The Ben Shapiro Show - Coronavirus Pandemic: Doctor vs. Economist | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 89

00:00:00.000 When my girls came home, they were really unsettled.

00:00:03.000 So what we decided to do is every day we would sit down and talk about what's happening on the coronavirus, and importantly, what to expect.

00:00:10.000 What to expect.

00:00:12.000 And this notion of, I don't know for sure, but this is what I'm looking for, has helped people enormously because you give them a roadmap.

00:00:19.000 It's been almost three weeks since President Trump issued his 15 days to slow the spread recommendations, urging everyone to stay at home and only leave for essential business.

00:00:28.000 Those recommendations have now been extended through the entire month of April, which leaves a lot of uncertainty for everyone as we grow increasingly more concerned with our health and well-being, as well as our financial stability.

00:00:39.000 By ordering every non-essential business to close, the economy came to a crashing halt, spurring a $2 trillion stimulus package, another $4 trillion of spending from the Federal Reserve, and the highest rate of unemployment this country has ever seen.

00:00:51.000 While the healthcare industry works on defeating this virus, infection and death rates are constantly changing based on incoming data.

00:00:57.000 Every day, more and more people go without work and paychecks, propelling the debate of how important the stability of the economy is to public health, not just the importance of public health to the economy.

00:01:07.000 Today, we're going to look at that argument from both a healthcare perspective and an economist perspective.

00:01:12.000 We're going to be talking the models used by governments to determine whether to shut down the economy, the question of balancing economics and public health, and when we finally get back to normal.

00:01:20.000 Kicking it off is Dr. Bob Wachter.

00:01:32.000 He is professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of about 300 articles and six books.

00:01:39.000 He is past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine and past chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

00:01:44.000 Dr. Wachter, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:01:46.000 I want to start by asking you some basic biological questions about coronavirus.

00:01:50.000 Let's start with the sort of conflicting messaging we've been seeing about face masks.

00:01:54.000 Are they a good idea or a bad idea at this point?

00:01:57.000 I think the science has evolved in the last couple of weeks, Ben.

00:02:00.000 I think we now better understand that people can have the virus and be asymptomatic and be shedding virus at that time.

00:02:08.000 And so now that we understand that, it is, I believe, marginally safer if everybody wears face masks out in public.

00:02:15.000 I think if people do it, it will become destigmatized the way it has in many Asian countries.

00:02:19.000 It'll be weird.

00:02:20.000 It's going to take a lot of getting used to.

00:02:23.000 But I think while the virus is out there in the communities, it seems like a prudent thing to recommend.

00:02:29.000 I also want to ask about the handwashing.

00:02:31.000 So obviously we're all doing it.

00:02:33.000 All of our hands are raw and bloody.

00:02:34.000 So when it comes to handwashing, why 20 seconds?

00:02:38.000 Is there something magical about 20 seconds versus 15 or 25?

00:02:41.000 Not magical.

00:02:43.000 There have been sort of these funny studies where they look at people's hands that have soil or germs on them and wash them for various periods of time to see which ones So, let's talk about the hospitalization rates for folks with coronavirus.

00:03:08.000 So, what percentage of folks with coronavirus end up going to the hospital?

00:03:11.000 What percentage of those people end up having to go to an ICU?

00:03:14.000 What percentage of the ICU people end up on a ventilator?

00:03:17.000 Are those coincident?

00:03:18.000 And what percentage of people on ventilators actually end up surviving?

00:03:22.000 Okay, how long we got?

00:03:26.000 A lot of the answer to that, Ben, depends on the population of patients, because we know that older people and people with other diseases before they got sick with coronavirus do worse.

00:03:35.000 So, for example, the very high mortality rates and ICU rates in Italy are partly related to the fact that it was an older population.

00:03:43.000 But if you take all comers, about 80% of people who get the virus do just fine.

00:03:49.000 In fact, some of them we now know are asymptomatic through the entire time, but most of them will have a flu-like illness, recover fully, and be fine.

00:03:56.000 About 20% of people will get sick enough, and a decent percentage of them, 15 to 20% of all comers, will need to go to the hospital.

00:04:04.000 Of those, somewhere around a quarter to a third, again depending on the overall health of the population, might need to go to an intensive care unit.

00:04:15.000 Not everybody who goes to an ICU needs to be on a mechanical ventilator, needs to be intubated and ventilated, but if you can't breathe without it, you do.

00:04:24.000 And then the overall death rate nationally in the U.S.

00:04:28.000 is around 1% of all people that get the illness.

00:04:33.000 If you are unfortunate enough to need to go on a mechanical ventilator in the ICU, the studies vary, but on the low side, the mortality rate is 50%.

00:04:44.000 On the high side, some of the early studies from China showed a mortality rate closer to 90%.

00:04:49.000 So, not everybody who gets sick enough to be on a ventilator dies, but it's a bad thing, and the outcomes are at best 50-50.

00:04:58.000 So looking across the country, obviously the hotspot right now is New York.

00:05:02.000 We've seen emerging hotspots in places like New Orleans and Detroit.

00:05:05.000 But in San Francisco, you've suggested that the curve has been rather successfully flattened.

00:05:11.000 In Seattle, it looks like the curve has been rather successfully flattened.

00:05:14.000 What do you think is the difference between cities like New York, Detroit and San Francisco or Seattle?

00:05:20.000 It's hard to know fully, and I suspect that multiple factors are at play.

00:05:25.000 But here in San Francisco, there was a concerted amount of action by both government leaders and, I think very importantly, corporate leaders.

00:05:34.000 They saw what happened in China.

00:05:37.000 They saw what was happening in Italy.

00:05:39.000 And they took it very seriously.

00:05:41.000 They believed the science, and I think the science is relatively clear, that the best chance that we had to stay safe was early and aggressive action.

00:05:51.000 And the action was sheltering in place, the action was avoiding close contact, the action was hand washing, things like that.

00:05:57.000 And so here in the Bay Area, as early as March 5th, leaders of the big companies, that was Google, Facebook, Salesforce and others, basically told all their employees to stay home and work from home.

00:06:10.000 Now, they're advantaged in doing that because their employees are all digital and they all have ways of working from home.

00:06:16.000 It's not so easy.

00:06:17.000 If you're an Uber driver, you're working in manufacturing or in other places.

00:06:21.000 But that was as early as March 5th.

00:06:23.000 March 16th, the mayor of San Francisco and the mayors of the five counties around San Francisco all issued a sheltering-in-place order, and the governor of California did the same thing on March 19th.

00:06:35.000 Those were earlier than any large areas in the country.

00:06:40.000 So I think it was all of that.

00:06:42.000 And I think people did it.

00:06:44.000 People just kind of believed that this was real.

00:06:46.000 We better pay attention.

00:06:47.000 I think part of that was being on the West Coast.

00:06:50.000 We're particularly close to China.

00:06:52.000 We have a very large Asian population.

00:06:53.000 We saw what happened in China.

00:06:54.000 We kind of, we took it very seriously.

00:06:57.000 And the second reason I think is Seattle was the first part of the United States to get hammered.

00:07:02.000 And San Francisco and Seattle are pretty, are almost sister cities.

00:07:05.000 They're very similar in many In many ways, and we saw that, you say, if it can happen in Seattle, it can happen here.

00:07:10.000 So I think it's, and then there's just some luck.

00:07:12.000 I think that, you know, New York may have gotten unlucky.

00:07:15.000 There are places where it just breaks out.

00:07:17.000 And even if you did all the right stuff, you're still going to have a big problem.

00:07:20.000 But I think those actions really did make a difference.

00:07:23.000 So, Dr. Walker, in just a second, I want to ask you about some of the modeling that's being used to justify the entire economic shutdown.

00:07:29.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:08:32.000 So we've been relying very heavily on the models to determine exactly what we ought to do here.

00:08:37.000 One of the questions about the models has been exactly how far they extend.

00:08:39.000 So the IMHE model from the University of Washington has been heavily used as sort of the source for we're going to experience maybe up to 100,000 deaths.

00:08:49.000 That model only extends until the very beginning of August.

00:08:52.000 It doesn't take into account the possibility of a second wave.

00:08:55.000 And that raises questions as to what exactly the purpose of the curve flattening is.

00:09:00.000 So on the one hand, obviously we want to flatten the curve so that we Don't exceed the medical capacity that is out there for ventilators or for ICU beds.

00:09:08.000 On the other hand, if there's going to be a second wave in the fall and we are all going to get it, and how do we calculate exactly when it is worth it to go back to work, considering that the economy is taking unprecedented hits right now, 10 million people unemployed in the last two weeks?

00:09:25.000 Yeah, it's a brutally difficult question.

00:09:28.000 I'm not going to accept the idea that we're all going to get it.

00:09:32.000 Particularly for myself, being over 60, I'm in one of the risk groups, so I can't go to sleep at night buying that it's inevitable that we're all going to get it.

00:09:41.000 I think what we are trying to do is tamp this thing down as much as possible so that hopefully it then dies down during the summer.

00:09:50.000 There's some seasonality about it so that then when it comes back in the fall, which is likelier than not, we're prepared for it.

00:09:58.000 We know what to do.

00:10:00.000 We can immediately institute the kind of public health measures that this time I think we instituted on the late side.

00:10:07.000 We have widespread testing available so that we can aggressively find people that have it early and quarantine them and isolate them from the rest of the public.

00:10:16.000 And all of this, I guess, if this went on forever and we never found a vaccine, then there is a good chance that ultimately probably we wouldn't all get it.

00:10:26.000 There's this thing called herd immunity that when you reach a certain amount of the population who's gotten it and has antibodies, it begins to die out.

00:10:33.000 But that's 70 or 80 percent of the population.

00:10:35.000 So that's that's a pretty nasty vision.

00:10:38.000 The hope is we tamp this thing down over a long enough time that, yes, we don't overwhelm the health care system, but more importantly, we come up with treatments or vaccines and can get rid of this thing once and for all.

00:10:50.000 I guess one of the difficulties in the modeling is because so few of the models extend out a full year, and because there are so many variables, it's difficult to see exactly what the sort of counterfactuals are in the various assumptions.

00:11:00.000 You have the assumption where we do nothing and 2.2 million people die, but it's difficult to see, okay, we have over the course of a year, not the course of three months, over the course of a year, how many people die if we engage in social distancing and mask wearing for people who are under the age of 60 or 65?

00:11:16.000 People who are 65 shelter in place to the best of their ability.

