 I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkDict. This is Coronaville. What's next? And we try to look into the future in general, but most specifically on COVID. And we have here today, we have Tim Epicella, we have Stephanie Stoll Dalton, we have Winston Welch, we have Cynthia Lee, Sinclair. And we're going to talk about where we are these days, technically. In case we were distracted by the election, yes, there is still COVID. It's relentless. The election didn't care. I mean, COVID did not care one way or the other. And it doesn't care who wins. It's going to continue to do its thing at a molecular level. And what are we going to do about it? And so I guess the only other point I would make in introducing the subject is the article, which I sent to you guys that appeared on CNN on their website by a guy named Eric Weirson, W-I-E-R-S-O-N, entitled No Matter the In Outcome, America's Standing in the World took a big hit on election night. And to summarize it, half the country, in case we didn't notice, votes for Trump, both in 2016 and now. It's not a question of who wins. It's all these millions, tens of millions of people who vote for a man who undermines their world in every way. They vote for him. And if I'm in Europe or Asia, anywhere I look and see this, I pity the United States. Clearly to me, the United States is on a decline. And if we don't recognize it, it will come home to us. So Tim, the question is, what are we doing in terms of dealing with the spikes? Can you identify for me what the federal government is doing in all of the raucous noise of the election? What is the federal government doing with all these spikes? Well, they're doing more harm than good. They're creating the spikes, Jay. Each rally Donald Trump held was a super spreader event. There's statistical data supporting that there was over 30,000 cases and over 700 deaths just from eight rallies alone. He's held more than eight rallies. So he's worsening the problem, not improving it. Is there any movement to talk to each governor to say, hey, can you convince your constituency to wear masks? Can you persuade them to have social distancing? No, he's not doing anything like that on a federal level. So the answer is absolutely nothing. He's not procuring any more PPEs. He's not setting any kind of national policy to head this death rate off and the case increase off because we're now in the winter months. He's doing absolutely nothing except for letting Dr. Atlas spread his misinformation about the virus and let that permeate through the country. Yeah, so you know what they say, these days you could swing a cat and hit somebody who has it or is going to have it and will die from it. In other words, six months ago, a lot of people never met anybody who had COVID. Now we all have stories. We all know somebody. It's ubiquitous and it's going to be more ubiquitous. So Cynthia, what's the estimate by the end of the year? What are we now? We're at 260? All total. We have in the country, I mean in the world, we have 9,580,000 cases and 234,000 people in our country that have died. Since, let's see, here on Oahu, we've got 15,000 total cases. Well, 15,591 total cases. Most of them are on Oahu. We've got 170 deaths here on Oahu and 31 on Big Island, 17 on Maui and zero on Kauai and Lanai. So all total we have 219 deaths here in Hawaii. It's been the first time since October 9th that we've had triple digits. So we had 156. We're up 156 on Wednesday. 125 of those were on Oahu. So we are growing. We're back up in the triple digits again, which we haven't been. We closed down so we're doing quite well and then when we open back up, they shot right back up again. We've got 37 states that are having up kick in their cases and holding and there's 24 states that have an up in depth and holding. Louisiana and Hawaii are the only places that have lower cases and are keeping them pretty low, but Wednesday that sort of all flipped back around again and we're back in the triple digits. So unless it's somebody that's going to talk about wearing masks and being more careful and social distancing in more specific concrete ways, those numbers, all that data is just going to keep going up and keep going up and keep going up. More and more and more people are going to die. This morning I got one of those polling emails. I get a lot of them every day and the question that was put to me in this polling email was would you favor a national initiative about wearing masks? I'm saying what? This poll that comes from nowhere, I don't even know who sent it. They're going to try to make this decision on the basis of a poll by email. We'll never get that that way. We'll never get a national initiative. We're going to have to have something way stronger than that. I think we blew it on the testing and tracing because when you reach a certain point of disease in a given community, you can't test and trace anymore. It's just no longer effective and I think in a lot of places that's exactly it. And you saw in the times this morning there was a chart of how the numbers in COVID infections have gone in the United States and it's like off the chart, man. It's like straight up logarithmic, straight up, not even any relief at the top, just sailing to the heavens. We're in trouble, election or no election. Dr. Sanjay Gupta just did a big giant study and came out with a really good report on how all of the states where Trump has held his rallies, they have had huge spikes within about two to three weeks afterwards. So it's pretty easy to follow. Now some of the further away rallies anyway, the ones that just happened last week, we won't know for another week. But the ones that we do know, there has been a market uptick in cases directly following all of