 town at the end of the line. Yeah, Coronaville, here on Think Tech. Coronaville is a little town at the end of the line and we're getting there. Coronaville, what's next? I'm Jay Fidel, okay? And with me is Cynthia Sinclair and Stephanie Dalton and we're talking about the coronavirus today. We want to take a weekly snapshot of what's going on and there's always so much going on. I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic and there's the world is upside down and burning and we can never forget that no matter what they tell us in Washington. So let's discuss first, okay, the resurgence because I think that's the benchmark of where we are. We're having, I don't think there's any question about it. We're having a resurgence, a major resurgence over 110,000 deaths already or millions of cases already. And of course we have 21 states that are seeing new heights in infections. So Cynthia, what's the status of the resurgence, honestly? Well, we know that Arizona is having the worst of all of the states, but there's 20 of them yet, 20 states that have an uptick in cases like a serious uptick in cases over the last week. And so we still aren't even seeing the uptick from the cases that are gonna come from all the protests and stuff. People are trying to be careful, but even trying to be careful, they're too close together. There's too many of them. Just the statistics alone are enough to tell you that it's gonna be bad. Arizona just- It's already bad. Right. Arizona is a good example. Yeah, exactly. They have 85% full. All of their ICU beds are full. So they're like reaching out, the governor, I believe it's the governor who has just said that we need to start, they need to start using emergency procedures in that state. So it's pretty big deal there. And they still haven't even seen the top of it. We have 2 million plus cases now in this country. And like you said, there's 104,000 souls dead. Okay, were we prepared for this, Stephanie? I mean, is this a surprise? No, and we knew before we started that we had the hospital beds were 85% already taken. Okay, so there wasn't a full complement ever available for this. So no, we're not prepared. Florida's, I mean, if you can believe Vermont is in desperate circumstances. And Utah, which are surprising just because you don't see those states come up in the news. And then Florida now has just had the highest number of cases in seven days at about over 8,500. So we're in the full blow of it the second wave. And all of that of our own doing and all this is in the what second month of the reopening without any regard for the number. But the important thing to remember here as the queen of hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, our leader says, you know, the more you test the more cases you get. Well, you know what's interesting? I just a point of media, Stephanie, is that yeah, these protests have gone on for 15 days. And I'm not sure they're over. I haven't looked at the tube yet today. And presumably it would have slowed down at the time of the funeral yesterday, but maybe, maybe not. Okay, the problem is that the press, if you noticed was focused entirely exclusively on the street scene. Day after day, night after night, early morning hours, every single day. Meanwhile, we were getting a resurgence and they were really hardly covering that. So now that the street scene seems to be diminishing a little bit, or at least people are not as interested or the press isn't as interested because it's a downward curve of activity on the streets. All of a sudden now we find out, something like a surprise. We find out that, yes, we have in our midst this resurgence and I'm just, I'm sort of shocked because this is the way the news has been going. My friend Donald has set the agenda. What he does is what's covered. The news follows that around and we don't get the whole picture. If they have our attention for, I don't know how many hours a day they can at least give us some diversity in the news we need to know, but they're not. They're just following the raw meat all the time. And I think that's really made clear in this case. Thoughts? I was really worried about the fact that they didn't talk about it because without talking about it and telling people to remember, they're not gonna be as careful and they're gonna sort of fall into this false sense of security, right? Well, I've got my mask, so I'm okay, but then there's all these other people that don't have their masks on, and then they've got the tear gas and the things that are making people cough and sneeze and making it worse. So those elements involve tubes. Don't forget when you're in a protest demonstration type of crowd, what is everybody doing all at the same time? Yelling. Yelling and shouting and spewing droplets in every direction. And if you don't have a mask on, you're really a fool. If you do have a mask on, you're still at great risk because when did I see this recently that the droplets can get out from behind a mask. If you talk loud enough or yell or scream or holler, you get right through the mask. And so, we should have known this. So where was the CDC, Stephanie? Were they talking about this? If they told us, be careful in crowds. Have they told us to stay home? No, it was too red hot, and they were on the sidelines. And let me ask you, what is the status of our task force, our very prestigious, important, critical, emergency task force? What's going