00:11:20.000 We isolate people who are in old age homes and have inherent vulnerabilities.

00:11:24.000 What is the counterfactual to that or lock down for three months and then do it?

00:11:28.000 There's so many variables, it's hard to tell what is worth it at this point.

00:11:32.000 What do you think emerging from this looks like and when do you think we start to emerge from this?

00:11:38.000 Yeah, I mean, we need to put our best minds and our best models to this to help guide us as to what the right thing to do is.

00:11:45.000 There is no question that a stance like we now have in California and increasingly around the country that everybody stays at home and the economy shuts down can't be our stance forever.

00:11:57.000 That can't possibly work.

00:11:59.000 And eventually there will be so much harm from that that you begin having to weigh the harm from the virus against the harm from the economy.

00:12:08.000 And they harm to health from people not going out and getting health care.

00:12:12.000 There are competing demands here that we've got to be thoughtful about.

00:12:16.000 I'll tell you a quick metaphor for that, which is at UCSF, where I work, we prepared for a New York-like surge.

00:12:23.000 We have not seen it.

00:12:24.000 We completely canceled all surgeries, essentially, unless it was absolutely a hyper-emergency for a couple of weeks.

00:12:32.000 We're now beginning to open up to do more urgent surgeries.

00:12:36.000 And that's because at some point you say, all right, we're not seeing the same kind of surge.

00:12:41.000 We need to take care of other people.

00:12:43.000 And so there's a balancing act that we all have to do.

00:12:46.000 It appears that the best models seem to say that sometime in the next four to six weeks, and it depends on how prevalent it is in the community and how much of a spike you had, because you come down faster if you had a big spike, The rates of the prevalence of the virus will go down in communities to the point that we can begin entering a new phase where we begin to relax some of the strict standards that we have now, begin to let people go out.

00:13:13.000 But the key thing there is going to be testing and contact tracing, which we haven't done very much of.

00:13:17.000 When you have tens of thousands of cases, you can't do contact tracing.

00:13:21.000 It's overwhelming the system.

00:13:23.000 But if you can tamp this down, my analogy is that of a wildfire that You have tamped down the worst of the wildfire and now you're out there looking for embers.

00:13:32.000 And you see an ember and it pops up and you stomp on it and make sure that it doesn't spread.

00:13:37.000 So we can, I think, reach that kind of a mode where we've tamped it down so it's not rampant in the community.

00:13:44.000 Hopefully it goes away, or mostly goes away over the summer.

00:13:47.000 And by the time it comes back in the fall, we're ready for it.

00:13:50.000 If someone has any symptoms, we immediately test them.

00:13:53.000 We're checking people's temperatures.

00:13:55.000 People probably are still wearing masks.

00:13:57.000 And if we find a case, those people get isolated, separated from the community, probably, or at least we consider separating from their families as well.

00:14:06.000 And that we can keep this thing at a low enough level that then there is time to go ahead and find the vaccine and the treatments.

00:14:14.000 So given the variability in the models, and given the fact there was an article in the Washington Post talking about how even the White House's estimate, 100,000 to 240,000 dead, it was completely vague.

00:14:23.000 We have no idea over what term even they were talking about.

00:14:26.000 We don't know what the factors were in coming to those statistics.

00:14:29.000 So I've been asking sort of a wide variety of people to ballpark where they think we are over the next year, given the fact that there seems to be pretty wide consensus that we're going to have to tranche people back into the workforce.

00:14:39.000 By mid-May, perhaps by June at the very latest.

00:14:44.000 This cannot last forever.

00:14:46.000 So if that is what happens, if we start to test people, move people back into circulation, isolate people who are most at risk, tell people to hunker down until there's a vaccine if they are really, truly the most at risk.

00:14:57.000 If we do that, what do you think the numbers look like?

00:14:58.000 Do you think it looks like 100,000?

00:15:01.000 Well, I believe the models, I think 100,000 is looking like the minimum, and that is extraordinarily tragic if you think about what that means.

00:15:12.000 But we're seeing New York, but New York is just the leading edge of what we are likely to see in Detroit, New Orleans, potentially Florida, a number of other cities, Illinois.

00:15:28.000 It's 90,000 still pretty terrible, but I think it is a big number. 1.00

00:15:32.000 My confidence that the fall will not be as bad as the spring.

00:15:38.000 is that I think we're smart enough to have learned the lessons of this.

00:15:42.000 It's awfully hard to tell people to disrupt your life and basically screw up the economy based on a theory or based on something that's happening in China.

00:15:51.000 Once it's happened in New York, once it's happened in big cities, I think people get it.

00:15:55.000 This is the real deal.

00:15:58.000 I think we will take the kind of actions.

00:16:00.000 I think science will move quickly.

00:16:01.000 I think we will find treatments and vaccines, and almost as importantly, new technology ways to track cases and follow people.

00:16:11.000 If you look at what happened, it's hard to know whether the numbers coming out of China But what's happened in prior epidemics, what the experience in Korea, for example, seems to show that after that initial spike, if everybody gets their act together, we can keep this thing at bay to a large extent.

00:16:32.000 And the analogy, I think people always say, well, there was a big surge in the Spanish flu.

00:16:39.000 Well, yes, but the Spanish would think about what they had to do tracing.

00:16:45.000 There were no treatments.

00:16:46.000 There were no vaccines.

00:16:48.000 There was no Zoom.

00:16:49.000 There was no Netflix.

00:16:51.000 And you're telling people to stay at home.

00:16:53.000 I think our ability to weather this and act responsibly and communicate effectively is massively better today than it was 100 years ago.

00:17:02.000 So I don't think the fall will be as bad as it's been and will be in the spring.

00:17:06.000 Dr. Wachter, I want to do a quick lightning round.

00:17:08.000 I have five questions for you.

00:17:09.000 So, number one, what do you see as the actual sort of end date for the crisis?

00:17:15.000 Well, two end dates.

00:17:16.000 When does life go back to normal, either post-vaccine or not?

00:17:20.000 And when do we actually start to emerge from the groundhog holes that we've been burrowing for the past several weeks?

00:17:30.000 Anybody's guess, but I'm guessing that, you know, a May to June, probably mid-May is the best estimate of being able to come out of our burrow and get back to something that resembles, more closely resembles normal is right.

00:17:47.000 And in terms of when we reach a time that things are truly back to normal, the best estimates for a vaccine are 12 to 18 months.

00:17:57.000 And the minute people find it, it's not trivial to get it into the arm of 350 million people.

00:18:04.000 So, you know, you've got to think it's 18 to 24 months.

00:18:08.000 So question number two, with all that said, what does America look like in six months?

00:18:11.000 I mean, are we still presumably social distancing?

00:18:14.000 Is everybody wearing masks?

00:18:15.000 What do you think that American life looks like six months from now?

00:18:18.000 I think masks are going to become a norm.

00:18:21.000 I don't know if it'll be quite like Tokyo or other places in Japan where it is absolutely the norm, but you're going to see a lot of people wearing masks.

00:18:29.000 I think people are going to be cleaning their hands incessantly.

00:18:32.000 I think people are going to keep a distance from one another.

00:18:35.000 And it may vary community by community.

00:18:38.000 If there are no cases in your community, What should America do?

00:18:42.000 What are the big steps that we can take to prevent the next pandemic?

00:18:45.000 active case finding.

00:18:46.000 And if you do find a case, then you begin to do the contact tracing and those sort of things.

00:18:51.000 But in communities where there still is virus in the zeitgeist, I think you are going to see people walking around with masks, keeping their distance and cleaning their hands religiously.

00:19:00.000 And I think that's the right thing to do.

00:19:01.000 What should America do?

00:19:02.000 What are the big steps that we can take to prevent the next pandemic?

00:19:05.000 Because this obviously is not the first and it will not be the last.

00:19:08.000 Yeah.

00:19:08.000 I mean, if you look at how well some of the countries in Asia reacted, it was in large part because they had a playbook that they could pull off the shelf.

00:19:18.000 And they had a national strategy for dealing with this.

00:19:20.000 And the national strategy had every had Have included what should the population be told and what do they need to do?

00:19:28.000 And it can't be a patchwork if you do it this way in this city, do it this way in this state.

00:19:31.000 It really has to be a national strategy because this thing permeates state and city lines. 0.92

00:19:36.000 It goes to red and blue states.

00:19:38.000 It's got to be a uniform playbook.

00:19:41.000 It has to include a testing strategy.

00:19:43.000 And part of the challenge here was, you know, we don't have a way of getting testing throughout the entire country, so we have to have a rapid-fire way.

00:19:53.000 Somebody at CDC has to be able to, obviously with the White House and with the health leaders, has to be able to push a button and say, there's been an outbreak in this place, and it looks awfully like coronavirus, and here is the playbook, let's roll it out.

00:20:08.000 And I think At least if it happens in the next five or ten years, I think people will remember this and believe it.

00:20:13.000 If it happens 20 or 30 years from now, people will forget this and we'll go through the same trauma, I'm afraid.

00:20:18.000 So, how should we treat the government of China after this?

00:20:20.000 Obviously, the government of China not only prevaricated about the virus in the beginning, they openly lied to the WHO.

00:20:26.000 They said there was no human-to-human transmission.

00:20:28.000 They knew better.

00:20:30.000 Obviously, they've been using some of their propaganda efforts to actually suggest that the United States put out the virus.

00:20:36.000 How should the world community be treating China in the aftermath of this from a health perspective?

00:20:41.000 Well, I think this shows how interconnected we all are.

00:20:44.000 And I'm not a diplomacy expert, so it's difficult for me to know how we should treat them.

00:20:49.000 But I think what it has made clear is that we can't completely isolate from one another.

00:20:55.000 The borders are permeable.

00:20:57.000 A virus that starts in China is going to end up here and vice versa.

00:21:02.000 China reacted and didn't do some of the things they should have done.

00:21:08.000 On the other hand, once they reacted, they reacted with an aggressiveness that I think probably saved a bunch of lives in China and may have saved a bunch of lives around the world.

00:21:18.000 They did things that we're not capable of doing and we shouldn't be capable of doing in terms of what an authoritarian regiment can do.

00:21:24.000 But in some ways, I think I can understand us being unhappy with them and that influencing our relationships.

00:21:31.000 On the other hand, it just shows how extraordinarily interconnected all the countries are.

00:21:35.000 And if we isolate from one another, it doesn't work.

