 I don't need any of this technological stuff that's up here. I am just going to talk to you. All right. Well, some of the things I say might be a little bit different from what you hear in the news media. So you may want references. Some people watching on YouTube may say, I don't believe that guy. Why should I believe that schmuck? Where are his sources? So I am going to have a page on my website with the sources for some of the things that I say that you might want some source backing up. So that page is not done yet. But by the time the video appears on YouTube, Clay, make sure and delay this appropriately. I'll have that page up. I just started working on it today. And then it turns out Pete Canones is visiting us from the Free Man Beyond the Wall podcast back there. And how am I supposed to get any work done when Pete's talking my ear off? So that will be done by the time. But it will be tomwoods.com slash lockdown. And that's where you'll be able to find the resources. Now, if you try to go to that page now before it's been set up, you'll get my 404 error page. And the 404 error page at tomwoods.com. If you type in tomwoods.com slash some gibberish, take you to the 404 error page where it says, I'm sorry you reached this page where there's nothing here. And to make you feel better, here's a free ebook. I actually give away a free ebook on the 404 error page. Speaking of free ebooks, I have an ebook on the lockdowns. And it's called Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About the Lockdown. So you can get that in two ways. WrongAboutLockdown.com. And if you're in the US, you can text the word lockdown to 33444. You get a whole ebook on this. Cost you nothing. OK, now that we've done that, we'll jump right in. This is a topic that's very personal for all of us. It's hard to look at it dispassionately and scientifically. And we've all lived through it. And we all know people who have been affected by it in one way or another, either by the virus itself or, in many more cases, by the lockdowns themselves. Everybody has had something disrupted by this. I remember as recently as March 7th of 2020, which is like a lifetime ago, having lunch in New York City with our old friend Gene Epstein. And Gene just turned 75 at the end of 2019. He's retired book review and economics editor at Barron's. And we were having a nice lunch together in New York talking about upcoming travels. And saying, well, I don't know, with this virus, I don't know what's going to happen with the travels. And should we still go on them or not? And his view was, you've got to live your life, man. You've got to just live. I mean, yeah, the world's a riskier place now, but you've got to live your life. And here he was. He didn't shake our hands. He did the Japanese bow. He's married to a Japanese woman. They gave us the Japanese bow, which we were quite delighted to return. But his view was that, look, you go live your life. And maybe I'll stay in my apartment, but you should go live. Why shouldn't you go live? And we all kind of felt like, yeah, that's about the right approach. It never dawned on us at that point that these decisions would be taken out of our hands entirely. We really thought that we were going to assess the pros and cons and make a decision. It just never occurred to us that this would happen. The world would be closed down. That one minute, they'd be telling you globalism is the best thing since sliced bread. And if you think otherwise, you're a xenophobe. Then the very next minute, if you say you want to see the world, you're a grandma murderer. It just was very sudden how this happened. But what also changed quickly were the rationales that were given for some of the measures that were taken, rather draconian measures. Now, obviously, I live in the United States. I can speak most confidently about here. So first, we all recall. We've all been through this before. We were told we had to so-called flatten the curve. Remember that expression? Now, there's a phenomenon that Michael Malus talks about a lot. It's the phenomenon of the midwit. Now, the midwit is not a complete idiot with an IQ of 65. But he's not exactly curing cancer either. So the midwit has just enough intelligence to be irritating. And so you would get all over social media, midwits, explaining to you, even a month after we had all heard what flattening the curve was all about, we'd heard this from every official source over and over and over. And then you would make some mild remark, slightly dissenting from one point some official made. And you would get a solemn lecture, as if you had never heard the idea of flattening the curve before. What we need to do is flatten the curve. Because this way we spread out the infection, so we don't over. You think I haven't, blankety blank, heard this already? But if we cleared out the midwits, there'd almost be nobody left to talk about this topic. All right, now, it's true. There were some people who advocated flattening the curve because not only did they think it would help the hospital system cope better, but they also thought that that would reduce the overall number of deaths. And there were other people who said, we are not going to reduce the overall number of deaths. We're just going to spread them out. There were some flatten the curvers who said it will actually lead to fewer deaths. But this was not really coming through from a lot of the official sources, let's say. And so then, all right, so then they confine us. What are we on? The 127th day of 15 days to flatten the curve? I think that's where we are. So we've been confined to our homes for a few weeks. And then suddenly it wasn't flatten the curve. It flattened the curve was like Bell Bottom jeans at that point, or the Rubik's Cube or something. Like, if you were to bring it up, people would find it an interesting novelty. But it was like they had sort of forgotten all about that at that point. Instead, no, no, no, it became, according to Andrew Cuomo, if it saves only one life, that was the new metric. If it saves only one life. If we save even one life with all these draconian measures, they will have been worthwhile. Now that's particularly gruesome and grotesque coming from Andrew Cuomo. It is rather an upside down world