 Okay, we're back. We're live and see 11 o'clock. I'm J5. This is think tech Hawaii and we're talking about community matters. We're talking about coronavirus. What's next? So let's talk with Winston Welch and Stephanie Dalton about what is happening with the disease. You guys, you did a little research. So Winston, we have new symptoms that have just popped up. What are they? Well, the CDC has advised three new symptoms. It makes it look more like the common cold more than anything else. So in addition to the ones that we've already heard about, we've got some other ones here and they are, let's see, so you've got shortness of breath, fever, cough. We already heard about that. Chills, shaking, loss of taste, muscle pain, headache, and sore throat. So I think those are the last ones are what they have added on there, which was sore throat. What did they say? Six, they added six more. I'm sorry, I just lost it here. Oh, congestion, running nose, nausea, diarrhea, joined the federal agencies list that already included fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle and body aches, headache, new loss or taste of smell, and sore throat. So it sounds like everything that everybody would ever go to the emergency room for. But we've heard all of those before. Every one of the ones we've just had heard have been discussed before. I hadn't heard running nose or congestion. So that one was a new one for me. And out of all of these, the loss of taste or smell is the only really distinguishing one from any other diseases might present in a emergency room. But we've heard that before. It's not new. This reminds me of the CDC ads, which have begun appearing on television, where the CDC gets on and buys a spot on television and the spot says, wash your hands. I said, my God, that is amazing that they're just getting around to tell us that, Nat. Now, do you think that everybody in the country hasn't heard that X millions of times already? Why are they telling us now? At the same time, at the same time, this is my point, they haven't told us about that whole list you just read. Now, if they were really interested in informing us and saving us, they would give us the whole list, wouldn't they? I would think they would more focus on other strategies like wearing a mask in public and that this is not a controversial thing. Every credible health authority in the entire world says wear a mask. It's a simple. The White House is opposed to that. The White House does not want to encourage you. That is not a credible health authority. But elements inside of the government do are credible health authorities like the National Institutes of Health or the CDC. They do say to wear a mask, as well as our state, local governments. Everybody understands. Are you saying that the CDC is separate and distinct and not under the influence of Donald Trump and the White House? No, sadly not, because when we're just seeing an ad come out up to three months that says to wash your hands, it is still its own organization. It has just been blocked at the top like so many other organizations. Departments of the government have been. We can find true news inside of it, but we have to look for it. It's not coming out from the top. Well, okay, but why doesn't the coronavirus task force tell us about this, Stephanie? That has dissipated. That's gone away. That is no longer there. And the speaking by Fauci and Dr. Redfield and Dr. Redlaner, those are all coming out of their own areas of employment and they're silent on why they're not participating in the task force. It's just over. But I know that with Redlaner, who is a person who's the director of the National Center for Disease Disaster Research and has said that his prediction out of the work that they've done is that 50% of Americans will get this virus by the end of 2020. 50% because the estimates are so low. The truer estimates are those that they have been broadcasting at 10%. He says it's higher. It says 10 times that the news is saying 10 times the number that's reported for the 2.5 million is actually going to be by more like 20. I think that came out of the CDC and it was this morning and for everyone that's reported, they say there are 10 more. So that's really just amazing. 2020,000 for what's on the news and then it's actually the estimate is half of us are going to get it because it's going so virulently. So far only like 5% have gotten it or less 2%, something really low. We're on land and sneaking around to escape it. Now the good news is that more young people are getting it, which means that cases are going to rise dramatically, but the deaths aren't. So it's still going to be the oldsters and at-riskers who are going to die, but the others are going to recover because the young people seem to be recovering. You have to see the young people as more than just having coronavirus. You have to see them as spreaders. They're unknowing spreaders and they can spread it to everyone else. So even if they do fairly well and dealing with the disease personally, they're going to be throwing viral particles in all directions without knowing it. That's why it's so dangerous to have these rallies and reopenings because they go and they feel just fine, but everybody around them is getting the particles. Well, the chilling news for me is that they are saying the children are asymptomatic and may not be getting it as easily because their nose tissues are not mature enough to provide the catchment or the attachment feature of the corona. It can't get in there and hang there and do its thing as well as it does in the adults. So they have some degree of protection from what I've heard and read. However, they're saying that a kid can be a spreader. So the kid can have the virus and be asymptomatic and then and unaffected much and yet can still take it around and spread it as you're saying these other post infection young people can be. Okay, let's talk some more medicine. Winston, what about this BCG thing? Is that a viable option to treat the virus? I don't know. It's interesting to see that that's one theory is why folks in Korea and Japan have not been hit as hard as because