00:21:39.000 The virus gets through and we'd have to work together better.

00:21:42.000 But finally, the measures that everybody is taking.

00:21:45.000 You mentioned before that we're going to be wearing masks for a while.

00:21:48.000 Is there ever a point where we go back to full normal, meaning like giant events, 60,000 people at baseball games?

00:21:56.000 I sort of think at this point that all mass events are basically going to be canceled until there's a vaccine.

00:22:00.000 Are all the measures we're taking right now temporary or permanent?

00:22:05.000 I really hope they're not permanent.

00:22:07.000 My son works for the Atlanta Braves, and I can't imagine that we're never going to go to a baseball game again.

00:22:12.000 That's too hard to even imagine.

00:22:16.000 I gotta think that this is, we'll be back to something resembling normal in a couple of years.

00:22:24.000 It might be a little shorter than that.

00:22:25.000 I don't think it will be that much longer than that.

00:22:28.000 You think about the quality of the American scientific and medical enterprise, the idea that we're not going to be able to find a vaccine for this, I find hard to believe if we completely put our full resources, full attention to it.

00:22:40.000 I think for a year, year and a half, things are going to be pretty weird.

00:22:43.000 I think they are going to, they're not going to be full lockdown like they are now for the next, probably the next month or two, probably two.

00:22:50.000 But they are not going to be normal.

00:22:51.000 People are going to be walking around with masks.

00:22:53.000 People are going to be keeping their distance and cleaning their hands all the time.

00:22:57.000 But I think we're going to reach a point in a couple of years where things will be back to something resembling normal.

00:23:02.000 Well, Dr. Walker, I really appreciate your time.

00:23:04.000 And as I've been saying to folks, stay safe in there because we can't be out there.

00:23:08.000 - Thank you. - I really appreciate it, sir.

00:23:09.000 - You're welcome.

00:23:10.000 Nice to talk to you. - Joining us next is Dr. Scott Atlas, a medical doctor, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a member of the institution's working group on healthcare policy.

00:23:27.000 He is previous chief of neuroradiology at Stanford Medical Center, is the author of the leading textbook on MRIs, and has written over 120 scholarly articles.

00:23:35.000 Dr. Atlas, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:23:37.000 Really appreciate your time.

00:23:39.000 So let's start with some questions about the modeling that's been used so far.

00:23:43.000 Some models that I've seen really only go out a couple of months. 0.96

00:23:46.000 The model from the University of Washington has been heavily relied upon that says that we could see up to 100,000 deaths.

00:23:50.000 That only goes up to August.

00:23:52.000 I guess my question with these models is we are all now locking down for the next few weeks at a bare minimum in order to flatten the curve for the next few months.

00:24:00.000 But none of these models seem to extend far beyond that.

00:24:03.000 And we've been told that the vaccines are only going to be ready 12 to 18 months from now.

00:24:06.000 It's obviously unrealistic to suggest that we are going to Yeah, I mean, this is, of course, a very tricky question.

00:24:11.000 I would say a couple of points to understand.

00:24:12.000 Number one, the models are really just those.

00:24:13.000 So how exactly should we balance the needs of public health and the needs of the economy in a time when we are at such a lack for data as to what happens next?

00:24:23.000 Yeah, I mean, this is, of course, a very tricky question.

00:24:27.000 I would say a couple of points to understand.

00:24:30.000 Number one, the models are really just those.

00:24:33.000 And like all projections, they're likely to be wrong, no matter how good the people are that are doing them, because there's so many incoming assumptions that underlie each projection.

00:24:44.000 And it's something very important to understand because, as you know, the definition of a case could be a positive test only, could be a symptomatic person.

00:24:52.000 The testing is very different and heterogeneously distributed.

00:24:57.000 Second point is that to re-enter, I would call, I use that word re-enter society.

00:25:04.000 I think we're going to see something first Clearly gradual.

00:25:08.000 And secondly, there's going to be a sort of a different way to look at re-entry.

00:25:15.000 I make the analogy, it's possible that we will see what people call a new normal.

00:25:19.000 Remember after 9-11, everything changed in airport security.

00:25:23.000 We never had that sort of waiting lines.

00:25:25.000 And I used to run up to a plane minutes before it took off.

00:25:29.000 All those things change.

00:25:30.000 This might be the same in that, at least in the beginning, I think it's very likely we will need some sort of testing to permit and allow reentry.

00:25:41.000 And that testing is likely to be twofold.

00:25:45.000 One is antibody testing, which involves a blood test of some sort.

00:25:50.000 And that will say if you're immune or not, meaning you've already had it and you're highly unlikely to get it again, judging from all biology of previous virus infections.

00:26:01.000 And those people clearly will be safe and actually fine to re-enter.

00:26:05.000 And the other test might be a test of active virus presence.

00:26:11.000 And I think that's possible and actually easier But probably less likely to be done.

00:26:23.000 So I think we will have some sort of testing at point of entry.

00:26:27.000 We will still have restrictions.

00:26:29.000 And most importantly, we will have restrictions, and I'm talking about as we re-enter, on the people who are the vulnerable people.

00:26:37.000 Remember, the number one goal is to stop people from dying.

00:26:42.000 And it doesn't really matter if you get a mild version of this, which the overwhelming majority of cases are mild.

00:26:50.000 The question is how to protect those who are vulnerable.

00:26:54.000 And this is the number one focus and most urgent thing of any policy.

00:27:00.000 So older people, particularly people with underlying chronic diseases, need protection.

00:27:07.000 They need isolation.

00:27:09.000 They need meaning isolation from people who are either asymptomatic or sick, clearly.

00:27:15.000 And that is going to need testing of people who deal with those people.

00:27:19.000 And those people, the older people who are much more likely to have a serious illness or die, are going to need special sort of re-entry public health formulations.

00:27:30.000 So with all of that said, and looking at sort of the fact that these models and studies are not taking into account really the possibility of a second wave or the reality that people are going to reenter the workforce, there are a lot of skeptics out there who have been kind of rearing their heads and saying, OK, well, maybe We could take this for a week, but we can't take this for another two months.

00:27:49.000 And the economy is losing 10 million jobs every couple of weeks here.

00:27:53.000 And we are going to enter economic levels not seen since ever in the United States in terms of unemployment.

00:27:57.000 So why not pursue a policy like Sweden, for example, where we isolate everybody who's over the age of 60. 1.00

00:28:04.000 If you're over the age of 60, or if you have a pre-existing health condition, you're expected to stay in your house and self-isolate.

00:28:09.000 Everybody else goes to work.

00:28:11.000 Everybody else wears masks.

00:28:12.000 Everybody else social distances.

00:28:14.000 And life goes back to quasi-normal.

00:28:17.000 It appears that that may, in fact, be what ends up happening after three months of this.

00:28:20.000 Is that sort of the plan?

00:28:22.000 That after three months, if the summer knocks this thing down, or if the curve actually flattens, that we all go back to life in that way?

00:28:27.000 And if so, then what is the end date of that sort of thing?

00:28:31.000 Yeah, I sort of think there's going to be something like that.

00:28:37.000 I don't think it will be.

00:28:38.000 Okay.

00:28:40.000 There's so many parts to the question.

00:28:42.000 I mean, one part is how do we reenter and who reenters and, uh, you know, we are a certain sort of society.

00:28:49.000 So the main thing to get the economy going.

00:28:52.000 Is to allow people in the workforce to get going.

00:28:54.000 And as you obviously must realize people over 65 are not a big part of the workforce.

00:29:01.000 And so, uh, it's clearly less impactful to restrict those people.

00:29:06.000 I do think that testing is going to be part of this.

00:29:09.000 And you know, there's a lot of new tests.

00:29:11.000 There are more than 20 tests being worked on.

00:29:14.000 Some have been approved even today for antibody testing.

00:29:18.000 We do testing all the time at home and at points of care for things.

00:29:23.000 You know, there are simple pregnancy tests.

00:29:25.000 We don't have that sort of thing yet, but I envision some sort of like at-home diabetic people use a blood pinprick test.

00:29:33.000 So I think that to re-enter You know, there's a public health concern and there's an individual concern.

00:29:41.000 And the working economy is critical.

00:29:44.000 There's, as you are alluding to, a huge cost to individuals and to really sickness but death when there's a depression sort of economic situation.

00:29:56.000 This is not going to go on.

00:29:59.000 I think we have to realize a couple things.

00:30:01.000 Number one, the isolation policies actually work and are working.

00:30:06.000 And this is a message that I think people don't quite understand.

00:30:10.000 Yes, more and more people are dying, but the rate of increase of deaths is slowing all over the world.

00:30:19.000 And we have to realize that there are causes for optimism.

00:30:22.000 This is reality, not just panic mode.

00:30:26.000 And so as we see these death rates, the increase in deaths go down, which they are, eventually we're going to get a handle on that.

00:30:34.000 This is a virus.

00:30:35.000 There's fundamental biology to understand.

00:30:38.000 And we are going to have enough immunity.

00:30:40.000 We are going to allow, and it's actually beneficial to allow more people to mingle, given that the overwhelming majority are not going to die.

00:30:51.000 And the overwhelming majority are going to have a mild or a symptom course.

00:30:55.000 We need so-called herd immunity because there's a natural way to eliminate viruses like this.

00:31:01.000 And that is by natural immunity.

00:31:04.000 And yes, you're right.

00:31:05.000 We don't have an immunization.

00:31:06.000 We won't have an immunization as we re-enter.

00:31:10.000 But the immunization technology is very good.

00:31:13.000 We'll have it in theory.

00:31:16.000 Projections are at least by early this coming year, maybe sooner.

00:31:19.000 We don't know.

00:31:20.000 But there's going to be a reentry and it's essential for health reasons as well as simply the economic survival.

00:31:31.000 of individuals and families.

00:31:32.000 So realistically speaking, it seems as though a lot of the press that's being done, Dr. Atlas, on this sort of stuff from the White House, from other folks who talk about it, has focused on this sort of idea that we're all going to avoid the disease, but that obviously is not reality.

00:31:47.000 It's gonna be, it may become seasonal like the flu, in which case we're probably all gonna get this at some point in our lives.

00:31:52.000 So would it be better for people who are speaking about this publicly to simply say, look, the purpose of what we are doing right now is to avoid the overwhelming of the healthcare systems, That's really what this is about.

00:32:01.000 It's not preventing people from getting infections in the long term.