his rallies. So actually Winston, we don't have a vaccine yet. And Fauci was talking about a year away. The Israelis who are working on phase three candidate right now, they're talking about a year away. We had a show with Dwayne Gubler who was a national infectious disease guy, used to be at Japson, then he went and developed a whole infectious disease department in a Duke medical school in Singapore. He's retired now. I asked him, just a couple of days ago, I asked him, what do you think, at least a year? And that means that between now the election and the year from now, we're going to have to cope using the basic things we've been talking about, masks and social distancing. Testing and tracing may not be effective anymore. And so we're in for it. We're really in for it. What is going to happen to the economy Winston? It's already in the tank. Unemployment numbers are up. Notwithstanding Trump's lies, the fact is that our economy is in the tank. And certainly in Hawaii, it's in the tank. What do you predict? Oh, you know, the stock market just surged this week. So that's a little bit different than reality on the ground for so many shops and businesses that have closed and been affected. I mean, I think our national strategy has been just to give up. So we may be going for the elusive herd immunity where it's just every man and woman for him or herself. And hopefully the states and the cities have prepared their convention centers and exhibition halls to be mass field hospitals, because that's basically where it's going. And I think there's some sort of tacit admission that no one's going to do anything. It might happen locally on some level, but you're also going to see enormous pushback and people just saying, so what? We have the virus. It's going to kill some people. My business needs to be open. I think that's probably where we're going. Florida is the model for that. You're right, totally right about Hawaii missing the boat on that. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, island nations that could contain these things, Korea, effectively an island nation. We had every possibility to do this. Now that we're letting in people from the mainland with one test, and it's maybe not even one test, New York, New York surrounded by open borders requires two tests of people that come in one before and one after. Is this not like a minimum that we can do here to at least, I don't know, pretend face that we're doing something more than what we're looking at? As far as the vaccine goes, I don't think we should. Dr. Fauci said, this is going to be the way it is for the entirety of next year, at least through the third quarter. And I think he was being trying to calm us down. It's going to be through the end of the year next year. So again, it's just going to come down to your own personal responsibility as much as you can do that. But if you're a person that has to go out and be a bartender or a waitress, and that's the way that you've made your living, God help you because if you're forced to do that, there's some laws passed that says you can't sue your company if you have insurance. There's a lot of really important questions. I don't think this election is going to help me, which I'm surprised we haven't touched on that yet. We're sticking back to corona topics, which is unusually refreshing. But it's here. This is supposed to be about coronaville. And the election really doesn't have any effect on coronaville. He's still in the president until January 20th. Don't forget, even if Biden wins handily later today in minutes, it doesn't affect corona very much. But let's talk about poverty and hunger. Stephanie, if you don't have a job and you don't have any income coming in, then you don't have anything from Congress. Congress is like dead on arrival these days. Although I would point out that yesterday after winning in Kentucky, your friend, Mitch McConnell, and I say he's your friend because I know he's not my friend. I don't think he's Tim's friend or Cynthia's friend or Winston's friend. Your friend, Mitch McConnell said, no, he's going to bring back some some cares money. He's going to do that after months of sitting on it. I wouldn't count on that right away, especially in the distraction of this period of litigation between election day and inauguration day, hoping it ends there. But what's going to happen to people who are hungry? They have no income coming in. Unemployment benefits can't last forever. The state cannot print money without money. You know, I mean, I'll go on record with this. Without money, people can't eat. And if people can't eat, what happens? That's where we're heading here. Looks like going to be 1930s again. And the big question is, are we doing any better than they did 100 years ago? It doesn't look like it in many, many ways, even with all of our scientific knowledge. I think there are two paradigm shifts that we have to make that are really major efforts we're going to have to go through, which is polls are over. The polls have been useless now, second time around. And then for all of the small races in between at the state level, we get nothing worked out, according to the polls. So I think that we didn't actually go to the full shift to data driven, data driven promulgations or announcements or decision making. Okay, so the whole poll thing is, is going to have to change. And they're going to have to find out other ways than calling people on telephones, those who have landlines, and all of the other flaws and errors that have been pointed out in polls. So there's going to be a huge shift there. And hopefully it'll be on the way to more data driven kinds of announcements. And the second one is, Jay, you said that people, we know now that we're