they were vaccinated against that whereas we in America typically not at the time. So it may be something there may be something in there where the immune system is recognizing it even decades later. I see other things where they're saying maybe some antibiotics will help or even using radiation on the lungs. But it's interesting to see all of these other things coming up and saying who doesn't get it and why and why are they not getting it and trying to focus on that. But I don't think we have 250, 500 million doses of BCG vaccine ready to go in this country either. And even if they decided that was the cure, it'd take a long time for that to get rolled out as well. So I don't know that there's any magic bullet here. And as far as the young people, we read about young people getting this and that it's a third of the cases now from what I've read about a third are in their 20s. But when we say they've recovered, I think it's important to realize that we don't know what recovery means. And a lot of people are not recovering or when they're recovering, they're recovering with lungs that are permanently damaged or organs that may be permanently damaged. So we shouldn't be cavalier at all about who gets this disease and why we can see that certain groups certainly are dying at a lot higher rates. But why is it to CDC telling us that? I just don't think that they're in disarray right now. They're afraid to publish their results. They're afraid to, I mean, there's a culture of fear inside of so many agencies of the government that we may not be getting this information for a while. And I think that if CDC really wants to help us right now, it needs to have a mass campaign sent to every house that says, wear a mask when you are outside. It protects. It's the right thing to do to protect you and other people. Yeah, but the president doesn't wear a mask and he's sending a message to a lot of people. And you have even like, I saw there was a sheriff in Washington state, Jay Inslee says, the governor, wear a mask when you're outside. And the sheriff says, don't be sheep people. Don't wear a mask if you don't want to wear a mask. You're getting very contradictory messages. And I think in places in the world, they're just looking at us like, what kind of mask delusion are we under here that we can't simply abide by wearing a mask? This is not a major aspect. Okay, let me tell you about a question that came in. This person, and thank you to the viewer for the question. I work in hospice care. When the second wave hits, perhaps in the fall, it's coming soon. Will society deem as expendable those with severe dementia and allow the virus to reduce our medical care load? Whoa, that's out of a bad science fiction novel. Stephanie, you got a reaction to that? We care about old people who have dementia. How much do we care? How little do we care? I think we care. I've been through the hospice situation with my husband, but I believe that one of the tools that the administration has to use and that has been admitted now in the reporting testifying to the House committee is that there's fear. People are afraid of the President, and so it has been assumed. I mean, I assumed it and even worried about mortal threat at some point, but people are indeed admitting that they're afraid of the President, and that's why they did some of the things they did. What I'm saying is that the fear of this is rational, because if there is by omission or commission threat by the President, there may be some holdup on getting the right supplies and the important medicines to these healthcare facilities. But on the other hand, everybody's had a chance to ramp up. We know that's a weak spot. We knew that early and that there's been a tremendous effort to strengthen the facilities and to get the supplies in. So it can go. If you had a choice between going into a senior facility, because you would otherwise go into a senior facility and saying, no, I think I'll stay at home instead right now, which one would you pick? Definitely stay at home. There were so many flaws in the systems of these nursing homes pre all of this that needed fixing them more actually. I want to go to this expectation, this projection that came out in the morning paper. I forget which one. I said next few months, we're going to have 180,000 tests. We're at 120 now. So this is moving very quickly. And I don't know the total number, but between the three or four top states where it's spiking, we're talking about 15, 20,000 per day. So it's quite remarkable what's happening. So the next couple of months will be 180,000. But the think tank that came up also said that if we all wore masks, it would be 140,000. So we can save 40,000 lives if we all wear masks. I find that remarkable and to your point Winston, it's incredible that people don't all get that. That just seems so simple. The other thing is testing. On Saturday night, Trump said, I love this part, Trump said at the rally in Tulsa that he was going to slow down on testing because the more you test, the more cases you find. And he didn't want to find the cases. He wanted to turn his back on the numbers, ignore them. So let's not do testing. And then when the press called him on that, he said, no, no, no, no, no. I was just joking. Now my reaction was, you got to fool me that he was just joking because we all saw him say that and he wasn't, he didn't seem to be joking. I think it was his press secretary said he was joking. And then he said, I never joke. Isn't that what it was? Whatever it is. This information where he says one thing and says, Oh, I was just doing it to raz the press or whatever it is. The best part Winston is that this morning he announced or the paper reported that he was defunding the testing program. No more testing, no more support for testing in this country from the federal government. I said, well, I guess now he's not lying. Now he's not joking. He's really doing it because he doesn't want to know about the cases. Well, this is part of the strategy of having the states and local governments take care of it. So if your state is one that takes it seriously, that's great. But