00:32:04.000 It's not preventing people from getting this and receiving treatment.

00:32:06.000 The idea is to delay because we weren't ready for this and then to ramp up production of the ICUs and the ventilators and the mitigating treatments that we have so that when there's a second wave, it's not as cruel in the fall.

00:32:16.000 And then hopefully we get a vaccine.

00:32:17.000 by sometime next year.

00:32:19.000 Wouldn't that be a more realistic way to go about explaining to people what exactly we are doing than the way that has been generally explained, which seems sort of vague?

00:32:25.000 It's almost as though, well, you know, we're going to flatten the curve and then everything is going to go away by September.

00:32:30.000 And that does lead to some pretty significant questions about the modeling.

00:32:34.000 Yeah, well, I mean, if you listen closely, I think it has been said by the White House Task Force, at least, and Fauci specifically, as well as Dr. Birx, that there is an anticipated second wave, if you want to call it, or it is being thought of as, OK, if you want to call it, or it is being thought of as, OK, we're probably going to get this somewhat like the flu in terms of seasonal, So,

00:33:00.000 So the real direction of health policy in this is twofold.

00:33:05.000 It's not just not overwhelm the health care system.

00:33:08.000 It's number one to save lives, to protect the people who are going to die.

00:33:13.000 And when we look at just looking at the New York data, OK, New York data alone, Something like 1.5% of deaths are in people without any previous underlying condition.

00:33:25.000 Okay, so that's very impactful on the decision-making because we know who's going to die.

00:33:30.000 There are exceptions.

00:33:32.000 No one's saying there's no exceptions, but exceptions don't disprove the rule.

00:33:35.000 So the number one goal is to stop people from dying.

00:33:38.000 The number two goal is to make sure that we don't overwhelm the system so that we can take care of sick people and so that we don't endanger our health care provider network of doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists etc.

00:33:55.000 And so that to me I think the appropriate policy is to have Isolation of the people who are vulnerable.

00:34:03.000 I mean, in a very strict way, making sure that people understand that there is a strategic isolation going.

00:34:10.000 That is the vulnerable and the people who interact with it.

00:34:15.000 People who are sick, everyone who's sick absolutely must assume, with or without testing, they should assume they have the virus and then proceed in an isolation mode for the two weeks that are recommended.

00:34:28.000 And number three, a prioritization of testing.

00:34:33.000 So that means who should be tested?

00:34:36.000 People who are in the hospital, who have the symptoms and are sick, make sure they have, they do or do not have this so they can be isolated.

00:34:45.000 People that are interacting with older people, like nursing home workers.

00:34:50.000 People in the healthcare profession.

00:34:51.000 This is the... that are taking care of patients.

00:34:54.000 These people need to be tested.

00:34:56.000 It's not true that there's this urgent, equally urgent need to test everybody immediately.

00:35:02.000 That is not really... that's a bad message, I think, to send out.

00:35:07.000 And the second thing to understand is that if you're sick and otherwise healthy, you don't need to go in to seek medical care.

00:35:14.000 You can call your doctor, but if you just have a mild fever or cough and you don't have shortness of breath or high fever, you should assume you have the virus and stay home.

00:35:24.000 That prevents overwhelming of the system.

00:35:27.000 There is no urgent need for testing of people just out of curiosity or fear.

00:35:33.000 We should, if you're sick, again, assume you have it, be isolated.

00:35:37.000 The goal here is to really stop the people from getting it who are vulnerable.

00:35:42.000 There is a topic that I think is worth knowing about, which is this idea of herd immunity, which means that there's a societal benefit to have people who have the disease, meaning our carriers, sort of get it and develop their own immunity.

00:36:00.000 And the more people that have that, the virus ultimately does disappear as is the case for every other virus that we encounter.

00:36:11.000 And you know, the other part of the equation that I didn't mention is that we should not underestimate the work being done on the drugs.

00:36:20.000 that are being used in clinical trials.

00:36:22.000 And we will start seeing results this month, meaning within a couple of weeks, perhaps even within one week, I've been told by one of the big companies being testing, testing the drug in clinical trials.

00:36:34.000 And these drugs, the intravenous drugs by, for instance, the Gilead drug is a life, if it works, And there's plenty of reason to believe it will work.

00:36:45.000 There's no guarantee.

00:36:46.000 It's not proven.

00:36:47.000 But it did work in other coronavirus models previous to this.

00:36:53.000 In animal models, it does have safety profiles proven already.

00:36:57.000 In fundamental biology, it should work.

00:37:00.000 And if it works, it will save lives.

00:37:02.000 And the other drug that we hear a lot about is the hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin.

00:37:10.000 And there is fundamental biology.

00:37:13.000 It's not just some sort of strange anecdote report.

00:37:16.000 There's fundamental reasons on the mechanism of action of the drug, why this will work.

00:37:22.000 And so I think that's another cause for optimism.

00:37:25.000 It's not a steady state here.

00:37:28.000 We're not where I believe there's reasonable optimism to be held that we will be able to treat the disease.

00:37:38.000 And given that over time, That changes what happens next in terms of, let's just say this comes back next January, February.

00:37:48.000 Okay, by then it's very possible we will have drugs to prevent people from dying.

00:37:53.000 And that changes the whole equation.

00:37:55.000 So how would you rate the federal and state response so far, Dr. Atlas, in terms of responding to this thing?

00:38:00.000 Obviously, there were shortages of ventilators in New York.

00:38:04.000 The government, on a federal level, had been warned for 15, 20 years that they needed to be producing more ventilators.

00:38:09.000 The mask stockpile was not renewed.

00:38:12.000 But how would you sort of rate various responses from state and federal governments on this thing so far, considering it is a Black Swan event?

00:38:19.000 Yeah.

00:38:20.000 I mean, the first, before I even comment, I would say that there is no scenario whereby a health care system would not be overwhelmed by a massive need.

00:38:20.000 OK.

00:38:32.000 If, for instance, if 200 million people needed a ventilator tomorrow, that's just not going to happen.

00:38:37.000 That's not realistic.

00:38:38.000 We're not going to be sitting there with hundreds of millions of these machines.

00:38:43.000 It's just it's unrealistic and sort of silly to contemplate that.

00:38:47.000 I would say that there is, you know, a good but imperfect response.

00:38:54.000 I mean, the first issue was Uh, knowing as soon as possible that there was something serious going on.

00:39:01.000 And that was imperfect.

00:39:02.000 And it was, uh, it was imperfect by our, by our government and by our officials, because we didn't have the information and we assumed we did.

00:39:11.000 And if you look at the quotes by somebody who's really been fantastic, which is.

00:39:15.000 Dr. Fauci in the end of January, he was saying there's no problem here.

00:39:20.000 You have to realize that the president, and luckily for us, the president and the government officials are not winging it here.

00:39:28.000 They're going by what they're told from public health and other experts.

00:39:33.000 So, you know, decisions were made based on flawed information and that information was really, frankly, lies coming out of China and a lot of obscuration of what happened.

00:39:44.000 So no one in the world was prepared.

00:39:48.000 But I think we did implement a pretty quick, I think President Trump implemented a pretty quick travel ban on incoming China flights.

00:39:57.000 That was good.

00:39:58.000 I wish there was a stronger and quicker response to bans on incoming flights from other centers of the infection, including Europe.

00:40:07.000 It's hard to do.

00:40:09.000 I think that the response of our system has been Uh, I think very good.

00:40:16.000 And I would say that, uh, given that, okay, I'm not minimizing it.

00:40:20.000 People are dying.

00:40:21.000 Probably tens of thousands of people.

00:40:23.000 That's a huge tragedy, but not everything in retrospect, uh, is, is that it was done wrong.

00:40:30.000 Certain things are insurmountable.

00:40:33.000 Uh, I think we implemented the right policies to try to at least immediately capture the kind of containment mode of isolating.

00:40:42.000 Given we're not a society where we're going to put people in jail and bar them in their homes with physical barriers, I mean, we're a little bit different than some of the other societies, but I think our response has been good with that.

00:40:57.000 We have fantastic experts working on this.

00:41:00.000 Tremendous amount of uncertainty.

00:41:02.000 You know, models are fallible.

00:41:03.000 People are fallible.

00:41:04.000 I think our numbers of capacity for critical care beds is the highest in the world.

00:41:11.000 per capita, and particularly per capita of people vulnerable to die.

00:41:18.000 Okay, when you look at the data, which I have, and you calculate it, we have anywhere from two to ten times what every other country has.

00:41:26.000 Okay, we're not sitting there with our pants down, having an inadequate health care system.

00:41:31.000 It's just that this is a very, very urgent situation.

00:41:35.000 In terms of ventilators, I mean, yes, you know, it's a common Concept that, okay, we don't have enough ventilators.

00:41:43.000 On the other hand, I think we are short in the hot spot of Manhattan.

00:41:51.000 There's no question.

00:41:53.000 But we're mobilizing.

00:41:54.000 We have a very nimble healthcare system compared to other systems.

00:41:58.000 I'll give you an example.

00:41:59.000 CMS just authorized, waived a lot of rules on ambulatory surgery centers.

00:42:06.000 Uh, which we have, which are mainly private.

00:42:08.000 They're not government run.

00:42:10.000 And we have 5,800 ambulatory surgery centers in the country, by far more than any other country.

00:42:16.000 And why is that important?

00:42:17.000 Because A, those places have ventilators.

00:42:20.000 Let's just say on average, the estimate is five per ambulatory surgery center.

00:42:25.000 That's 29,000 ventilators right away that have been freed up because elective surgeries and elective uses of those centers have been stopped.

00:42:34.000 Other countries can't do that.

00:42:36.000 We can shift and move around things very quickly, and we are.

00:42:41.000 And we've relaxed rules on ambulatory surgery centers, by the way, for healthcare providers for admitting people for more than 24 hours, which was forbidden before.

00:42:52.000 We've relaxed rules on the use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe medicine.

00:42:58.000 to do things that they're capable of but not really authorized to do in a normal circumstance without physician input.

00:43:06.000 We've authorized distance monitoring of patients.

00:43:11.000 So, I mean, there's a lot of things being done that we can do and have done and are doing because we are a nimble, non-government centralized healthcare system.

00:43:22.000 I think we're, you know, we have a lot of problems because it's a very difficult new virus to deal with.

00:43:30.000 We have the most innovative system in the world.