declining. To tell you the truth, I think that we're coming into a realization, this is a second paradigm shift, that there are a lot of people that need a lot more capacity to be American democracy citizens, because we're not there yet. And that that is a greater group than we ever had any notion was there. I mean, all of our efforts have been to assist at risk populations and people, language people and disabled people. But we have a lot more people that need a whole lot of assistance to get in position to be real democratic citizens. And that's not to presume they're going to take us back to education again, aren't you? Well, it's it is about COVID, because we're not doing David data driven anything on COVID. And we're not doing any of the testing. And we haven't done the tracing. And until we do all that, we're on, we're all standing in line to die from it. So I just, those two paradigm shifts, and and also a rate, a rareness raising about whether we're doing any better than they did last century. And how if that can be an, you know, a momentum towards getting it better and doing what we actually know, we can do better with the scientific method and data driven decision making. So, hey, what does it matter? Tim, you know, we've been trying to figure out the national psychology on this for a long time. And the election, you know, although it's embarrassing, it's embarrassing to the world who watches this afternoon, we're having a show with my old friend in Varanasi, India. And I'm going to ask him what they think about the US, what they think about our election process, because they're a democracy too. And I'm really interested to see what he has to say about it. But if you take it from that fellow, Eric, in CNN, CNN article, Eric Weirson, you would imagine that the world thinks we're a bunch of clowns, that we have an election, we have a constant election process. No other country in the world has that. We've been in campaign mode since before 2016. And then we find out that we don't understand what we have. We don't understand where people are coming from. We don't understand who's mad at who, just that we find that everybody's mad at everybody. It's a social psychology issue a mile wide. And on top of that, we have NAMI, the National Mental Health Association, becoming very active because there are a lot of people who are having mental health issues now because of this constant stress, the constant worry about what's going to happen to social security and Medicare, Medicaid. And we have, although there was an article yesterday about suicide, good news, Civil Beat reported that suicides in Hawaii were decreasing. I think they were increasing for the first part of COVID, and they may still be, you know, capable of increase now. And I would bet you five that around the country, there's an increased number of suicides. So we have a mental health issue, a social psychology issue. Do you agree with that? And what do you think it means? And how do you think we can address it? I'm going to tag on a little bit to what Stephanie just said. You know, we're in a paradigm shift. And once in a while, Jay, a leader comes along that taps the raw nerve of grievance and feeling underserved and not getting ahead in their life and feeling that they didn't get their fair share in their fair slice of the American dream. And Donald Trump is that candidate, that leader, that president of grievance. And through his rhetorical skills, he's turned that grievance into anger, anger towards the government, anger that all things government brings to the table, be it science, be it traffic control, be it military, they're not they're inept in what they do and how they do it. And they've been left out of the equation. They know better. And their blind leadership and loyalty to Donald Trump, who is the candidate and leader of grievance, is their guy. So it doesn't matter what the government says. It doesn't matter that COVID is a deadly virus. It doesn't matter about the science. If Donald Trump says, don't worry about it. That's what they do. So until this candidate, this leader of grievance is shown the door, and hopefully shown the door quickly, we won't begin to start on the road to prosperity again. We won't be able to get bring science back into the equation. We won't get a handle on COVID because he won't let us and he won't let 50% of the nation realize that COVID is a deadly virus. And that's where we stand. That's sad, but that's where we stand. So Stephanie, rather Cynthia, you know, Biden does stand a fair to middle and chance of winning this here within the next few hours. Seems like you will knock wood and crush your fingers and everything. And that is certainly a, you know, as, as Tim suggests, that is certainly a better opportunity for making the country, you know, work again. Then, then Trump who will destroy it, who has gone very far already to destroy it. But what should Biden do to deal with COVID? I mean, he's only one man. And, you know, I suppose he's got resources that Trump would never entertain. But if you were, if you were Biden's consigliori, what would you tell him? Oh my, that's a pretty, pretty big question. I like what he's been doing about mask mandates. I like that he's willing to put himself out there and put that out there. Because right now, Trump has done so much to make people think that that's an artist's initiative as opposed to a public health issue like it should be. And I think that Biden is going to bring it back to being a public health issue. And I think he needs to make that his number one thing in the front of his administration, the minute he takes office and beforehand, if he does win, that before he takes office in January, he's already got his administration set up. Like