you know, there's others, even inside of the states, you've got other elements like in, I saw Governor Newsom says, you're wearing a mask if you're in public. And then he is having to threaten to cut off counties that don't abide by the law that are going rogue and saying, Oh, no, this is a matter of personal freedom or whatever. It's, it's, it's a matter of public health. Same for Arizona. I saw that the governor had funding allow the decision to be made at the state or local level. But, but up till now, a lot of them, a lot of states and localities that have tested people have been, have had the benefit of federal funds to pay for the costs of the tests. Now that's being, that's being removed. Yeah, that's done. But you have to think about it. This is a, this has become a political thing. So when the president says, if you're wearing a mask, it's, you are stating that you are against me. And so, I mean, it's dangerous on a number of levels, but basically just, so you're wearing a mask and you're, let's say you're in a state where you have people that really believe that that's true, and there is no threat of the virus or there, or whatever they believe, and you're wearing a mask, and you might be surrounded by a hostile crowd of non-masquers that are thinking that you're making a political statement by wearing a mask when in fact you're just trying to follow basic hygiene of public health. And so this, it's so convoluted. It's, it's, you can't understand the cognitive. Well, there is a common denominator. He's, he's, Trump is doing all this. He's managing things like a marionette, marionette or a puppeteer. And I give Stephanie these two things and see if you can connect them up. One is that there was a curfew established by the city of Tulsa over the weekend because they were very worried about a lot of things about COVID, among other things, and they were, you know, concerned about demonstrations and violence and all. So they were taking all the steps they could and they made a curfew. Well, the secret service went to the city and instructed them to take the curfew off. Secret service works for who? Okay. And, and they did. So then the curfew went away. In a parallel fashion, you know, the United States Attorney for the District of Hawaii is involved in litigation over the, the travel quarantine that David E. Gay imposed, which is about to be changed already. But they, but what happened is a Department of Justice went to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Hawaii and told him to make sure to oppose that travel, that travel quarantine requirement. So they leave it to the states. The states try, and now the White House is trying to insinuate itself into the decisions the states make. I mean, what, do you see a comparison there? And do you see other things happening like that where the president says, oh, no, I'm leaving to the states and if anything goes wrong, it's their fault, not mine. And then what we have is you try to manipulate through other agencies. Well, the states, according to the latest news are at breaking points, most of them, all of them, they have no more funding. Okay, it's all dried up and they're having to depend on the sources that they get from the federal government. So I see this, it could be a desperate blow for states who are already underwater. And without money for the funding for tests in states, states are not going to be able to pick that up to supplant what the feds are no longer going to give. So that, of course, is going to have a huge impact. And the, the, this seems to be the pattern that I'm seeing. And in, because states are not going to be able to afford to do all these where they get in the money from that they've got to get the money from their state taxes, and they're not going to have that coming in. People are not able to pay and they're prolonging it. Now this, this goes to the whole reopening issue. So they have the the PPP, the payroll protection program, which is part of the CARES Act, right, is billions and billions of dollars involved. The deadline for filing, okay, is June 30th. That's one week away. You'd really have to hustle to make your application, to get the loan, to take the remaining part of that money and get the benefits of the PPP. Congress has not authorized any more money. It has largely expired. There's 120-some-odd billion left that has not been spent. Don't ask me why that would be true. And we are about to have what the paper charitably calls a pause, a pause in many states. So first you have the epidemic, which you don't recognize, then you recognize it, and then you have a lockdown, and then you have a reopening, and then you have a re-epidemic, a spike. All these are great words to describe the journey we've been on. And after the spike or the resurgence, now we're having a pause in three or four states today. So where does it take us when you have the pause on the reopening and these businesses don't really have options to get the federal money or more federal money? And they are going, lots of them are going to go out of business, Winston. What is going to happen to our economy in the pause? I don't see any pause in anything, honestly. It seems like these numbers are just climbing, climbing, climbing in California, Florida. This is the pause in reopening. It's the pause in reopening. You know what? It's like I've said a month ago, we're just giving up on it. We're just going to let it run wildfire and do what it does. And that question from the viewer was deeply disturbing, and thank you for the question. This idea of sort of a eugenics almost, of letting our weakest and sickest die, that is the hallmark of civilization, is that we take care of our weakest and sickest. So I would hope that, although who was the fellow that initially onset, was it Glenn Beck or somebody said, I would gladly go out and sacrifice my life for the economy or whatever it was, a couple of months ago. But when it actually comes down to real people and letting them do that, it's horrific to even think that we would be a society that does that. We're not in a place where we need to make those choices. But what we do need