00:43:33.000 Our system has the appropriate incentives in place for drug development, for vaccine development, and our private entrepreneurs and private sector medical technology system, which is by far the best in the world in terms of just quantity as well as quality, is working very well on this.

00:43:55.000 Our FDA is streamlining, I think, you know, tremendously in getting through new approvals, new drugs, new clinical trials.

00:44:06.000 I mean, there's so much going on that people don't realize and I'm very confident that this A is temporary, biologically speaking.

00:44:17.000 That's just simply factual.

00:44:20.000 But B, I'm optimistic that this is going to be controlled and we are going to get back to work and less and less people are going to die because of the way our system operates.

00:44:33.000 Last question on the death rates and the models.

00:44:37.000 So we've seen models that suggest anywhere from 36,000 people to 2.2 million people dying in the United States.

00:44:43.000 Where do you think that, given the measures that are currently being taken by states and that probably are not likely to let up, I would say, at this point until May, it seems is sort of the common denominator, where do you think that those numbers end up over the course of, say, a year?

00:44:55.000 Yeah, I mean, it's obviously impossible to predict, but I would put it this way.

00:45:00.000 When you look at the models, they've been coming down significantly from the original models.

00:45:08.000 And there's a reason for that.

00:45:09.000 The original models were worst case scenarios, and they assumed that nothing was being done.

00:45:16.000 We know that this isolation works.

00:45:18.000 So when you look at the model that the government is really using, which the sort of average of the range of prediction in that model by Murray and others is roughly in the US, maybe 80,000 or so deaths, which is

00:45:37.000 dramatic and huge and tragic for all the reasons that of course we know with the range of really being in the order of 30 to maybe a hundred and some thousand and so my guess as we proceed and again you know nobody really can predict is we're going to see more and more cases by virtue of more and more testing and by virtue of spread also

00:46:06.000 We're going to see a lower and lower fatality rate on the order of under 1%.

00:46:12.000 I think that's highly likely, if not already proven.

00:46:16.000 And we're going to see, you know, I'm hoping we see tens of thousands of people die in the United States as a maximum.

00:46:26.000 And the perspective on that Can also be ascertained from looking at the modelers, a different group of modelers who came out with this first estimate that you mentioned, 2.2 million in the US, 500,000 in the UK.

00:46:39.000 They changed in three days to saying 20,000 in the UK instead of 500,000.

00:46:44.000 And so the models are fluid.

00:46:47.000 This is not a criticism of the modelers.

00:46:49.000 This is understanding that the, the inputs are really making all kinds of assumptions and those, those inputs change dramatically.

00:46:58.000 I want to put a little bit about perspective on deaths, and this is not at all to be minimizing anything.

00:47:04.000 I don't want any viewer to interpret this as a minimization.

00:47:09.000 But when you look at the number of deaths from the flu every year in the United States, we have between 30,000 and 60,000 people die in the U.S. 30,000 to 60,000 people die in the U.S. every year.

00:47:26.000 every year from the flu.

00:47:30.000 600,000 people in the world die from the flu per year, roughly.

00:47:37.000 And so it's a tragedy.

00:47:39.000 It's horrible.

00:47:41.000 But we do have to realize that if we get out of this with under 100,000 people dying, it's It could have been a lot worse and was projected to be a lot worse.

00:47:56.000 And we will move forward.

00:47:57.000 This will end.

00:47:59.000 Dr. Atlas, I want to do a quick lightning round with you.

00:48:01.000 Five questions specifically.

00:48:03.000 If you have to set an end date for this particular crisis, when people start to go back to work, what do you think the end date is when people start to go back to work here?

00:48:11.000 OK, it's a guess, but I'm thinking there's going to be a re-entry into the workforce sometime early summer.

00:48:19.000 What do you think America is going to look like six months from now?

00:48:21.000 Do you think we're all going to be wearing masks?

00:48:23.000 Are we all going to be socially distancing still?

00:48:25.000 Are all the concerts and the sports leagues going to be closed still?

00:48:28.000 What do you think America looks like?

00:48:30.000 I think we're going to have some sort of new normal, which might involve some sort of testing before group events.

00:48:36.000 I could see that happening.

00:48:39.000 I think many people wear masks.

00:48:42.000 It's their choice.

00:48:43.000 I'm not a, I don't think there's sound medical evidence to use general population masks.

00:48:50.000 And I do not think that that warning, by the way, was absent because of some kind of shortage.

00:48:56.000 That's not the reason it's medical science.

00:48:59.000 So I don't think that, but I think a lot more people will be wearing masks.

00:49:06.000 I think we're going to be more prepared.

00:49:08.000 This has really heightened the alert.

00:49:12.000 We're going to see another one.

00:49:13.000 We've seen, this is the third since 2003, 2004.

00:49:15.000 There's no question we will see another one.

00:49:19.000 I think this is really going to be much, we're going to try to be more prepared.

00:49:25.000 We're going to learn from this.

00:49:27.000 Not just with vaccines, but technology to generate new drugs and vaccines, the infrastructure.

00:49:35.000 And also, and I'm involved with a big effort now, making sure we understand that health security is national security.

00:49:44.000 How should we treat China after all of this, considering the lies that they told, considering the fact that if they had let everybody know what was going on, that we'd probably prevent, according to some studies, 90% and 95% of all casualties from this thing? 0.77

00:49:55.000 How should the world health community treat China?

00:49:58.000 You know, I think that China, I think this sort of opens people's eyes.

00:50:02.000 I hope it opens people's eyes to what the economists have known all along, which is that their economic numbers are not to be believed.

00:50:09.000 This is clearly nothing they're saying about how many cases they have or anything is to be believed.

00:50:14.000 They did something really heinous here in covering this up.

00:50:19.000 I think China has really lost a tremendous amount of credibility in the rest of the world.

00:50:26.000 And I think that changes their position tremendously.

00:50:31.000 And by the way, I think a lot of other countries will be understanding they cannot depend on China for a lot of things, including And finally, the measures that we're taking now on a personal level, the sort of social distancing, no handshaking, staying away from elderly people more. 0.97

00:50:50.000 Are those going to be temporary or do you expect those to be permanent?

00:50:53.000 I think those are going to be temporary.

00:50:54.000 I think we'll be more conscious of things and we'll be conscious of it just like we have been in the past with the flu, getting flu immunizations.

00:51:03.000 Everyone should get that.

00:51:04.000 Everyone will get these immunizations.

00:51:07.000 I think there'll be a new normal, but it will fade into a near normal.

00:51:14.000 Well, Dr. Atlas, really appreciate your time and your insight.

00:51:16.000 Thank you so much for your hard work and stay safe out there or in there as the case may be.

00:51:19.000 Okay, thanks very much.

00:51:20.000 Now that we've heard the public health perspective, let's turn to the economy.

00:51:29.000 Bringing us the economist's point of view is Mohamed El-Erian, the Chief Economic Advisor to financial services company Allianz and President-elect of Queen's College at the University of Cambridge.

00:51:39.000 He's the Senior Advisor at Gramercy and Professor of Practice at Wharton.

00:51:42.000 He's an opinion columnist for Bloomberg and has authored The Only Game in Town and When Markets Collide.

00:51:47.000 Well, Mohammed, great to see you.

00:51:48.000 I'm glad that you and your family are safe.

00:51:50.000 Thanks so much for joining us.

00:51:51.000 So let me start by asking you about the sort of balance that we have to draw between public health and economic need.

00:51:58.000 There's this weird dynamic that crops up mostly on Twitter, where one side of the debate suggests that the economy is real life and therefore we should sort of ignore the public health warnings.

00:52:08.000 After all, is this worth losing?

00:52:10.000 Tens of millions of jobs and tens of trillions of dollars.

00:52:13.000 And on the other side, you have people who are saying, if we even save one life, then we have to all lock down for the rest of time.

00:52:20.000 As an economist, how do you determine where exactly these sorts of lines should be drawn, how we create these balances?

00:52:26.000 And thank you, Ben, for having me.

00:52:27.000 Look, there is an inherent contradiction, and that's why you get what you mentioned, an inherent contradiction between what this phase of the health policy is social distancing, separation, isolation, and what the economy is wired for.

00:52:43.000 And the economy and society are both wired for connectivity, integration.

00:52:49.000 So there is this tension that's playing out, and understandably so.

00:52:55.000 I think you have to think about this sequentially.

00:52:57.000 It's not an either-or, it's just a sequence over time.

00:53:01.000 Priority number one is to get control of the virus, contain its spread, treat the ill better, and hopefully increase immunity.

00:53:11.000 Until we get the first two things done, it's going to be very hard to restart this economy without going into a W. You start, and then you have to come down again.

00:53:21.000 And we don't want a W. Having said that, we have to protect the economy.

00:53:26.000 And this stage is about relief, about containing the damage.

00:53:29.000 And there'll come a next stage, which is going to be about trying to return the economy to some sense of normalcy.

00:53:35.000 So I want to ask you about the relief measures that have been taken in just a second, but you've been looking at the same models that I've been looking at, you know, the models from University of Washington or the Imperial College models.

00:53:44.000 And one of the problems I have in looking at the models, especially when we're thinking in terms of the economy, is trying to figure out when people go back to work is pretty difficult when these models end in August.

00:53:53.000 Nobody seems to be taking into account what happens in a second wave.

00:53:55.000 Nobody seems to be suggesting what level of medical capacity will have to be in September in order for us not to go back into that W-shaped lockdown that you've talked about.

00:54:04.000 And so it makes it almost impossible to determine at what point we have a metric of success.

00:54:10.000 From an economist's point of view, what would a metric of success look like such that we could have a permanent return to the workforce for at least a segment of the population?

00:54:17.000 So, Ben, you've zeroed on an issue that's going to come up, I suspect, in everything we discussed today.

00:54:23.000 Which is we don't know.

00:54:25.000 There's lots of things we don't know.

00:54:26.000 We are learning as we go along.

00:54:28.000 This is a shock that was unthinkable.

00:54:32.000 If you happened like me when I was young, when I was your age, I worked on a fragile and failed economy.

00:54:38.000 I saw what that looks like.

00:54:40.000 Most people haven't.

00:54:41.000 And we've never seen a sudden stop hit us at a level of the country as a whole, let alone the global economy.

00:54:48.000 So we're learning in crisis management mode.

00:54:51.000 We are basically trying to keep a plane in the air while trying to build engines and figuring out what to do with it.

00:54:58.000 So this is really hard.

00:54:59.000 I don't know what the answer is.

