Even left-wing mayors are beginning to admit the experts got it wrong. Way more people have the virus than they thought, way fewer people are dying from it, and the lockdowns aren t doing very much to stop it. Then, the price of oil plummets to negative $40, and Kim Jong-un might be brain dead.
00:04:17.9204.1% is very, very high when you compare it to what we had been hearing before.
00:04:23.180So this is from not just Garsity, but the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
00:04:27.140They say infections, this is their press release, by the way.
00:04:30.640This is not journalism covering it or some right-wing website.
00:04:33.440Infections from the new coronavirus are far more widespread and the fatality rate much lower in L.A. County than previously thought.
00:04:40.760Approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county have had the infection.
00:04:47.160That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than the 7,994 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported to the county.
00:04:57.600So all the models, everything that we were basing our numbers on was based on an infection rate 55 times lower than what we're actually seeing.
00:05:07.920So if you just divide very simply the number of people who have died from coronavirus by the number of people we thought had it, then the mortality rate's pretty high.
00:05:17.560If you divide it by, you know, you've got the mortality rate, the number of deaths, divided by 55 times the number of people we thought had it, then obviously it's much lower.
00:05:26.960This backs up what we see out of Stanford, Jay Bhattacharya and other scientists up at Stanford have done similar tests and found similar numbers for infection, which were much higher than previously thought, which is, by the way, what conservatives were saying weeks ago and leftists were mocking us for.
00:05:43.540This backs up what we saw in Massachusetts.
00:05:45.380Obviously, that was right in the heart of the epidemic over there.
00:05:48.680We looked at those numbers yesterday, showed infection rates up to 30% or 35% people who had antibodies, which means they had it before, which you're going to get if you're in a real hotspot.
00:05:59.360And, you know, that varies city by city and state by state.
00:06:06.700One, for most people, the virus isn't that bad.
00:06:11.880For some people, it's bad, particularly people who are older who have underlying health conditions.
00:06:17.100But we were already talking about how for the majority of cases, confirmed cases, it wasn't that bad weeks ago.
00:06:26.240Now we find out that it's actually 55 times as many people had it.
00:06:30.000The vast majority of them never even knew they had it.
00:06:32.520The vast majority of people who have had coronavirus haven't had any symptoms or any symptoms that would have made them even consider going to a doctor.
00:06:43.040Now, the second thing we can conclude from this is the political conclusion.
00:06:47.920Which is that once you know that the hospitals are not going to be overrun, then the lockdowns are useless.
00:06:57.340That's the conclusion from this, these studies in this press conference that the left and the media don't want you to think about.
00:07:04.080The whole point of the lockdowns is to not overwhelm the hospital system, right?
00:07:11.720So when we say lower the curve or, you know, stop the, what are they, flatten the curve.
00:07:18.780That's not to reduce the number of people who get the virus.
00:07:21.700It's just to slow it down so that you don't get this huge spike of people and there aren't enough hospital beds and people die unnecessarily.
00:07:28.920But the same number of people are going to get it either way.
00:07:31.480So now, now once we know that it's so much more widespread, that it's, that it's going gangbusters, that it's, it's so much faster in its spread, then the lockdowns actually aren't doing anything.
00:07:43.000We know that we're not going to overwhelm the hospital system.
00:07:47.020We have an empty Javits Center and an empty hospital boat.
00:07:50.600If the, if the virus rather is spreading so quickly, then we now know it's going to spread to everybody, virtually everybody, before we get the vaccine in 18 months or two years.
00:08:04.360Even if you said the point of the lockdown is to slow it enough that we can get a vaccine and it'll be better for people, we're not going to do that.
00:08:11.420We now know it's spreading too fast for that.
00:08:13.620So the lockdowns are serving literally no purpose.
00:08:17.880Mayor Garcetti tries to put a scary spin on it and he does so unsuccessfully.
00:08:24.540But it would also mean that still more than 95% of us, if this study is representative, still do not have that, do not have any potential immunity and are still vulnerable to being able to catch this disease and die from it.
00:08:39.300Yeah, we are still vulnerable, but that's always been the case, right?
00:08:43.780The argument was never lock down the economy and then most people won't get it.
00:09:19.240That is simply an unavoidable fact that the left is trying to pretend is avoidable through science, capital S, and progress, capital P, but it's not.
00:09:29.200And it gets to a real divide in our politics.
00:19:32.560We see with scientific precision what politics is.
00:19:36.640And so if you just put the smartest people in charge of politics, you'll have a perfect politics, no more rancor, no more debate, no more misery.
00:19:43.260If you just get a lot of data and you empower smart people, we will have perfect governance.
00:19:56.440The only problem with that idea is that it has never been correct ever anywhere in the world, and it has always been wrong, and it has always failed.
00:20:04.500But in theory, it's a really good idea.
00:20:12.020Conservatives have a different take than that.
00:20:15.260Okay, conservatives have this idea that we're happy to listen to experts when they've got some modest contribution to their narrow field of expertise.