that the guy who by far has the worst record on this, by far, is considered to be the great model and savior. And then all these hapless governors in other states where things have been at least manageable are viewed as like the devil. But Cuomo sends infected people into nursing homes, says that's not his fault. And everybody goes, well, he's got a pretty good point. And that is just accepted. This is not normal. We're surrounded by crazy people. We can't even have a conversation. Because if you try to have a conversation about this, you just want people to die. So if you disagree with, this is typical, by the way, of course, all the time we have to deal with. If you have a different opinion on what the welfare policy should be, that's because you hate the poor. Or if you think, well, private property might solve this problem a little bit better. That's because you hate the environment. You can never have an honorable disagreement with the hysterics. Never. It's always because you secretly hate something. And that strikes me as the classic case of projection. If their first instinct is, this must be motivated by hatred, maybe they intimately are familiar with that emotion or something, that they would constantly be consumed by attributing it to everybody. All right, but there are perfectly good reasons to doubt this, first of all, this criterion of, well, if we save only one life, I mean, come on. And now I realize that in this room, people are not so unscientifically sentimental that they think there's any sense to that. But you know, from interacting with people out in the giant insane asylum that is the world, there are people who think this way. But if that were honestly believed, we would have to modify all kinds of behaviors. We'd have to restrict the sale of all kinds of items. We'd have to ban dangerous pastimes, all kinds of things like that. And if you make this argument, they say, oh, you stupid unsophisticated rube. The difference here is, yeah, of course, skiing can be dangerous, but you don't have to ban skiing because skiing is not contagious. Skiing accidents are not contagious. This thing is contagious. And that's the difference. But if the standard is saving only one life, then it doesn't matter if it's contagious or not. And the thing is, nobody lives according to the if we could save only one life thing. Nobody does. If somebody dies in an automobile accident, we don't blame the institution of driving. It's an unfortunate part of life. We don't ban things that give people pleasure, even if they can cause death. Not just because we value liberty, but because these are things that make life worth living in the first place. And as I'll explain later, there is more to human life than mere biological existence. Now, it's true that what I'm saying in my presentation here at Mises You this year, OK, it's not really about Austrian economics. I'm going to admit that. Normally, I like to be on that topic because that is what we're talking about here after all. But good heavens, I can't not talk about this. You remember the judge telling us about Bojewski's book, What We Can't Not Know? This is what I can't not talk about. It's the lockdowns. So for example, let's take people who say to you, if you don't favor locking people in their homes, then you just enjoy watching people die. I've had that said to me. I want people to die. And then conversely, I've had people tell me that they hope I die because I'm encouraging things that are going to make other people die. There's a lot of death wish around in society these days, apparently. But what they don't factor in are things like this. Now, again, these are the sorts of things that I have in the e-book and or on that page, in particular, that I'll have ready soon. For example, over in the UK, on several occasions, in major newspapers are not like my friend's underground newsletter that doesn't have an italic font so he has to underline the words with a ruler and a pencil. I'm talking about a real newspaper that we're supposed to listen to and they're always telling us the truth. Even they have been saying that it's quite possible that we will wind up with more preventable cancer deaths than COVID deaths in the UK because of an irrational diversion of resources into a surge that didn't really materialize the way we were told it would. What about those lives? And see, that's another thing. A lot of times the other side is driven by anecdote. I knew a guy who died. If you knew a guy, then you would take this more seriously. All right, well, what if I know somebody who died of a preventable cancer? Wouldn't that make me be more against the lockdowns? So what is knowing a person? I mean, yes, it can encourage us in empathy, but it is extremely unscientific to say, well, I know a guy and therefore I favor the lockdowns. The lockdowns cause other deaths and those deaths are just as important even if you didn't know those people. If you're really empathetic, you can go beyond just your immediate circle and understand that other people's lives matter too. Okay, in April, the United Nations warned of hundreds of thousands of child deaths and the reduction of somewhere between 42 and 66 million children to extreme poverty as a result of the complications emerging from the lockdowns. Do those people's lives not matter? Something called the well-being trust in Oakland, California produced a study trying to find out how many deaths of despair would come about as a result of not just the lockdowns, to be honest, also just worry about the virus itself, but also the effects of the lockdowns. How many deaths of despair would there be? Now, by deaths of despair, we are referring to things like suicides as well as alcohol and drug overdoses. And they came up with a high figure and a low figure and they just averaged the figures out to about 75,000 excess deaths of despair. Now, I don't know about the method behind some of these studies, but nobody seems to care about the method behind studies saying that everyone's gonna die next Wednesday, so I'm not particularly worried about that objection. And we're told by the vice chairman of the American Psychiatric Association's Council on Addiction Psychiatry, I've been seeing this in practices and my colleagues