00:55:00.000 I don't think anybody knows what the answer is.

00:55:02.000 The key issue here is to have an open mindset, to be able to make trade-offs, and to be honest about the trade-offs we're making.

00:55:09.000 Because we're going to make some trade-offs, and we're going to make some mistakes.

00:55:12.000 I want to talk about how long, realistically speaking, from an economic perspective, we can last like this.

00:55:18.000 So we've had a full-on economic stop globally.

00:55:21.000 I mean, the United States, we're going to see unemployment rates like we've literally never seen in American history.

00:55:26.000 We're going to see people thrown out of their jobs.

00:55:28.000 It's going to give the lie to the myth that companies somehow have safes full of cash in their back rooms that they're just withholding from their employees, because everybody's going to go basically bankrupt within the next few weeks, because it turns out that's not how companies actually operate.

00:55:41.000 How long can we just keep floating along on basically taking out a credit card when nobody is going to buy our debt?

00:55:48.000 I mean, it's basically a bunch of countries that are selling their debt to each other at this point.

00:55:52.000 How long is that sustainable before you start to see shortages, before you start to see No underlying economic activity have the sort of permanent significant impacts on the economy that we just can't recover from.

00:56:02.000 So first, it's going to be horrific.

00:56:05.000 It's going to be worse than anything we've ever seen.

00:56:07.000 And there's no hiding this.

00:56:08.000 And we have to be honest with the American people that we are facing a very difficult economic outlook that will make the sense of health and security feel compounded by economic insecurity.

00:56:20.000 And I wish I could have another message, Ben, but that's the reality.

00:56:23.000 Already we've seen 10 Now, the good news is relative to every other country in the world, we can manage this awful journey a lot better.

00:56:33.000 Not smoothly, but a lot better.

00:56:34.000 Why is that?

00:56:35.000 we decide to sacrifice the health issue.

00:56:36.000 Now, the good news is relative to every other country in the world, we can manage this awful journey a lot better.

00:56:45.000 Not smoothly, but a lot better.

00:56:48.000 Why is that?

00:56:49.000 Because we are part of a neighborhood that's being hit hard.

00:56:52.000 So we have better capacity to avoid the things you said, Shortage.

00:56:59.000 Avoid temporary problems becoming permanent ones.

00:57:03.000 And we've got to get money to people quickly.

00:57:06.000 Now we're going to make trade-offs that you and I don't like.

00:57:10.000 I can tell you right now, we're not going to like what we're going to do.

00:57:13.000 But in crisis management, you've got to contain the crisis first and then try to clean things up.

00:57:20.000 We have that ability, but it's not going to be perfect.

00:57:23.000 There's going to be a lot of casualties out there.

00:57:26.000 And then you and I should talk later.

00:57:28.000 This is not just about winning the war.

00:57:31.000 And it is a war.

00:57:33.000 This is also about winning the peace.

00:57:35.000 And what we learned in 2008-9, that if you don't win the peace, you come out fragile.

00:57:41.000 And we've got to avoid that.

00:57:42.000 So let's talk now about the relief efforts that have been attempted here.

00:57:46.000 So Congress obviously passes the largest spending package in the history of the world, $2 trillion.

00:57:50.000 The Federal Reserve is injecting another $4 trillion into the system.

00:57:53.000 So for folks who don't understand exactly what Congress did here and what the Federal Reserve did here, what exactly did Congress do?

00:57:58.000 What exactly did the Federal Reserve do?

00:58:00.000 So the Federal Reserve tried to stop, and so far has been successful, a crisis that originated in health and paralyzed the economy from creating a financial crisis.

00:58:12.000 We came this close, this close, Ben, on a Monday, two weeks ago, to having both a 1930s-like depression and having a 2008-like global financial crisis.

00:58:26.000 We came this close.

00:58:27.000 And the Fed simply had to flood certain segments of the market because the Treasury market, the senior market, the mother of all markets, the most senior market in the world, was dysfunctional.

00:58:40.000 And that means that the pipes were clogged.

00:58:43.000 I know we don't pay attention to the pipes, and many people watching this will say, I don't know anything about the pipes.

00:58:49.000 But you know in your house, when the pipes are problematic, you have a major problem.

00:58:53.000 And we came this close to the pipes clogging.

00:58:55.000 That was the Fed.

00:58:57.000 Congress and the administration are trying something else completely.

00:59:01.000 They're trying to stop short-term problems from becoming long-term solvency issues.

00:59:08.000 Let me give an example.

00:59:11.000 A company right now cannot sell anything.

00:59:14.000 If you're a restaurant, if you are cutting hair, whatever, you have no earnings.

00:59:21.000 It doesn't mean you can't cut hair in future.

00:59:23.000 It's just you can't do it now.

00:59:25.000 It's a liquidity problem.

00:59:27.000 If you don't deal with your liquidity problem, you go bankrupt.

00:59:31.000 And what happens when you go bankrupt?

00:59:32.000 Lots of bad things happen and the productive capacity of the whole economy contracts, which means we hit ourselves now and we hit ourselves in the future.

00:59:41.000 That is what Congress and the White House are trying to do.

00:59:44.000 It's not easy because Many pipes aren't there yet.

00:59:48.000 So when we talk about the Federal Reserve buying up commercial paper or backing bank loans, it seemed to me one of my recommendations early on was that the first chief response here should be to prevent the banks from being forced to call in all of the loans, from being forced to call in the mortgages, from seeing the sort of stuff we saw in 2007, 2008.

01:00:07.000 Instead, it looks like the government is going to start floating basically direct loans to businesses as opposed to via banks.

01:00:13.000 Do you think it would be better to go via the banks, or do you think that it would be better to start giving out direct loans via the government, as some have called for?

01:00:19.000 So both, okay?

01:00:20.000 And I think the banks are under pressure not to do what you said.

01:00:24.000 And they have been provided massive relief.

01:00:27.000 Massive relief.

01:00:28.000 They have had constraints on them taken off.

01:00:32.000 I can go through them, but they're very technical.

01:00:35.000 And there's no excuse for the banks not stepping up to their responsibility.

01:00:39.000 And I think they really want to be part of the solution, because they were part of the problem last time around.

01:00:44.000 And when it comes to the possibility of inflation, a lot of people have been worried deeply about what comes due on the other end of this.

01:00:49.000 So obviously, we've been spending out of control for literally decades at this point.

01:00:53.000 We just added $6 trillion, presumably, to the national debt over the course of about three weeks here.

01:00:59.000 The appetite for debt out there has to be fairly low, considering that literally every other country in the world is incurring its own set of debts.

01:01:08.000 So is this going to be a situation where the United States is either going to have to radically raise taxes two years from now, or where we are going to have to radically inflate the currency?

01:01:16.000 So there's three issues here.

01:01:17.000 First, the inflation risk.

01:01:19.000 Yes, it is going up.

01:01:21.000 This period we've lived where we haven't had to worry about inflation, and to the extent that the policymakers did, it was because inflation was too low.

01:01:29.000 That has gone away.

01:01:31.000 We are going to have high inflation coming out of this.

01:01:33.000 That's part of winning the peace, is understanding that we have to deal with this.

01:01:38.000 And why?

01:01:39.000 Because when we restart the economy, which we'll do, You and I will want to buy things much faster than they will be available.

01:01:48.000 So we're going to put pressure.

01:01:49.000 Demand is going to recover before supply does.

01:01:51.000 So we're going to have inflation.

01:01:53.000 Second issue.

01:01:54.000 No, we're not going to have a problem selling the debt.

01:01:56.000 You know, I call it the cleanest dirty shirt.

01:01:59.000 You and I are, you know, anybody's on a trip.

01:02:02.000 The trip is extended suddenly because the airlines don't fly.

01:02:06.000 We can't get to a laundry.

01:02:07.000 We've got to wear a shirt.

01:02:08.000 We're going to wear the cleanest dirty shirt.

01:02:10.000 We are the cleanest dirty shirt by far in the world.

01:02:13.000 So we will be able to sell our debt.

01:02:14.000 We have the reserve currency.

01:02:16.000 However, we are going to come out of this with a really deep entanglement of government and private sector activity.

01:02:24.000 It will be a spaghetti ball bet.

01:02:26.000 You and I are going to be talking about this.

01:02:28.000 It's going to be a messy spaghetti ball because all these things are being done ad hoc.

01:02:34.000 So, can you talk a little bit about that?

01:02:46.000 What specifically, give an example, do you mean by that sort of entanglement that we should worry about?

01:02:52.000 Because I think there are a lot of people who are fiscally conservative, like I am, who say, well, my goal, as soon as the thing is over, is to get government the hell out of this as fast as humanly possible, since government Obviously did a terrible job preparing for it. 0.99

01:03:04.000 And then I sort of believe the government is a giant lumbering idiot. 0.99

01:03:07.000 And that doesn't mean you don't need a giant lumbering idiot every so often to intimidate people to stay in their homes. 1.00

01:03:12.000 But it does mean that you want it out of a more nimble private sector as fast as possible. 0.98

01:03:16.000 What's that entanglement look like coming out of this?

01:03:18.000 So let's take bailouts, okay?

01:03:21.000 That's a perfect example.

01:03:22.000 So we've already identified Boeing and the airlines as recipients of bailouts.

01:03:29.000 We did so because they were at the front end of this process.

01:03:34.000 There was this notion that they're exceptions.

01:03:36.000 They're not exceptions.

01:03:37.000 They're leading indicators, right?

01:03:39.000 Every sector I know, except for a few, are having a simultaneous destruction of consumption and production.

01:03:49.000 So the line for bailouts is going to be very, very long.

01:03:54.000 So if you embark on a bailout strategy without having clear principle who you're going to bail out, why you're going to bail them out, how long for, on what term and what the exit policy is, you end up with a spaghetti bowl.

01:04:08.000 And the danger is... Now, what is that spaghetti bowl?

01:04:11.000 OK, so Boeing survives because of government help.

01:04:17.000 So what's the government's claim on Boeing when they recover?

01:04:20.000 How long should the government be an equity holder in Boeing?

01:04:24.000 Where should it be when it's to other equity holders?

01:04:26.000 None of this has been discussed, and this has got to be sorted out.

01:04:30.000 Would it be better, in your opinion, to avoid that sort of spaghetti ball if the government were just providing basically zero-interest loans to these firms as opposed to trying to grab chunks of them?