on with that? The leadership has completely dropped everything. So I have heard comments on that, and I've noticed it too. There's absolutely no information coming out, no matter that we're going up with 26 states affected, really in highways. I mean, so we're not having anything at the federal level attending to this. And I think your points about the media are so right on. And I've noticed it because I've been forced to change channels because enough, all right, I wanna know about the protests, but come on, on and over and over in every single channel, which forced me into other channels. So your point is, I think that the press needs to be, the media need to be more nimble, and they need to be on numerous topics, not just following the mother load. We have enough of the mother load information and it's gonna be repeated all day. So I know that press has been hammered badly by Trump, but they also made this mistake during the 216 campaign where everything was also cute and funny and entertaining and ratings driven by Trump. And so everybody got to see him. So we didn't get to see hardly anything of the other people and other smaller things that weren't so ratings heavy or ratings impacted. And they made, I think a big mistake there and contributed to this mess. So now they've had this purgatory and they're kind of paying for their, paying their debt here to us. But now they need to get up on it and be nimble and understand that there are multiple things in play. All the time- The thing about it is you say they need to get up and now they can do it. But the reality, remember that we were behind the curve because we didn't do anything for weeks. I mean, not months, but weeks. In fact, I go further and say it only takes days or hours for a pandemic of this vitality to reach out into the community and infect millions of people. And so if you lose 10 days on warning people, if you lose 10 days of distancing, if you lose 10 days of good conduct and masks, you're actually generating an enormous logarithmic level of infection. It was totally predictable and we didn't hear from Trump. So let's talk about him for a minute, Cynthia. What was he doing, if anything, about coronavirus while this was going on? Where was he putting his attention and thus where was he attracting the press to go? Well, I think he was putting all of his attention into making money on this whole thing. I think he was delaying so that he could put his book in place to make the masks instead of using the, you know, the, I forgot the name of the act that you could use to make all of the production act to make, yeah. If he had done that, then every state would have been making masks and PPE for each state. And now what we have three companies, I think, for the whole country doing it, and they're his buddies. They're the people that are the big donors for him. So it's like he put all the contracts to his friends. It seemed like it was just all about money, all about making money. He didn't care one bit about people dying. Well, no, I mean, we know from his comments about the protesters, he doesn't care. He doesn't care about the Black Lives Matter movement. He doesn't care about people in general. And so my reaction is, you know, he's not capable of caring. That's the way it is. That's not gonna change. And it's certainly not between now and November. People still hold out this kind of hope that he'll turn human, but I don't think so. So let me return to the notion of complacency. It's like, it seems to me that what happened here, that what happened here, these protests, these demonstrations, absolutely got to be influenced by the fact that millions of people, we forget sometimes, but millions of people have been holed up for the past what? Months, six weeks, two months long time. And you forget time, it's altered. Time is altered while you're holed up. You don't realize how much time goes by. It's a continuum from night to day and day to night, and you manage to get through, but you're not connected to time in the same way. So these people, you know, are not themselves, I don't know, a lot of people, I think, are not self-aware enough to know that they're being affected by being holed up. And so something comes up, like the scene in the street, like the murder of George Floyd, and they wanna go out. They wanna go out, it's a perfect way to go out, get some air, get out of your house, get away from being cooped up. And I mean, not everybody, some people, probably not affected much by this phenomenon I'm describing, but I think a lot of people were affected by it. And if you look for the factors, the influences that built a crowd across the country and the world, it has to include, those influences have to include the fact that people hadn't been out of their houses for months, don't you agree? Well, I think Trump's gonna use that at some point. Exactly, as the reason he got into this situation and that that was something that emerged and was stimulated by the circumstances of being sequestered. But I think that there was another study going back to the point about the numbers of people infected, the more recent study of who wasn't infected because of what was done. And that's an interesting way to take a look at it too, because of when it did get attended to, then there were enormous numbers that did not contract the infection. So there's studies going both ways. But eventually, this has got to come around to Trump's