have been talking about it too, people suffering because of social isolation and that addiction patients are relapsing and a lot of patients who don't have drug use or alcohol problems are drinking more now, sometimes every day from four or five PM and they don't stop until they sleep. Then UNICEF predicted 1.2 million child deaths as a result of the lockdowns. So it's not just either or, well, either we have the lockdowns and people live or we don't have them and everybody dies. The world is much less comic bookish than that, it turns out, but nobody who implies that you're a terrible person is ever required to answer for these other four things. Hence this presentation today. Now, these items go to show that if you shut down the world and you tell us that we all have to live like vegetables and that's the new normal, this has consequences. And it also reveals to us how barren it is to say you should shut up and listen to the experts. Now, obviously there are many situations in our lives when we do simply shut up and listen to the experts. When my car breaks down, I take it to a mechanic and I pretend to understand what the hell he's talking about and I pay him and I drive it away. I don't go up to him with a conspiracy theory, I don't say, you know, I know Bill Gates wants to have some other kind of car and he's discouraging me in the car I have by having it break down. I don't do anything like that, I don't need to. I just get the car fixed. But the thing is there is, and I think you can see a bit of high ex-concern about scientism in all this, there is a superstitious reverence for so-called experts that manifests itself in the expectation that they can answer all questions. Not simply the questions they're trained to answer, but they have a holistic view of the world and they can really answer all questions. So let's take, for example, why don't we pick somebody at random? Okay, let's just pick a random expert. Dr. Anthony Fauci, I just picked him at random. Now, people say he's an infectious disease expert and he knows all, you know, he's been around a long time and he has a lot of experience with this and we should listen to what he says because he's the expert. Okay, it is true that he has a lot of knowledge about a lot of things. But if he says the most important thing you should value is flattening this curve, the most important thing you should value is minimizing deaths from this virus, that may well be the best judgment somebody could make. But that is a judgment call because as we've seen, there are competing health concerns in the world. So we need to be able to make our own judgments here. Moreover, he was asked at one point, are you factoring in trade-offs here? That yeah, obviously, if we take all of society's resources and we direct them at one goal, okay, maybe we make some progress against that goal, but what about all this unseen wreckage we're leaving everywhere? His answer was no, he hadn't thought that through. And this is the point. There's no class that a doctor takes in school that teaches him how to balance all the different competing concerns in a situation like this. He doesn't take a class teaching him how you factor in to your public policy recommendations that there are going to be unintended consequences of this, that and the other thing. And gee, how do we balance the 1.2 million dead children against this policy over here? They're not taught that. These are judgments we have to make as informed people. So epidemiologists are not taking a class that teaches them what the answer is in this situation. And then we're told, listen to the science. Okay, now in general, I don't have any objection to that. Science is a glorious thing. It's one of the great, I mean, I know people don't like to talk like this anymore, but it is one of the great creations of Western civilization is the scientific method and all that absolutely agreed. But we have to understand what is science? Science is not a series of infallible statements. That is absolutely not what we're dealing with. It's an ongoing search for the truth. So thus science has been all over the place in this crisis. They're presumably trying to get a handle on what's going on. So simply to say to me, listen to the science. Well, okay, if I listen to the science, I'm constantly getting different answers to how does the virus spread? How does it not spread? What is the role of children? Do children get it? Do they spread it? Do they not spread it? Do asymptomatic people spread it? Do they not spread it? What about pre-symptomatic people? Is Sweden's approach a good idea? We were told, no, it's terrible. Everybody's gonna be dead in Sweden. And then we were told by the head of the health emergencies program of the World Health Organization, Sweden's avoidance of a lockdown was a model, we were told by the science. Why are some countries doing so much better than others? So the science told us that Japan should be a giant graveyard. And the ghouls were practically rubbing their hands together in anticipation at the Japanese, getting what they deserved because they didn't listen to the science. It's almost like there's something more than just science motivating these people. And none of that ever happened. Japan did fine. And then later they said, well it's because Japan wore masks. They knew Japan wore masks when they were predicting they were all gonna be dead. So nice tribe bozo to bring that one up at the end. Or whether lockdowns work. Well show me. So I'm supposed to listen to that? I mean I'll do my best to be informed but it's not like there's some infallible answer that we can all be listening to at a time like this. And then okay, then we get told, well why don't you talk to healthcare professionals? They'll set you straight. They'll tell you ought to shut up and listen to Dr. Fauci. But even they have differences of opinion because believe it or not, even healthcare professionals have political ideologies. It turns out. They're not actually sitting on platonic mountaintops abstractly contemplating the eternal forms, all of them. So if we're going with anecdotes like hey, my friend's a nurse and my nurse friend said such and such. Well there are plenty of healthcare professionals willing to say this has been a