is just common sense solutions. Here in Hawaii, when we open up here, which we are opening up, I was down at the beach the other day, they're also having a spike. If you look at the charts, they are having a spike every day and restaurants are packed. I'm seeing it. Well, businesses have picked up. Definitely. People are out and about. When we start getting our tourists back in here, we need common sense rules that require several days, several tests, two or three tests minimum. And then a couple days after that, where we can always reach them by phone, just in case they slip through the test and using different tests. We can do it. We can do it sensibly. We were down to zero new cases for a while there. And now we're just back up to 18, 19, 15, 12 cases a day. And that's going to go way up as well once we open the doors here. We are opening them. And we're not on a pause here yet. And we're trying to get more people to come. And the restaurants are open and full. And I think in all that message of reopening, there's a certain sub-message about complacency. You don't have to worry. It's over. We're beyond that. We have prevailed. We're back. And all this is coming originally from Trump. So Stephanie, are you going out to a lot of restaurants these days? I mean, personally, don't you have some concern about that? Well, certainly I do. I mean, but I have the more general concern about Hawaii's economy and its survival and the nations because the economists are predicting it's at least three to five years for recovery from this fiscal calamity. And certainly in Hawaii, the prediction is that or longer. And it's going to require leadership governance to have multi-year strategies for spending cuts. So because they're not going to have the inflow of income that states and cities and counties expect to have. So I think we're facing that. And I understand the tension is terrific because when you go to that restaurant, I have a good feeling when I do get whatever I get usually take out. I'm happy, you know, to tip and all of that because these people are in survival mode and it is we are all connected in it together. So they do need as much support as possible. And of course, many are dropping by the wayside. And this is putting the state and us all in this disastrous on the edge of the cliff of real financial calamity, where we don't have the funds to do the things we know need to be done. I mean, of course, the biggest one is like 911. Who's going to pay for that? What about the police? Who's going to pay for that? What about the schools? I mean, all of this stuff is real close to home here when it comes to the list of what are the funding needs. And with the state having no money, they are going to start down that list. And that's leading us right. Civil. Watch out for that. We have a $2.3 billion shortfall in the state budget. The legislature was really out for most of the session. It's back now. And the question is, what do we do to cover that $2.3 billion? Well, one of the things they have done, I think a few days ago, is they agreed over objection by some members of the community to give $150 million to the unions for a delayed increase in pay to union members. I think HGA, the Hawaii government employees union, which you can see is political and which you can see drives the other direction about trying to narrow the gap and avoid the shortfall. So we're not sure what they're going to do in the next couple of weeks, but it's a monumental task to deal with the shortfall. As you say, Stephanie, that we don't have the tax revenues that we used to have before. And every time you look, the council on revenues doesn't find any improvement in that. In fact, we find deterioration in that. So Hawaii has a serious and unique problem. And I don't know when we'll have a vaccine or a therapeutic or anything. Before we start the show, you guys were talking about this O blood type O transfusion. What about that? Does that offer any comfort here? It seems there's some evidence that the different blood types are having infection at different levels and that the O's look like not much infection. Those with O's are not as often infected. So I haven't seen any more about that, but it looks like there's a line of research opened up here. And that might give us the option of transfusions, if the O types are... I don't even know if that's an effective way to get the effects out of the O into another person. So I mean, with the antibody research and this kind of blood, which might tie in with what Winston was talking about earlier with the vascular disease connection, I mean, maybe we're getting a good, rich, strong effort on the research to uncover some of that. Indeed we are. And the press is covering it. And I get more confused every day about what the good candidates are, because you know they're not all good candidates. And there's talk about herd immunity, such as I think in Sweden where they made a policy choice on that. Herd immunity means what 60%, 70% of the population has had it. And so the fertility rate, so to speak, the transmission rate is reduced below one per capita. And then it sort of dies out because there's nobody around to spread it. This is a long shot. And it also means that 60% or 70% of the people have had it and are at risk of really being seriously ill and dying. It's not very attractive. But you know what? We may go through that anyway. Winston, you know, if we don't have a solution and the federal government is not going to help us and everybody's confused and they think it's a question of their personal liberty and to wear masks and get tested and all this. And we're in a state of chaos on this issue. Chaos. Then what will happen is we will have herd immunity, but a lot of people will die in the process. Am I right? Tell me I'm wrong. Well, like you said, lots of information, lots of confusion out there, 160 different vaccine tests going on right now in people. Who knows who's going to rise to the top? Basically at this point, what is under your control? Under your control, you can't control Donald Trump. You can't control the governor. What you can control is wearing a mask