00:20:27.280We know, however, that the world is simply too complex to govern it based on a model.
00:20:37.960It's not possible to put in all the data points to perfectly model out the whole world, or to perfectly model out global warming, or to perfectly model out a pandemic, or to perfectly model out systems that are terribly complex.
00:20:51.340We know fundamentally that politics is not a science.
00:20:57.200Politics is actually the opposite of a science.
00:21:28.460Do we want to legalize drugs and have a more permissive society, or do we want to control drugs and have a more orderly society, right?
00:21:38.840There's no scientific answer for those things.
00:21:41.060Do we want to tax people way more and redistribute their money and have a more economically equal society, or do we want to reduce the tax rate and allow people to keep more of their money and have a freer society?
00:22:06.300That's the point of government and politics generally.
00:22:09.000This is why the educated country bumpkin conservatives have a better track record in politics than those brilliant, wonderful, credentialed, rationalist liberals who worship at the altar of the latest data fad.
00:22:28.420Because novelties and fads are always wrong and useless.
00:22:52.560The left is always shocked about this in politics, that those deplorable, irredeemable rube idiots that the left holds in such contempt are usually more correct about politics than these fancy liberals who are really rationalists and who have read all of their David Hume and who have read all of their Jeremy Bentham and, you know, who catch up on the latest science journal, right?
00:23:17.560They should know better, they should know better, and yet they don't.
00:23:19.960It's all those deplorable idiots that they hate.
00:23:22.080Those are the ones that actually get politics a little bit better.
00:23:26.120And the left ends up looking like fools.
00:23:29.480Look no further for evidence of this than Bill de Blasio in New York.
00:23:32.760Bill de Blasio, a leftist, progressive, rationalist, scientific guy par excellence.
00:23:40.640He decides, in this pandemic, he's going to let a bunch of criminals out of prison.
00:23:47.220A lot of criminals out of Rikers, okay?
00:24:33.120And if there's one thing that criminals are known for, it's their conscience.
00:24:37.480You know, I always say this about criminals.
00:24:39.340I say they've just got such a well-developed, healthy conscience, which is why they are the people who, by definition, violate their conscience.
00:25:26.000Then they're shocked when they find out that the criminals, once they get out of prison, commit more crimes.
00:25:30.380I'm not saying that the left, I'm not saying that the experts can't be right on like a few narrow matters.
00:25:38.340The trouble that they run into is when they try to expand that to take into account multiple categories, multiple problems, multiple areas of government.
00:25:47.700This is why the left always thinks that if you've got some environmental expert, that he should be the guy in charge of the EPA, or you've got some health expert.
00:25:56.600He should be the guy in charge of the FDA or whatever.
00:26:03.360I know it seems that way, but actually those two experts are the last people who should be in charge of those departments.
00:26:09.820Because the people you want in charge of those departments are people who can see beyond their narrow field of expertise.
00:26:17.080You want generalists in charge of that, who can see how those different departments are going to work with the rest of the government, how they work with other priorities that we have.
00:26:26.500You listen to the advice on that one narrow area, but then you've got to move beyond that.
00:29:27.960This, along with record low interest rates, means it's the right time for a worker-led mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.
00:30:15.380The Green New Deal gets rid of American, 90% of American energy at least, bans virtually every form of transportation.
00:30:21.520And then they say that they're going to remake every house in America, every building in America and make it green and that's going to save the planet.
00:30:29.400How are you going to redo every single house in America if you get rid of all the transportation and the energy?
00:30:34.040Even by their own premises, you can't achieve their ends if you do what they want you to do.
00:30:41.720But that's what happens when you're really narrow.
00:30:44.580You're only viewing every issue through this very slight frame of reference with regard to environmentalism and you end up losing that too.
00:30:55.080Just think of the advertisements that Republicans are going to be able to make on this.
00:31:18.020They're blowing it because they're disconnected from reality.
00:31:21.220They're blowing it because of their trust in the experts.
00:31:24.660They're blowing it because they want to destroy whole American industries to pursue goals that you can't pursue without those industries.
00:31:32.860They're blowing it because they'd rather certainly throw millions of Americans out of work, certainly increase their death numbers, than save people's lives in theory.
00:31:51.480They want to make sure the theoretical aspect works.
00:31:53.560They're living in a theoretical world.
00:31:55.160They're ignoring the real world in front of them.
00:31:57.500And meanwhile, back here in reality, President Trump and his supporters are having a field day.
00:32:05.840Just look at the ads that they are already running.
00:32:08.700This is an ad about the lockdowns, about Nancy Pelosi eating her fancy ice cream out of her $20,000 fridge while they're gleefully allowing millions of Americans to go out of work.
00:32:20.360We turn now to that $350 billion fund to help small businesses and its workers get through the shutdown.
00:32:26.900It will be up to Congress to restock it.
00:32:29.340But Democrats blocking that move this morning.
00:32:31.760They asked for a quarter of a trillion dollars in 48 hours.