01:04:39.000 We saw Boeing actually turn down the possibility of government ownership in a stake.

01:04:43.000 They said, we'll fire people before we allow the government to run our business. 0.99

01:04:46.000 If you're trying to encourage businesses to keep people employed, one of the questions I've had about the bill that Congress passed is the interference in how businesses are run, the idea that if you're a small business, that we are going to float you a loan specifically so you can maintain your employment base.

01:04:59.000 But as you said, there is literally no market for your employees to cater to.

01:05:04.000 So would it not be better for the government to provide zero interest loans to companies via banks that can assess risk and then to just increase the unemployment insurance on the other side so that we are not actually providing incentives for companies to keep people on the payrolls?

01:05:17.000 And then the minute that this thing ends, fire everybody, which is presumably what will happen because the market is not going to recover simultaneously with the end of this pandemic.

01:05:25.000 So they're trying to stop that by saying if you keep them on, some of your existing loans you're going to get are going to be...

01:05:33.000 Forgiven.

01:05:34.000 But your way is a critical point.

01:05:36.000 If I was to play it again, you know what?

01:05:38.000 The Monday morning quarterbacking is really tempting, but I've been in crisis management situations.

01:05:43.000 You are making decisions with imperfect information, and you're making it up as you go along.

01:05:49.000 And that's what happened with this $2 trillion package.

01:05:51.000 And having a T ahead of the rest of it makes us really worried, because that's a really large number.

01:05:57.000 It was unthinkable just three months ago.

01:06:00.000 Look, you raise two issues that I wish in the next phase, because there will be a next phase, implementation, we think about.

01:06:07.000 One is incentive alignment.

01:06:08.000 You talk about incentive alignments.

01:06:11.000 It's really important to us to align public and private sector incentives.

01:06:16.000 And the second one that is as important when you do this is behavioral science.

01:06:22.000 Understand how people respond.

01:06:25.000 And neither of these things have informed enough The design of the program for understandable reason, but they must inform the implementation because we are going to learn as we go along and we have to have an open mindset.

01:06:38.000 I keep on telling people, when you deal in massive uncertainty, you're going to make mistakes.

01:06:45.000 No one wants to make mistakes, but you're going to make a mistake.

01:06:48.000 Make sure you can learn quickly and correct it.

01:06:50.000 Most mistakes are recoverable.

01:06:52.000 It's the failure to learn from this mistake that makes it non-recoverable.

01:06:56.000 And we must avoid that then.

01:06:58.000 So you're warning for years that use of central banks as the as the chief policymakers in finance was going to be a large scale mistake because governments were basically avoiding their responsibility.

01:07:08.000 We had already brought the interest rates down to extreme lows in the United States, even leading up to this, which meant that there was just less water in the hose.

01:07:15.000 Now, there may have been enough water in the hose to forestall something for the moment, but looking forward to the future, is that failure to abide by actual policymaking across countries, not just in the United States, but in Europe as well, and the overuse of central banks as chief policymakers, has that watered down the ability of central banks to do what they need to do, and is it going to make the recovery a lot steeper on the other end?

01:07:37.000 Yes, and yes, and it's really unfortunate because this was an avoidable mistake.

01:07:42.000 You know, I wrote this book in 2016 called The Only Game in Town, and the last bit of it was avoiding the next collapse.

01:07:50.000 And I argued then, and an update of the book is coming up, I argued then that within five years, we will come to what I call the T-junction.

01:07:59.000 That the path we were on, that relied only on central banks, would plant the seeds of its own destruction.

01:08:06.000 And then we would have to make a choice, turn towards better policy, genuine growth, genuine financial stability, none of the artificial stuff that we've done, or alternatively, recession.

01:08:20.000 and financial stability.

01:08:22.000 And I argued that the vulnerability to a shock was very high.

01:08:25.000 I never imagined the shock would be as big as this, Ben.

01:08:29.000 Never imagined.

01:08:31.000 But now it caught us weak.

01:08:33.000 It caught us fragile.

01:08:35.000 Our ability to recover is going to be less strong because of that.

01:08:42.000 And that's what I meant about coming out of the global financial crisis.

01:08:45.000 We didn't win the peace.

01:08:48.000 We just won the war.

01:08:49.000 We didn't win.

01:08:49.000 And this time around, we've got to be much more thoughtful.

01:08:52.000 You and I can talk for the whole show about how different the post-crisis landscape is going to look like.

01:08:58.000 Let's prepare for it now.

01:08:59.000 So let's talk about that.

01:09:00.000 What will the post-crisis landscape look like, and how exactly do we prepare for it?

01:09:04.000 There was a lot of talk early on when this first broke that this was going to be a V-shaped recovery.

01:09:07.000 OK, so everybody loses their job for a month, and then we all go back to work.

01:09:10.000 And it's basically summer vacation, except paid for by the government.

01:09:13.000 But obviously, that is not the case.

01:09:15.000 There are going to be some permanent landscape shifts in how the economy works.

01:09:18.000 I mean, at least for the next year, restaurants, the entertainment industry, movies, sports, How office buildings work, all of this is going to change.

01:09:27.000 What does the post-crisis landscape look like, and how do we win the piece?

01:09:32.000 So I have a piece of paper here where I keep on writing down how a difference is going to look.

01:09:36.000 I ran out of one side, I started the second side.

01:09:39.000 We're going to look very different.

01:09:41.000 Very different.

01:09:43.000 If you're a company, you're going to swing from efficiency to resilience.

01:09:48.000 You're going to say, forget all about this just-in-time inventory management.

01:09:52.000 Forget about these globalized supply chains.

01:09:55.000 I want to increase my resilience.

01:09:57.000 So we're going to de-globalize the world.

01:10:00.000 Households are going to become much more cautious.

01:10:05.000 They are going to increase their precautionary savings.

01:10:07.000 So we're going to see a change in household behavior.

01:10:10.000 We are going to see a change in work practices.

01:10:14.000 You just mentioned some of them.

01:10:16.000 We're going to see a change in so many things we do.

01:10:19.000 Institutions are going to come out of this battered.

01:10:22.000 Our trust in the establishment is going to be even weaker after this.

01:10:27.000 So there's going to be lots of things.

01:10:29.000 We are going to have massive debt.

01:10:32.000 We would have lowered our productivity because we're going to rewire the economy.

01:10:36.000 And when you rewire the economy, productivity goes down.

01:10:39.000 So our ability to afford that debt will be less.

01:10:42.000 Central banks will have massive balance sheets that we need to deal with.

01:10:47.000 Just to give you an example, in two weeks alone, we've increased the balance sheet by over a trillion dollars.

01:10:54.000 And like you said, four trillion expansion is on the cards.

01:10:59.000 That is incredible.

01:11:00.000 So it is a very different landscape.

01:11:04.000 We can manage it, but we have to plan from now.

01:11:08.000 The aftermath of the crisis is going to be as important as what seems pretty horrible now.

01:11:14.000 So how do we plan for stuff like that?

01:11:16.000 So to take for an example, you mentioned the breaking of global supply chains.

01:11:19.000 Now, there are going to be a lot of firms that look at China, for example, and say, we're not locating there because of what just happened.

01:11:24.000 But presumably, there will be one or two firms that say, OK, well, the reward is worth the risk.

01:11:29.000 I'm going to undercut my competitors by continuing to manufacture from China and hope that for 5 or 10 years, there's not another wet market outbreak like this.

01:11:35.000 And so without any sort of government measure that prevents people from undercutting one another by taking that riskier supply chain line, Are those changes going to be permanent, or is the institutional memory here going to be short?

01:11:48.000 So I think it's going to be permanent.

01:11:49.000 And again, we all have a role to play.

01:11:51.000 The last thing you and I want for our kids is the notion that any company is international when it makes profit and national when it fails.

01:12:02.000 Because it means that when it's making profit, everybody else benefits.

01:12:07.000 And when it fails, They come to us, the taxpayer, okay?

01:12:13.000 So there has to be incentives to stop people abusing this notion that you can be international when everything's going well, and then you become national when things go badly.

01:12:21.000 So we can do this.

01:12:22.000 Again, these are about tax incentives.

01:12:25.000 We can do this.

01:12:26.000 We just have to realize that that's the world we're going into, and we have to stop the abuse that you talked about.

01:12:32.000 So let's talk about the stock market for a second.

01:12:33.000 You've mentioned before you were ahead of the curve, as you very often are on this sort of stuff.

01:12:38.000 When the stock market started to drop and people were saying, now's a great time to buy, you were saying, well, wait a second, because it's going to drop some more.

01:12:45.000 How far do you think the stock market is going to drop?

01:12:47.000 You don't have to put a number on it, but how long do you think it's going to drop?

01:12:50.000 Given the uncertainty, have we reached sort of baseline uncertainty and now the news starts to get better?

01:12:56.000 Or do you think that the uncertainty continues for months and months and months?

01:12:59.000 And is this a buying opportunity or should we all just sort of So I think it's the latter.

01:13:06.000 I think it's still time to be very cautious.

01:13:08.000 And I've gone out of my way through my social media and my publication to try and increase the amount of information going to retail investors, small investors in particular, because the tendency of this industry is to tell you, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.

01:13:22.000 Because they make fees when you buy.

01:13:25.000 Look, go back to the uncertainties.

01:13:27.000 We are just about understanding the severity of this shock.

01:13:30.000 We had no idea about this duration.

01:13:33.000 We don't quite understand in the marketplace that it's going to take time for the relief measures to work.

01:13:40.000 We certainly haven't incorporated in the marketplace that the restart isn't about turning on a button, turning on a switch.

01:13:50.000 And none of these things that you and I have talked about, about the post-crisis landscape is priced in.

01:13:55.000 So we are still at an early phase.

01:13:56.000 I tell people, expect volatility around a declining trend for now.

01:14:02.000 And realize that in such an uncertain environment, you're gonna likely make a mistake.

01:14:08.000 No one wants to make a mistake, but you're gonna make a mistake.

01:14:10.000 Ask yourself, what mistake can you afford to make?

01:14:14.000 Is it missing the 5% jump immediately when the bottom is formed?

01:14:20.000 Or is it avoiding another 10 to 15% drop?

01:14:24.000 Regret minimization, in my mind, is what should lead So you mentioned earlier there may come a time when we have to make hard choices with regard to the economy.

01:14:34.000 Too late back into the market, then too early.

01:14:37.000 So you mentioned earlier there may come a time when we have to make hard choices with regard to the economy.