fiasco. And a lot of them have written to me. I have patients not coming in because they've been terrified into not coming in and they're winding up having all kinds of problems. It turns out that I think a cardiac arrest is down by like 40% of where it would normally be. Now either the virus is a magical curer of cardiac arrest or people who need to go to the doctor are not going. So now I liked this statement. This came from Dr. Steven Shapiro. He is the chief medical and scientific officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Now I took him as being frankly a little ticked off when he first made his statement. Ticked off by the exaggerated accounts of what was surely going to happen in his area. And then nothing approaching it happened even though they prepared everything for it to happen. They're sending other patients away. They got everything ready. Not even a tiny fraction of it occurred. Yeah, we're opening back up to let sick people come back in. So this is Steven Shapiro. These are some excerpts. We indeed saw a steady stream of patients but never quote surged. At peak in mid-April COVID-19 patients occupied 2% of our 5,500 hospital beds and 48 of our 750 ventilators. Subsequently admissions have been decreasing with very few patients now coming from the community almost all now being from nursing homes. Of note in the 36 UPMC owned senior facilities we have had zero positive cases. Our outcomes are similar to the state of Pennsylvania in general where the median age of death from COVID-19 is 84 years old. I might add by the way that the general statistic for the United States is that the life expectancy is about 78 and the median age of COVID-19 victim is 81. He says the few younger patients who died all had significant pre-existing conditions. Very few children were infected and none died. Minorities in our communities fared equally as well as others but we know that this is not the case nationally. In some this is a disease of the elderly, sick and poor. We are now actively bringing back our patients for essential care following CMS guidelines. To assure a safe environment we use adequate PPE and test all even asymptomatic pre-operative patients for active viral infection with PCR. To date zero out of 1,000 tested positive in Western Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland three of 500 are positive in central Pennsylvania. Our community prevalence is low which we will soon confirm with antibody testing. And now here's what I like the most, some humility. Despite rapid progress there are critical gaps in our knowledge as well as selective use of what we know. For example, we don't know why many who are infected never develop symptoms while other seemingly similar patients get very sick. Crowded indoor conditions can be devastating in nursing homes while on the USS Theodore Roosevelt 1,102 sailors were infected but only seven required hospitalization with one death. This contrast has significant implications that we have not embraced. Epidemiologic prediction models have performed poorly often neglecting critical variables. Seasonality is rarely considered yet we know that coronaviruses are seasonal. Hope is not a plan but it is quite possible that the virus is not very healthy in the US right now. The question before us is what will happen as we reopen society and how should we manage it? For New York and a handful of other cities with high case rates as a result of density, travel and socioeconomic issues they must open up in a measured stepwise manner with extensive testing, tracing and treatment. But for the rest of the country as people come out of their homes cautiously and safely if we protect our vulnerable seniors particularly those in nursing homes we should be able to keep case rates low buying time for a potential resurgence as we bolster our supply chain and find effective intervention. COVID-19 is a disease that ravages those with pre-existing conditions. Whether it be immunosinescence or of aging or the social determinants of health we can manage society in the presence of this pathogen if we focus on these pre-existing conditions. And now here it comes the health consequences of lockdown. What we cannot do is extended social isolation. Humans are social beings and we are already seeing the adverse mental health consequences of loneliness and that is before the much greater effects of economic devastation take hold on the human condition. In this particular case the problem we're not gonna be able to fix in the short term is the complete eradication of the virus. The problem we can fix is to serve and protect our seniors especially those in nursing homes. Now again when you try to raise points like this you get told by people well I know somebody who died who was only 37. And that's true. I believe that the statistic below age 50 in the US deaths is something like 9,000 have died. So it's nothing to shake a stick at but comparable to suicides, accidents and whatever in that age group. I remember distinctly the New York Post ran a story about a 20 year old who was given the all clear they said and then he died of the virus I beg your pardon of COVID-19 and they said what a tragedy this was. Paragraph 10 tells you by the way he had leukemia and but yet everybody people walk around with I knew a guy and these are the pro science people we're the pro science people and we're gonna argue from anecdote. I know I heard there was a 20 year old guy. This is like saying men are generally taller than women and coming back with what are you talking about? My wife is six foot one. What is that? You're not even entitled to get into like you need the prerequisites for science 101 if you're at that level. More people over age 100 than under age 30 have died which is quite interesting. And even Neil Ferguson who was responsible for the models the major UK model of the virus predicted that somewhere between 50% and two thirds of all people who would go on to die from it would have died in 2020. That's how sick they were. So let's say just a few little statistics here because why not? We have to have them. In New York City that was the hardest hit part of the United States and we can speculate as to why it hit so hard. Obviously that horrible nursing home policy