeal to black and Hispanic people for issues that affect everybody, because you're talking to black and Hispanic people, that's also very bad.
00:55:33.000Okay, so a little bit later this afternoon, apparently there will be an announcement on a regional reopening plan with governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.
00:55:41.000Expect that to be, we're not reopening ever.
00:56:46.000As the coronavirus doomsday models fall apart, the alarmists who pushed them are doubling down on their draconian policies.
00:56:53.000We will examine the value of civil disobedience when power-hungry hypocrites get exposed and lash out.
00:56:59.000Then, the former Biden staffer accusing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexual assault files a formal police complaint, and the mainstream media go into full cover-up mode to protect Joe.
00:57:11.000Finally, we take a look at the glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the left's favorite coronavirus narrative.