most presidents in the past, when they come in, they already know who they want to be in their administration as opposed to Trump who took months and months and months and then fired everybody and is still just acting, you know, secretaries of everything. I want some permanence and I want some to see some real professionals, some real scientists. And I believe that Biden will listen to them and he will put them in place. So I think that's all I would say. Just do what you're doing. You're doing right. Keep it up. Anything I can do to help, just let me know. That's about what I tell him, I think. Yeah, but Winston, you know, we've seen it now in two elections that there's half the country that follows Trump around in some hypnotic trance, call him the zombies. Whatever Biden does, whatever initiatives, whatever clever people he surrounds himself with, whatever great plans he makes to deal with this, there will be half the country who will probably oppose him because Trump will be on the scene. He'll be on the media. He'll be trying to run Biden down, fighting with him on everything, everything, confusing everybody as he has been for the past four years. How do we get them on board, if at all? Oh, it's a great question because we've never had a shadow president calling things from the sidelines. They just shut up. When they're out of office, they have a rule. Like, I don't say anything about anything. Look at Obama the last several years. He talked to me three times and then a little bit before the run-up. I think that once he's out of office and we can start implementing things like Cynthia saying science-based things, a call, what Joe Biden represents, the strongest point. He's not sexy and flashy. He's not loud. He's calm. He's sane. He's reasonable. He's grandpa. He's baking soda for the nation. It's what we need right now. When he talks about pulling back and we need to study this for six months, he's right. We need to study what happened in our nation to get these people so aggrieved. I realized that what, like Tim was saying, he's the president of grievance. The last 50 years of women's rights, gay rights, climate change, science, schmiens, race relations, where people are starting, where we're starting to wake up to our higher calling as Americans. Then there's that group that says, no, no, you don't. You're not going there so fast. That's what's happening. It's the last gasp of that. But we need to figure out how do we, after the main irritant is gone, after this con man is gone, how do we find, to find out, are there any real grievances that we can address as a group together? Because we all do have to look at our society, pull back and say, what are the core values that we all share? We share a lot of them. It's interesting. Mitch McConnell hasn't really been saying anything. He said he might hold up Biden's cabinet appointments for confirmation. So what? Biden can run for four years with acting cabinet appointments just like Donald Trump has. There's some positive news. The elections were pretty smoothly all things considered. As Tim suggested, yes. Cross your fingers when you say that. We're not out of the woods. We're not out yet, but let's just hope so. My main concern is that America's appetite has been wedded for a real cynical and angry, a real dictator who's been four years down the road. So what I really want to concentrate on these next four years is instituting really strong, structural safeguards that both parties have a vested interest in. The Republicans can't be thrilled enough to not have Donald Trump breathing down their next aisle. He might tell his supporters, call Mitch McConnell and tell him this or that or the other. But I think they are going to be happy to not have him on their backs every five seconds so that they can go back to reclaiming any even shred of whatever Republican used to be. So I think there's hope for the future. I would like to entertain that with you. But Stephanie, you know, we've talked about education with you a number of times and we have that half of the country that votes for Trump, they really aren't educated, sorry. They're angry and it's going to take generations to rebuild what I want to call it the educated, critical thinking base of the country. Those who qualify as real citizens in the way that the founding fathers had hoped we would have a rational country with principles. How can we possibly change that half? How can we bring them on board to develop and listen to and abide by reasonable healthcare policy, for example? Really, really good question. And I think that Winston, you know, touched on it too very nicely. But I wanted to share that I lived in Japan for a number of years, late 60s, early 70s. That was the first time I saw a mask. Okay. And this is what, 50 years ago now or 40, whatever, it's, these people were wearing masks whenever there was an infection of their own, the cold, or you never saw people out with Kleenexes like we do or, you know, rubbing their noses up. This was that long ago, they had the norm to wear a mask to deal with the infection. So I remember being so totally impressed by that given, you know, the, what we get always, you know, in the US too, and nobody pays any attention to it. And we're just very, I think we're going to benefit from this pandemic or the world is because we're going to be so much more conscious of how important it is to control our own infections and protect others. But that's the norm was to protect others. So all of these people, everybody, kid, mother with baby, businessman, Tokyo, Yokohama, they're walking around with masks on and they were sick. That you know, they had something that they were trying to spare the rest of the world from. So now how did they get that? How