is a big part of it. I think early on they weren't really sure about the right treatments and I remember seeing a YouTube video of a doctor saying the ventilators are making things worse. And people saying, oh, this is some crank doctor, you know, listen to the science everybody, listen to the science. And it turned out, oh yeah. Yeah, the ventilators are really a problem. And so no, Andrew Cuomo did not need 40,000 ventilators if I don't get 40,000 ventilators it's gonna be a giant graveyard over here. They got a small number of ventilators they wound up giving some of them away to other states. It turns out. It turned out that guy, that doctor on the YouTube video was telling us the truth. So between the ages of 18 and 44 we've seen a rate of 11 deaths per 100,000 in New York City. For people 75 and older, the rate was 80 times that. And for people under age 18, their death rate per 100,000 was zero. But this 18 to 44 group, and by the way I know this will come as a surprise to you but I don't belong to that group that 18 to 44. The policy is apparently to deprive them indefinitely of all the wonderful things we oldsters enjoyed as we grew up, even though they're at essentially no risk. And yet they did a study recently where they asked people like in their 20s how scared are you? Or like of a thousand of your friends how many do you think will die of the virus? And they had wildly out of scale predictions. The answer is like almost zero. And they thought it was gonna be dozens of their friends would be dead. I mean who can blame them? I mean they're probably watching, I don't know why, or what generation is that, Z maybe? I don't know why would they be watching the news but some of them I guess are. I mean why would they have this view? So it's not just that they're worried about their old relatives. A lot of them are really terrified of the likelihood of dying when they, according to everything we know they have essentially no chance. All right, let's go to my own personal observations. I've visited a number of these opening states because right now I have to balance something here in a talk like this. If I focus my talk entirely on the statistics of right this minute, on this date in July 2020, then it becomes stale in a week. So I don't wanna do that even though I wanna say a little something about that. I wanna focus primarily on these big picture questions. I had a chance to visit, let's say I visited Georgia as soon as it opened up and then Texas and then Massachusetts. Massachusetts where when I went to a restaurant I had to wear the mask before we were served and then you can take the mask off because you cannot spread the virus while you're eating. Thank God, that's such a relief. And then put it back on and leave but I had to write my name and address down. Like it was humiliating but you know when you're hungry, you're hungry, right? I mean I'm not gonna judge my status as a libertarian on the basis of how I act when I'm famished. So I visited a bunch of these states and let me tell you something, they were opening very, very slowly. If people have the idea, they just opened everything up and then look what happened. No, you couldn't get it. I mean most things were shut down in Dallas, almost every restaurant was shut down. So it's not the case, they just, and by the way for a couple of solid months there the case rate was still flat even though they were to some degree open. I'll never forget going to Waffle House at three in the morning. That's why you go to Waffle House. It's three in the morning. Where else are you gonna go? And it was you had to stand outside until your food was ready. Then you could come in and sit at one of the socially distanced tables and when you're standing outside a Waffle House at Dallas at three in the morning, you run into some interesting characters. I'll put it that way. So the good thing is it was kind of enriching. But I remember sitting there and getting to discover what life is like at a Waffle House at three in the morning because I heard the waitress at the register say to a customer, sir, you're bleeding. I don't even know what's going on here. But so the openings were extremely modest and yet when Georgia opened, the headlines were unbelievable. The Atlantic said Georgia was attempting an experiment in human sacrifice. Washington Post said that Georgia is striving to become the number one death destination in America. Makes you just wanna get one of those big foam gloves with the number one on it. Skull and crossbones on it. And it turns, I just checked the numbers. In the past week, they had under 200 deaths from it in Georgia, which is fewer than they had the week before they opened. So the giant Georgia shaped graveyard has not materialized, but no word from anybody. Well, maybe we exaggerated when we accused the governor of trying to sacrifice human beings to some sun god or whatever. I mean, maybe we shouldn't have said that. We get, one thing I observed, by the way, when I was in these states and particularly in Georgia, it seems to me that it was the older people who more wanted to resume their lives than the younger ones. Like they were the ones who wanted to go out. I don't wanna see my grandkids on Zoom anymore. You know, I'm willing to take the chance. You know, I have to be human at some level. I have to just go back to human life and take my chances in and an acquaintance of mine to put it this way. I relinquish any claim on the lives of the young. As an oldster who is presumed to be peculiarly susceptible to the ravages of COVID-19, I will not ask anyone to sacrifice days, weeks or months of their time, love, life and livelihood on my behalf. It is grotesque for the old to ask the young to sacrifice for them. Go live your lives. Enjoy the beautiful spring weather. I have no claim on you for my welfare. Who among my fellow oldsters will release any claims on the lives of young people? Interesting way to put it. I suggested that there should be a group called grandmas against lockdown. Nobody took me up on that, but it's a suggestion. So one gimmick that we got from people I call the doomers was the old jelly bean example. They would say, if you had a bowl of 100 jelly beans and you knew three of them were poisoned, would you