when you go out. If you are at risk, you reduce your going out. If you are, everyone is at risk, but if you are at higher risk, you reduce that. When you go out, you make sure that you are practicing good social distancing and common courtesy because we are not sociopaths and we respect each other with aloha. And that is what we can do as individuals. We can keep abreast of things, but eventually whenever vaccines or treatments come out, that will happen. But in the meantime, we have the control we have is wash your hands, cover your face. We've heard that, but you know, the problem is complacency sets in. So if I tell you there's going to be, what did Fauci say the other day, don't expect any vaccine until at the earliest the end of 2021. So that's a year and a year and a half away already. Well, yeah, about a year and a half away. Yeah, we may get corona fatigue. Very true. Exactly. And then we have complacency setting in. And because you wash your hands yesterday, doesn't help you today. Because you wore a mask yesterday, doesn't help you today. And people will kind of sluff off on that sort of thing. And then we'll be back in my favorite scenario, namely herd immunity because, you know, we're not taking care of ourselves. Benefit is that you won't catch it today. That doesn't solve the problem on the community. Today. Yes, that's a good point is it's today. And that's all you got is today anyway. But we should avoid the idea of herd immunity because we don't know that there's any herd immunity. This could be closer to smallpox or HIV, as far as its transmissibility and protection and maybe even a vaccine out there. So it may be just that Sweden took their pain a little bit earlier, but they also had public health and hospital beds. And that's what we were really trying to avoid was the surge or the hump. And now we, we have gotten past that and we realize, okay, we can, our hospitals can handle it. So we're just spreading out now. We're in a, we're in a spike right now. The other day, we had 27 cases. Yes, it's going to continue for a year, but they decided our hospitals can handle it at this point because we avoided the initial surge. And they looked at Sweden and said, okay, they had so many ICU beds and yeah, their death rate was four times higher, but they could handle it. So I think they just are extrapolating and putting it here. Stephanie, you really want to say something, don't you? Italy, Spain, Germany are down. Okay. They had the self-discipline that we started out to have and fell apart from it. So that discipline has those European countries under control and they are locking us out, us Americans out. We are going to be their threat. Okay. Now they did it. We can do that. We just have to pick it up and do it. There's no doubt we can do it and we just have to step up to it. We missed our first opportunity and paid for it. Now let's go again, pick it up and get it, get it knocked under. That's exactly what we got to do. I think the horse left the barn. We can do it in Hawaii and Alaska and that's about it at this point. Why? There's no doubt. We can do it in Hawaii because there's a disciplined population here that can, can manage. So Stephanie, you mentioned a number of countries in Europe, but what about Asia? There's been a bit of a resurgence in Korea, a bigger resurgence in Beijing. Beijing is now under a brand new lockdown and other places, even Singapore as spikes. So question is, what can we learn from Asia? A lot from them because they know how to do this. They did the same thing as Germany and Spain. Those people followed that, but the point is because they do the contact and the follow-up and the continued testing, they're still, they didn't, they're doing follow-up. They have the continued care continuity of attention to this so that as soon as they find the spot that's going to come back up, they get them and they isolate them and they treat them and that's it. So they're not going to rise up again to a plateau kind of graph like we have. They're going to- One more thing is, okay, so we test and maybe we're getting better at testing. We appreciate that testing is only good for a moment in time. 24 hours later, you know, you could have the virus, but let's assume we find somebody on our testing program who has the disease. What do we do about that? What do we do about that here? We don't have a working tracing program. We don't have that. We don't have rooms full of people who make telephone calls and trace through. We don't have software that does it. So we find somebody. What do we do? We warn the person. What do we do? With that is they do not let the person go. As soon as the person is identified and not even yet tested, they test them. They don't go anywhere until that test result comes back. Then if that comes back positive, they get shipped off to the wherever. Well, I suppose if you quarantined them, that would even be better for the community. What do you do Winston? If you find somebody who tests positive, what do you do? You know what? You treat them with kindness and aloha and assume we have 30,000 empty hotel rooms right a mile away from all of us in Waikiki. We just designate that as a COVID hotel for right now. We let them get it out. We have medical care that's available to them if they need it and need to be elevated to a higher level of care. We put everybody else that they came into contact with there until they prove that they aren't carriers of the disease. We can do it in Hawaii. Stephanie's right. We can do it in Hawaii. Weston and Hilton can just kick in on this and get pseudo hospital sections or temporary hospital sections. That's a wonderful contribution they are. Welcome to make. And get paid for it. I mean, they need the revenue now too. Sure, they need somebody to be in their rooms. Yeah. And we'll pay them assuming we have the money, assuming we have the money. I'll tell you guys we're about a time. I hate being out of time on every level. So Winston, thank you very much for joining us. Winston, this is Coronaville. What's next? And Stephanie, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon and in any event next week.