come the Japan and they still do it and all the Asians here do it too. So how did Japan? They do it certainly in China, which had, which has had very good numbers lately. So how do we get the population to do that? When I have leadership, you know, I was looking at one of our old programs I'm talking about the early days. And I was talking with, you know, our chief scientist, Mike DeWert, who's a scientist. And this is just within the last day or so is watching this program. And I had forgotten all about if you remember at the beginning of this thing, the government was telling us, you don't have to wear a mask unless you have symptoms. That was that was so crazy. That was so it seems like ages ago, but that's what they were telling us. And I mean, arguably, they didn't want you to use up a mask that could have been used for the for the healthcare industry. But it was so bizarre. We had mixed messages all along the way. And it's almost like you can't blame these the other half for not abiding by any mask suggestion now, because we've been confusing them for, you know, since February or March. Okay, we're almost out of time here. Let me go backwards. Stephanie, what's your state of mind on all of this? What's your word of the day? What's your prediction on what's going to happen in the national election real quick? A new paradigm shift. We're going to move it. Okay, new understandings, polls are a problem that has to be fixed. And we have to have a new way of thinking about our country and our fellow Americans. It's got to work hard on that. Okay, we'll expect to see you on the street corner on Bishop. I'm trying to spread the good word and other things. Okay, Winston, what what what is your state of mind? What is your special word of the day? And how do you think the election is going to go? I think that that Biden will win. You know, it was by any measure, this was not a win for the Democrats. They lost, they won no state house. The Senate will still be in Republican control. But if we can have a sane, sober, kind, thoughtful individual in the White House, it will change the tone and tenure of everything. And whatever tantrums happen between now and January 20th, we just have to deal with, and it will be okay. All right, you know, I think a lot of that is true. Cynthia, how about you? What is your state of mind these days? We're always interested. What is your word of the day if you have one? And what is your expectation on the vote counting? Gosh, that's a lot to squeeze into just a few moments. I'm pretty well because I have followed my take care of myself, stay sane, stay calm, not get pulled into it too much. So I've done pretty well, and I was worried about me to begin with. You know, all the lies, I think we're as confounded by the lies now as we were then, and we ignore them at the democracy's peril. But we look at them at our own sanity's peril, right? But I'd like to close with a really short quote from Susan Glasser, who is from the New Yorker. And she says, there have been many times over the past four years that covering Trump's Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the Capitol these last few days, and seeing boarded up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House in anticipation of unprecedented post-election riots. I have seen such scenes before in the places like as Bechegstan and Russia. This is Trump's America. It's not the America that I have always known. Great, great. So, Tim, one of the things that Cynthia said was that our discussions here on the show for the past, oh, God, for most of the Trump administration, where we have, you know, for the benefit of the community, in my view, we have had these discussions, and we will continue to have these discussions. But aside from the benefit of the community, I think, as Cynthia suggests, they're actually tonic for us. They're therapy for us. They're like a little group therapy thing we do. That's why I call all you guys in the middle of the night share thoughts. But the group therapy helps us stay on the mark, doesn't it? What is your state of mind right now, and what is your word of the day if you have one, and what do you think is going to happen here in the election? A state of mind is I'm stressed. My word of the day is, and I want to really emphasize this word, is grateful. I'm grateful that if Joe Biden becomes the President of the United States, I'm grateful that we'll see a restoration of the rule of law and the principles of the United States Constitution. Yeah, there was an article by Simon Winchester back a few years ago, and I rather a book called Pacific. And one of the chapters in the book dealt with the South China Seas. And he said, you know, we have lost our moxie in the South China Seas. You know, face it. China is emerging and taking control of that area of the world. It is in charge of that area. And the best thing we can do is get used to it and adapt our own moves to recognize that the world has changed and to, you know, do our foreign policy, do our geopolitical moves with due regard for that change. And I feel that Trump and COVID especially now, COVID is changing our world right down to the boots. And the best thing we can do is recognize it. As in Israel, they are completely transparent about everything they do. They tell you every little thing that they're studying, learning, all their stats. We don't do that in this country. And I think we have to be transparent. We have to teach each other that it is all, it is all us. We are the government. The government is us. And we all have to, you know, be conscious of it. Maybe that will help. Anyway, thank you very much, Tim, Cynthia, Winston, Stephanie. I look forward to the next few hours. Knock wood. And we'll see you next week.