take a handful of them? Now, there isn't a 3% death rate. It's extremely way lower than that. But the idea was supposed to be, you see how stupid it is to risk resuming your life when there's this chance of, so the idea was the only rational response is not to take any jelly beans and then in terms of the virus is just cowering in your house. So leave aside the gross exaggeration involved. The question really being asked is, would you reach in and take something if there was a chance it contained poison? But what they're leaving out is, the real question is, what would I suffer if I didn't reach in? What if I just stand there and do nothing? Because they're suggesting that my only possible concern in my life is the virus, but I have other concerns too. One of them is not spending months and possibly years living like a vegetable. And that's what happens if I don't reach in. In the analogy, my reaching into the bowl is the equivalent of returning to normal life and thereby taking a risk. And yes, I'm prepared to take that risk because I wanna live a life that's worth living. If the jelly beans represent everything I've worked for my whole life, if they represent financial solvency, if they represent all my hopes, dreams, and aspirations, you better believe I'd grab that handful and eat them without the slightest hesitation. Now, meanwhile, the virus has refused to behave the way the doomers have assured us it must. So my favorite example, because I was lectured repeatedly about it on social media, in mid-March, it looked like, you know, Hong Kong has really got a handle on the virus. And the headline read, Hong Kong thought it had a handle on the virus, but now it's in big trouble. They were reporting a doubling of confirmed cases in a week. And oh my gosh, in the media and all over social media, it was just way too weeks. It's gonna be piles of corpses in Hong Kong. And it wasn't even like how tragic that it'll be. It was almost like a perverse cheering. Like it's the same perversity with which these people reject all good news. Hey, here's some good news about the virus. As time goes on, a lower and lower percentage of people getting it need to be hospitalized. Like they don't even wanna, it's like they freeze up when they hear good news. It's the most bizarre phenomenon I've ever seen in my years on this earth. So anyway, wait two weeks, right? After Hong Kong, there's gonna be corpses everywhere. Two weeks went by no additional deaths. Four weeks, nothing. Eight weeks, nothing. Now at this point, that doubling of confirmed cases has clearly led to zero deaths. I will tell you that 13 weeks later, there was one death. But unrelated to that doubling of confirmed cases. So why didn't that happen? Can't we have the humility to say we don't entirely know what's going on? Not everything about this virus has a glib tweet response. Not everything. Masks will solve all our problems. Why is California having a spike? They've been wearing masks and it seems like somehow they got a time machine they've been wearing them for two years or something. I don't even know the science behind masks. Maybe they do work. Who even knows? But the point is the Connecticut governor is saying, well, the reason we flattened our curve is because of masks. I'm pretty sure the science doesn't say masks work in Connecticut, but they're a big stink and failure in California. Obviously there's something less cartoonish going on that we haven't fully got a handle on. Or I mentioned Japan before. Why didn't that giant pile of deaths materialize in Japan? Now this is a fascinating case study because despite plenty of contact with China and taking fairly modest coercive measures compared to a lot of other countries, Japan had very few COVID deaths. And the answer initially coming from the doomer side was that's because they don't wanna jeopardize the Olympics. They're suppressing the real numbers. And they're afraid that if they reveal, half of us died, no one's gonna wanna come to the Olympics. So then they postpone the Olympics. No reason to cover up now. No deaths emerged that had been covered. So they just ignored that. Oh, sorry, we accused you all of being liars. No apology, never an apology. An apology? Never, never. Apparently the virus really latches onto apologies. So they're never, never gonna issue an apology. So no apology. So then in early April, the Japanese government asked for voluntary compliance with further social distancing policies. And the press, oh my gosh, the media was overwhelmed with too little too late. It was almost like, yeah, we can't wait to see what happens to you people. And grim warnings of the hospitals are gonna be overwhelmed in Tokyo. Japan's gonna pay for being so lack, they're licking their chops. Two weeks go by, three weeks go by, four weeks go by, the daily death toll continues to fall. How do they account for that? So then they say, well, the Japanese are very clean people, they're concerned about hygiene. Did you just find this out in the past four weeks? You knew that when you predicted they were all gonna die. So you can't now use that. That doesn't work that way. But a professor at Waseda University, Mikahito Tanaka had the guts to say when asked why has Japan done so well? The answer was, even experts don't know the reason. How about that? Now on Twitter, they all know the reason. It was masks. They all know the reason on Twitter. Or if you post this on Facebook, all your Facebook friends, they all know the reason. The experts are stumped, but they really should get on Twitter more because then they would know what was causing it. If it had been such a cartoonish pedestrian answer as masks, you don't think the experts would have thought of that? Or other questions like, why was Iran hit so hard and Iraq not as much? Isn't that the opposite of what you would have predicted? I mean, Iraq's been bombed and had civil unrest and disorder for years and years and years. Wouldn't that seem like they're more ripe for this? I mean, just simple basic questions. We can't get the answer. And there's like no curiosity about it either. Like every country's the same. Everybody's gonna be Italy. The US is gonna be Italy, whatever. I just don't see what's so hard about admitting we don't entirely know