fall. At some point, there's got to be a reckoning here. We've got 110,000 deaths in two million cases. Oh, and going fast, yeah. The other parallel to this is he got up there, not too long ago, well, it was already a long time. He said, we're back. Remember, I quote, we have prevailed, okay? We're reopening. And this is really the core of our discussion today. Why are we reopening? Is there a reason to reopen? You can say the economy is in the tank, but is it safe? It's like the line out of the marathon, man. Is it safe? No, it's not safe. There's no indication that it's safe. The only indication we have of any kind of direction on this is from the White House who has confused us beyond recognition. The country, the world, it's all confused. Thank you, Dr. Trump, with the level of infection, with the drugs, with what needs to be done, we are all confused. And, okay, then as the hero, he emerges and says, okay, we've prevailed. How did you prevail? Tell me, what did you do to prevail? Because we don't know of anything by which you prevailed. Okay, and people took that seriously. I see it's another, I think it's another influence on what happened in the street. People felt, okay, that it was safe somehow or safer. Okay, if, here's the logic, that if the country could reopen, if we could reopen the restaurants and have the events and get married and have bar mitzvahs and whatever else, okay, then we're really saying it's safer, but there was no reason to say that. In any event, people listened to the bully pulpit, so they thought, okay, it's all right to go out. How do you feel about this, Cynthia? All of the CDC guidelines that were put out by the White House are not being followed. So, you know, that's that confusion that we all have because we get these mixed messages. And so we don't know which one we should believe or which one we shouldn't believe, which makes you doubt the whole process, right? So if you're doubting the whole process, then you think, well, maybe it's really not as bad as they say, even though we have more than a thousand people die every day here in America, a thousand people has a lot of people. We've become so desensitized to the death of it that I think part of the reason why people were so motivated to come and I agree with you that part of the reason they were out there was because they could go out. Let's just get out of the house and it's a reason to get out of the house. A lot of the people were there just because they firmly believe in the whole process and the reason why they were there. But I believe that some of them were there just to get out. So I think that you're right, that's part of why we got those huge, huge crowds that we might not have gotten otherwise. Yeah, you know, the other thing that has been of interest is the meatpacking numbers. I would like to discuss that with you guys. At first, we were getting plenty of information. Rachel Maddow was my favorite source. She had the numbers. She knew how many people and each one of those big meatpacking plants was getting sick and the percentages and the metrics on how bad it was. And with that, you could try to figure out what was going on in those plants. Then all of a sudden, we had these Republican governors and the like and they would clamp down on the information. So we started to lose touch with the numbers. They would say, for example, we're not gonna tell you unless it's more than 10% and they make the calculation of when it's 10%. So the result is we stopped getting the numbers. And I suggest to you, I like your reaction to it, I suggest to you that what we have thanks to Trump and the Republicans is a shutdown on information to the public. And this is also we shouldn't panic. This is also we shouldn't be concerned. This is also so we should go back to work and feel it's safe again because we're just not getting the numbers of what's going on in these meatpacking plants and other gathering places. What do you think, Stephanie? Well, I believe that people are drawing their own conclusions from the data that is available. So as the data came out, what did we find out? That actually it's certain groups that are more affected than other groups. And so when the groups that aren't affected as much found out about that, then that gave more impetus to the joining the activity in the streets where they would probably be pretty safe and they're out there on behalf of those who are not safe. But nevertheless, we're drawing our own conclusions because we have no additional information. All of the scenes, the settings that we're giving us that information have been shut off. We never had CDC to begin with because he'd shut that off. Then who went down, WHO? And now not even his, which is so ironic that he canceled that White House briefing. Of course, Pence was supposed to lead that, but he was the one that was the problem on the White House briefing. We didn't want the White House briefing to go away. We just wanted him to go away and let's get on with the science. It's kind of like that crazy teacher. We always had an elementary school that got it all wrong. What it was causing the problem and then we all had to stay in our shoes. Sure, you turn it back. You blame somebody else. You never take, you never acknowledge responsibility. I find it very interesting that he's absolutely, nobody can argue. He's turned this whole thing into a political issue. He's politicized science. He's politicized