01:14:42.000 That right now we can afford to take the public health hit based on the modeling, that we can all hope that the summer kills this thing off, that we have measures in place by September.

01:14:51.000 But it's pretty obvious that we can't do this indefinitely.

01:14:53.000 We're already starting to see some rioting in southern Italy.

01:14:55.000 We've already seen talk about the EU breaking up and we're only a few weeks into this thing.

01:15:00.000 One of the things that's been bothersome about some of the experts in public health talking about this sort of stuff is the models they put out there.

01:15:06.000 We'll assume things like we're all going to remain home for the next year or 18 months, which obviously is not true.

01:15:11.000 So when does, economically speaking, the pedal hit the metal?

01:15:14.000 When does it basically make or break point where if we don't at least start getting people back to work, then the house of cards completely collapses?

01:15:22.000 Is there a point where we basically have to say if it's a choice between the economy and public health, we just have to choose the economy or there will be no more economy left to choose?

01:15:30.000 So everybody will tell you being risk-averse doesn't mean not taking any risk, okay?

01:15:36.000 It means taking calculated risk.

01:15:39.000 And we do this all day long.

01:15:40.000 We take calculated risk.

01:15:41.000 When we cross the street, we take a calculated risk.

01:15:44.000 If we were completely risk-averse, we wouldn't even cross the street.

01:15:48.000 So at some point, we're going to get to a stage where you're going to have to take a calculated risk.

01:15:54.000 In my opinion, it's going to be when we have gotten control, we've understood how this virus spreads.

01:16:02.000 It's going to be when we have testing facilities out there.

01:16:07.000 When we are better at identifying who has it.

01:16:12.000 And finally, when we can treat the ill better.

01:16:14.000 When we have ventilators, etc.

01:16:15.000 When we get to that stage, we can start talking about taking calculated risks.

01:16:19.000 And we're going to have to.

01:16:20.000 Because you're right.

01:16:21.000 If we shut down the economy for a year, for two years, the cure is going to end up being just as bad as what got us here.

01:16:29.000 Because when you shut down the economy, it's not just about economic insecurity.

01:16:34.000 It's about Domestic violence.

01:16:38.000 It's about social unrest.

01:16:40.000 It's about all these other things that we also have to take into account.

01:16:43.000 We're not there yet, and we have time, but if we don't get our arms around this horrible virus, we're going to have some pretty nasty trade-offs.

01:16:55.000 My great fear is that now's the time when we should be listening to experts, but it's also a time when experts are able to provide us less information than any other time.

01:17:02.000 So we have this sort of backwards behavioral problem, which is we have to listen to the experts to stay home, but they can't provide us enough information that causes us to stay home other than providing these sort of very big top line numbers.

01:17:14.000 And when you say to people, stay home indefinitely, and meanwhile, people are losing their jobs, I wonder how long that can last indefinitely speaking.

01:17:20.000 I mean, I wonder if six weeks from now, when the checks still have not arrived, and when people's bills are still due, whether they just say to the experts, listen, you're not even providing us an end date here.

01:17:29.000 You can't tell people to diet indefinitely.

01:17:31.000 You have to tell them what the end date of the diet is.

01:17:33.000 Otherwise, people start ignoring the dietician.

01:17:36.000 And it was called adjustment fatigue, that at some point we get tired.

01:17:40.000 And the biggest risk we face as a society is the lag effects.

01:17:44.000 So we have made, every single American is making massive sacrifices right now.

01:17:51.000 by staying home.

01:17:53.000 Yes, they're trying to protect their health, but they're also losing jobs.

01:17:58.000 Those who are employed are getting their income cut.

01:18:01.000 So, massive sacrifice.

01:18:02.000 And what I worry about most is because the lagged effects of the so-called curve is at least two to three weeks, at some point we are going to say, collectively or parts of us, hey, wait a minute, you mean I've made all these sacrifices and I haven't flattened the curve?

01:18:20.000 Obviously, Leaders don't know what they're doing, and we're not going to realize that there was a lagged effect there.

01:18:26.000 So it's going to be hard, and this adjustment fatigue is serious.

01:18:30.000 I tell people, you've got to provide honest information.

01:18:35.000 I don't know, Ben, if I may, but I'll give you an example.

01:18:37.000 When my girls came home, they were really unsettled.

01:18:41.000 So what we decided to do is every day we would sit down and talk about what's happening on the coronavirus, and importantly, what to expect.

01:18:48.000 What to expect.

01:18:49.000 And this notion of, I don't know for sure, but this is what I'm looking for, has helped people enormously because you give them a roadmap.

01:18:56.000 We do not have a sufficiently clear roadmap on health and we have no roadmap on the economy.

01:19:02.000 And we've got to share both with the American people.

01:19:05.000 Otherwise, they do, you know, they create their own roadmaps.

01:19:10.000 And if you're worried about the expert not being informed, we individually are going to have, you know, another spaghetti bowl of roadmaps.

01:19:17.000 And we can't have that.

01:19:20.000 Mohammed, I have five questions for a quick lightning round. 0.99

01:19:22.000 So number one, how should the world treat China after this?

01:19:25.000 Obviously, China did not shut this thing down.

01:19:27.000 They lied to the WHO.

01:19:29.000 If they had revealed this information a month in advance, there are some studies that suggest 95% of all casualties could have been avoided.

01:19:34.000 So how should the world treat China after this?

01:19:36.000 I've heard suggestions from people that I don't think are doable, like we should just cancel our debt to China.

01:19:43.000 How should we deal with China and what sort of reparations should China be forced to pay for what has been incurred here?

01:19:48.000 So starting with the trade war, I think we've emerged from this happy talk that China is a global responsible player.

01:19:58.000 China is not a global responsible player.

01:20:00.000 China does not play to the global rules.

01:20:03.000 And we haven't held China accountable for a very long time.

01:20:06.000 We should continue to hold China accountable and we should do it with our allies. 0.99

01:20:11.000 But this is a moment to say enough is enough.

01:20:14.000 We've tolerated Intellectual property theft.

01:20:18.000 We've tolerated all that.

01:20:19.000 We will not tolerate you being part of the export of a virus.

01:20:25.000 So I think we got to hold China much more accountable to its global responsibilities now that we've allowed it to be part of the global economy.

01:20:33.000 Will the measures that we are now taking be temporary or permanent?

01:20:36.000 This is my great fear, is that people tend to use crises as an opportunity to confirm their priors.

01:20:41.000 And when it comes to the growth of government, we've never seen anything like this in so quick a time.

01:20:45.000 Are the measures that we are taking now expedient, or do you think that these become a permanent feature of the American landscape?

01:20:50.000 So I, like you, worry about short-term measures becoming long-term measures.

01:20:55.000 OK, that's why we have to think about this very carefully as we implement it.

01:20:59.000 Look, that risk is there and we've got to collectively make sure that it doesn't reach critical mass, because if it does, then our longer term prosperity will be threatened.

01:21:09.000 What can we do to prevent a couple of things that we can do to prevent this kind of economic meltdown next time a black swan event hits like this?

01:21:18.000 So we need to develop three things that we haven't developed.

01:21:21.000 Resilience, the ability to live through shocks, and that starts at the government level, the household level, and the corporate level.

01:21:29.000 Two, optionality, this ability to change our minds as we get better information.

01:21:34.000 Don't get stuck on an old model.

01:21:37.000 And finally, agility.

01:21:39.000 The good news, and I think there are silver linings, when we emerge from this, we are going to have an opportunity set.

01:21:47.000 What do you think America will look like six months from now?

01:21:50.000 I'm worried.

01:21:51.000 I'm worried.

01:21:51.000 to respond.

01:21:52.000 It will look different, but we have the best initial conditions, Ben, to respond with agility and be able to bounce back, not fully, but certainly faster than we would otherwise.

01:22:03.000 What do you think America will look like six months from now?

01:22:07.000 I'm worried.

01:22:08.000 I think six months from now, there's a big chance that our economy is still hit hard, that we have pockets of social unrest.

01:22:16.000 And I'm worried.

01:22:18.000 This is going to be a hard journey.

01:22:19.000 It's one of these things, you know, it's like taking your kids on a trip.

01:22:22.000 Even if you're going to Disneyland, if it's an 11-hour car journey, they're going to find the journey really long.

01:22:29.000 And at some point, you're fed up with hearing, are we there yet?

01:22:33.000 Are we there yet?

01:22:34.000 Are we there yet?

01:22:35.000 Okay.

01:22:35.000 I'm afraid that that's what it's going to look like.

01:22:37.000 The journey is going to be horrific.

01:22:39.000 And I'm worried that our social fabric is going to be really stressed.

01:22:44.000 Prior to all of this, obviously, the stock market was at all-time highs.

01:22:47.000 Unemployment was at all-time lows.

01:22:49.000 How long do you think it is before we return to those sorts of numbers?

01:22:52.000 So, on the unemployment side, a long time.

01:22:55.000 A long time.

01:22:56.000 Because certain businesses aren't going to come back.

01:22:58.000 And people are going to have to retool.

01:23:00.000 And, you know, I'm worried about this.

01:23:03.000 And I hope, you know, I make predictions and I normally hope I'm right.

01:23:07.000 This time around, I hope I'm completely wrong on all these predictions.

01:23:11.000 I hope it turns out that it is a V, that we simply flick on a switch and this is just a bad nightmare.

01:23:17.000 But it's going to take a long time.

01:23:19.000 And same with the markets.

01:23:20.000 We've come from a very special period, but we're being hit with a deadly virus that's going to create permanent scars.

01:23:30.000 Well, Mohamed, I really appreciate your time.

01:23:31.000 I really appreciate your insight.

01:23:33.000 Stay safe out there or in there, as the case may be.

01:23:35.000 Great to talk to you.

01:23:36.000 You too.

01:23:37.000 Thank you, Ben.

01:23:38.000 As always, folks, I really appreciate you watching and listening.

01:23:41.000 Stay safe out there or in there, as the new phraseology goes.

01:23:44.000 And we'll see you here next week.

01:23:45.000 week.

01:23:45.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

01:23:47.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mike Joyner and produced by Mathis Glover.

01:23:58.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:24:00.000 Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.

01:24:01.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynor.

01:24:03.000 Host production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.

01:24:06.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:24:07.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

01:24:09.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:24:11.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:24:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - April 05, 2020

Coronavirus Pandemic: Doctor vs. Economist | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 89

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