what's going on. Let's just be honest. We don't entirely know what's going on. But there are people who think they know. They think that if students return to school, this is gonna lead to piles of corpses. Now, I realize that I'm of two minds on this having helped to devise a homeschool curriculum. I'm not particularly eager to send people back to the schools. I grant that. But leaving that aside, I'm just talking about the arguments here. In Germany, Saxony was the first to reopen schools after the lockdown. The result was no hotspot whatsoever. And after the summer break, they're even gonna drop the mask requirement. So we'd actually, this has actually been tried. How about the lockdowns themselves? And there's some interesting food for thought at least on the lockdowns. So in the Wall Street Journal, we read this from T.J. Rogers. He says, we ran a simple one variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus 10 days to some states shut down before any sign of COVID-19 to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%. So low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as no correlation and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. I'll have on my page some charts that you can look at on this because we do have Google mobility data. Like we actually, I know we don't like being traced but here's a silver lining of it. We know that people have been moving around since some of the social distancing requirements have been lifted. And even before they were lifted, some people after a month just got tired of doing it and they started moving around. So you think the more they move around, the more that virus is gonna spread, the more deaths. So you could plot these numbers. So there's a researcher who calls this social contact score. Like, you know, how many people you come into contact with and how much traveling you're doing, how much mobility do you have? And they were looking at mobility versus deaths per million in the chart looking at all the different states. And there's no correlation. How about staying at home? How about the shelter in place policy? If anything, the results show the opposite of what you would expect. Now obviously correlation doesn't prove causation but I think it's reasonable to ask could you really have causation without any correlation? I mean, what is happening here? Again, that shouldn't be, right? That should not be, why would that be? And even I don't quite see why that, it seems to make sense. You stay home and things should, and yet the numbers don't even bear that out. You know, what's happening here? Now you say, oh, but maybe it's that in the places that were hit the hardest, because they were hit the hardest, they imposed the heaviest lockdowns and stuff like that. But they've played with those numbers too. It doesn't work out that way. So for example, you could look at, there were seven states that had minimal to no lockdowns and you look at what are the expected number of deaths that you would expect to have in these states by this time of the year? And every one of those seven is way below, or is at least significantly below or somewhat below the expected number of deaths. Then we look at the seven most heavily locked down states and five of those are above the expected number of deaths and several of them way above the expected number of deaths. So again, now there could be other factors at work here, but it's not just a glib response that on Twitter you could give in 280 characters. There's something we're not quite fully getting about this. And it's not entirely just population density either. Stockholm did better than New York City and even did better than all of New York State despite being 2.6 times more dense. All right, I don't want to talk any more about Georgia because I did that, so I will say a little something about Sweden before we start wrapping up. Sweden of course is the country everyone used to love. Everybody loved Sweden, whatever it was, Ikea's from Sweden or something and then they loved the social democracy and all that and then that just stopped. They don't like Sweden at all. So okay, so they say Sweden didn't do as well as other Scandinavian countries and yes, its nursing homes were hit very hard. But one thing that is interesting to note about Sweden is it's a country of 10 million people. How many people under age 50 died from the virus in Sweden? Under age 50, 70, that's an astonishing number. So now, and incidentally, it's not enough to say, well, Denmark and Finland did better than, if the virus justified this mad irrational destruction of the past four months and who knows how many more months, Sweden should be a thousand times worse than everybody else. Not comparable to the UK. It should be a thousand times worse. There shouldn't be anybody left. Ferguson's model said there would be 96,000 deaths by June in Sweden if they didn't have full suppression. By that date, they had had about 4,000 deaths. So they beat that by a factor of 24. So that's worth knowing. There's other things we can say about Sweden. I mean, we also know the Swedes kept sending kids to school, the Finland they didn't. And then it turns out there's no difference in the health outcomes whatsoever, none whatsoever. All right, it's true that people want to talk about what's going on in some of these states that have reopened. Because, yeah, I can find a state like Georgia where everything's pretty stable. But there are a few states where the cases have spiked and even the deaths have slightly spiked. Now, obviously the case spike is partly because of additional testing. Not entirely that, but partly that. And part of the reason behind additional testing is that in a lot of places, to return to work, you have to prove that you don't have the virus. You got to go get tested. And in Florida, I believe it was Florida, they were honest enough to admit that they're not catching all the duplicates. So if you go and get tested five times trying to get back to work, there have been times when that's been counted as five cases. You're actually only one person. So that's important to remember. So I will talk a little bit privately about that because if I get bogged down in that, then it makes this not as ever green a YouTube