science. And now we have this, the move of the Republican convention. How query do we really need a political convention, a Republican convention, out of what is it, North Carolina, Charlotte, to Fort Lauderdale, I think. And he's doing this because they gave him some constraint in North Carolina. They said, no, we're not gonna have a big crowd because that would be dangerous. Apparently, Flora didn't say that, so he wants to have a big crowd. Having the big crowd, having the rally, him not wearing a mask, Mr. Macho, that is more important to him. In a convention where he probably, I mean, 99%, he will be a Republican candidate. It's hard to believe. He's not doing this convention so he will become the Republican candidate. He's doing this convention, so it's a rally. Okay, and that's a fine point where he's willing to spend American lives. It certainly shows no way he's seeking alternatives to settings that are so dangerous. And of course, Florida is stepping out today, as I mentioned earlier, as having the most increase of all and certainly have its own data for seven days, the most number of cases, which only follows with the kind of openings that they pan. Yeah, so, okay, I don't know where this goes now, but go ahead. I have some numbers for you if you want them about the meat packing plants. There are 115 meat, 115, this is from the CDC, 115 meat packing plants and poultry also, right? Facilities that were reported by 19 states among approximately 130,000 workers at these facilities, there were almost 5,000 cases and 20 deaths. So, and we don't know if they're for sure these, I don't know if I really trust CDC numbers. Oh, that's it, that's true. We're not getting the information and the information we get isn't true. I mean, we haven't heard much about the meat packing plants lately. And for that matter, I just want to address this. So, okay, so he's created a kind of complacency in the country, confusion, complacency, people feel that it's okay, they can go out, they can restart the economy and all this without fear, with total impunity from a disease which has not been resolved. So, we're into, for example, this sort of national restart by effectively what, two weeks maybe, but it moves fast. And what do you guys think is gonna happen in the next two weeks? Because that's the normal period of quarantine and what do you call it? The period where the disease emerges. Are we gonna see worse here? Oh, yes, without a doubt we're gonna see worse. We knew we were gonna get an uptick of cases anyway just from the opening. So, you add all these protests in there and in 14 days we are gonna see, because that's the incubation time that the virus needs. So, 14 days from now, I hate to think what's gonna happen. And I know I started saying this last week too. In my opinion, because of all these protests happening, every single state should be putting in place what Arizona is putting in place by doing the emergency measures, you stop the surgeries that are voluntary, you stop all of that stuff, you put all of your access. Do you think they're gonna do that Cynthia? No, I don't. I think a couple of states are because they see how bad it's getting. But a lot of states aren't. A lot of the unfortunately partisan split. How does this go? I mean, what I get from you is that they're not gonna do it. The Republican governors are not gonna do it for sure. We're gonna have a stress on our mail system. We're gonna have a lot of people in the hospital more than before. We're gonna have a lot of infections out there. We don't have medicines. We do not have medicines, period. People say, even Fauci, we don't have medicines. So then we're gonna be where we were, what, a month ago and we're going to be really scared and we're still gonna be involved in, punitively, we're still gonna be involved in this quote reopening. So what's gonna happen when we have this reinfection? Are we gonna stop the reopening? Is Trump gonna do anything? Is the task force gonna do anything, say anything? Are the governors gonna step up? We're gonna have to go through, am I right? The same process we went through before, we're gonna go into this kind of panic shutdown. Everybody, you know, back to the drawing board, back home. Everybody shut in again. Is that what's gonna happen, Stephanie? I think it's gonna get very much worse. I think that the grievances are the tip of the iceberg now and the nurses and the emergency responder people are now questioning why they lost so many nurses, et cetera and all due to a lack of PPP. It's starting to arise. Like when is there going to be accountability? And then how about all of the people speaking of those meatpacking plants that had to endure the stress and terror of going to work? Hey, they're still there, they're still there, Stephanie. And so even if these people are oppressed and have no voice, I think their voice is gonna start to come up because look how long it's taken the nurses to really come out and say, there are this many people that are dead that do not have to be dead and it's all because we didn't have X. So I think it's gonna start to come meanwhile, we're gonna get more infection and more people are gonna die. And I think this thing could roll over into harsh show. I mean, this could roll over into really civil unrest in the streets of who's gonna be accountable for this and who's gonna come in and fix it. And we're still too pretty far out from the election