presentation. But the long and the short of it is none of these places are or will be New York. All right, so the last bit, and then I know I'm going over a little bit, but I feel like if I don't look at Joe Salerno, I can just keep going. If I can't see him signaling to me, I can just keep going. Now, obviously it makes sense to take precautions and particularly people who are vulnerable, especially vulnerable. There are precautions you can take. They're increasing, improving treatments all the time. These are all things to be welcomed. But the issue is, if we just simply say, let's just try to have a blanket protection of absolutely everybody, this is not the best, it seems to me, use of resources. It'd be better to focus the resources on the most vulnerable people and let the other folks try to live their lives the best they can, at the very least, to keep the engine of prosperity going that allows us to support the vulnerable people in the first place. And we should talk about how to best preserve biological life. But the bigger question that needs to be answered that I hinted at at the beginning is whether mere biological life is worth living. And no expert can answer that question for you because it's a philosophical question. So if people's hopes, dreams, and aspirations are dashed for an indefinite period of time, which purveyors of the current strategy almost flippantly propose, oh, we'll just stay shut down, is that really living? They say probably no large gatherings for a long time. Okay, well, how long? Just give me an estimate. And what are large gatherings? Oh, no big deal, just concerts, theater, lectures, church, sporting events, the arts in general, pretty much everything that makes life worth living. So yes, this kind of life has a pulse, but it has no soul. Now in this large gatherings thing, anybody who performs in front of an audience, and that's dancers, musicians, comedians, magicians, athletes, singers, actors, whatever, this present strategy means your hopes and dreams are on indefinite hold and you may never be able to fulfill them. Your heart will keep beating, but you'll never be able to fulfill them. People who went before you got to fulfill their dreams, but you can't fulfill yours. There's an ironically named Center for American Progress that has as one of its spokesman, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who's the brother of Rahm Emanuel, you know, of not letting a crisis go to waste that guy. He says we need to be on lockdown for 18 months until there's a vaccine, which he assumes there will be. And these are his exact words. How are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half? Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice. Conferences, concerts, sporting events, religious services, dinner in a restaurant, none of that will resume until we find a vaccine, a treatment, or a cure. We have to be realistic, Emanuel urges us, and accept that we will be giving up cherished things for a long time. And here's what he says, things we have to give up. Things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family. Things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family. This is insanity. What it boils down to is this. Either we're gonna live or we're not. And life is riskier in the age of COVID-19. Thankfully, we know precisely the kinds of people who require special consideration and attention. And we would have much better numbers today if we hadn't been acting on the basis of wildly inflated estimates. That's supposedly the reason they threw all these old people who were infected back into the nursing homes. It was to be ready for this surge of eight gazillion people. There weren't eight gazillion people. It was a challenge, but there weren't eight gazillion people the way they said. And meanwhile, all these old folks died. Start by not doing that. We had no right to expect a virus to be this accommodating to us in the sense that we could identify demographics in danger. This should help us as we try to cope with it. Or you would think. Instead, it seems like doomers want to discontinue those life-giving pleasures that give meaning and fulfillment to otherwise drab existences. Now, was your risk level precisely where you needed it to be down to three significant digits before this virus came along? Because that'd be an amazing coincidence. You were at just the risk profile you could tolerate. And then a very slight increase in risk meant you had to shut your life down. But you could transmit the virus to someone else, they say, and that's true. This is why people most likely to suffer serious consequences from it should probably isolate themselves. But I'm not going to render a judgment on a grandmother who decides she'd rather take her chances embracing her family members than spending her time isolated in a nursing home, wasting away physically, mentally, or emotionally, or for heaven's sake, spending her final months talking to her grandchildren over Zoom. If we don't agree to focus our efforts on safeguarding the elderly in particular, then life becomes a miserable series of deprivations. When will someone say we refuse to live like this? We already have some elderly and immunocompromised people, including friends of mine saying, look, we don't even want you to live like this. We're not even asking for this. Goal, enjoy the one life you get. And we will do the best we can until conditions change. We don't want our grandchildren's lives ruined, and we don't want to spend our final days staring at a computer screen. At least that way we could focus our resources on people who really need it instead of fruitlessly shipping millions of tests all over the place. Living cannot be mere biological survival because that would mean that eating cans of navy beans inside a windowless room for 75 years would be just as good as a life full of human affection, meaningful relationships, and exhilarating experiences. In the UK, Lord Sumption summed it up. What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship and arm around one's back, laughter or tears shared at less than two meters. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course, death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is. Well, right on. Thank you.