where we could see some respite here, people get in there that know what to do and would start setting up the remedies for this because all of us could sit here and generate remedies that could happen right now, just what Cynthia was saying. That's because we're smarter than he is, I really mean that. It doesn't take much, I don't think he's a smart man. But Cynthia, you know, here we are and it's a count the months, it's not that many months to November, okay? And of course we're gonna have other distractions, but my question to you is, what effect does this, what we're talking about here today, all these bundle of things we're gonna have on the election? Because as you guys said in the last show, which I thought that was an important point, people forget and if Trump can maintain the agenda, if he can distract us with something else, create some kind of other thing, who knows, an international emergency, what have you, people will forget what has been happening right now. How much confidence do you have that people will remember this and apply it in their thinking for the election? Well, I think with a resurgence, they will. I think if it was to stop where it was and we didn't keep going and we didn't have a big resurgence, possibly people would forget, because that's what they want, they people wanna not think about bad things, we're sort of as a people, we don't wanna look at ugly things, we don't wanna think about ugly things. And unfortunately that makes them prolificate, right? Now what you were saying, Stephanie, about the nurses, I agree and I think it's just, we may not be able to blame Trump for every single death from the COVID virus, but we can blame him for every death of every doctor, nurse and EMT and all of our first responders, because without PPE is why they died. If they'd had the right kind of PPE, they would not have died. And so I think he's responsible for every one of those deaths. Yeah, and those deaths are special. Those deaths are deaths of people who would be around to help us in the second wave, in the resurgence. And we're gonna find it all the more difficult to find the talent and the commitment, people willing to hang around and help people who are sick with COVID in the next wave. Well, already that's an issue in Arizona and if Clark's gonna quit up here, I mean, the cadres that do the work of nursing people and treating them, they're down because of this and it's gonna continue to get lower as people, but we know a lot. The other problem is, I was gonna say we know a lot more about it, but we don't. That's what Fauci said recently. Remember, he said that this is more complex than AIDS and what could be more complicated than that? That was hugely challenging. And now he's saying this one has really impressed me with its complexity and the degree of work that we have to do to understand it. We still don't have interventions. We still don't have ways to treat it. We still don't know who's done it. We still don't have enough testing and tracking for that matter. Testing and tracking. We don't. I mean, I think Hawaii is at risk too, by the way. We insist on having tourists come and they bring it with them. And we're not ready to let people come and I just heard this this morning. I know we just had four new deaths this over the weekend here on Oahu. They're not four new deaths. I'm sorry. Four new cases here on Oahu. What? What's the community for it? It's a kind of an uptick for us, right? They're gonna open it up and they're gonna let people, if they test negative on the mainland, they get to come here and they get tested again. They don't have to wait for 14 days. They're gonna remove the 14-day lock-in when people come. The mandatory quarantine is gonna go away. So we're gonna see a lot of an upsurge here in Hawaii, I think too. Yeah, and we're not gonna be able to reach, if people think that we're gonna be able to reach our former levels of tourism and dreaming because this is not unknown to people who might travel. Travel has become very dangerous, including travel to Hawaii. Hawaii looks very good, according to what... It looks good in a relative sense. But remember, we're on the cusp of a second wave. Exactly, but the money's in that wave. I mean, that's it. It's the economy versus dying. People don't take the dying seriously. So here's Hawaii's leadership. They're looking to save the economy but bring in the virus. I mean, so are they serious about this? Are they... That's what he's done. He's made dying a warrior experience. He's made dying the new normal. And I think there are people walking around saying, well, okay, well, if I get it, I'll die. And they don't see it as an epidemic. I'm very concerned about this, sort of the public state of mind about this. But I think that this conversation convinces me that we're gonna have a problem. And that problem is not something the public will forget between now and November, which is five months away. And that whatever he does, it's really not gonna change the fact that the country is awash in COVID. And it's gonna hurt him. Furthermore, there'll have to be more shutdowns. It'll either be by governmental initiative or it'll be de facto. People won't be able to work. So we'll have greater unemployment. We'll have an economy and unemployment and problems in supply lines worse than before. And everyone will feel that. And they will, if they're rational, they'll feel that he's responsible. He is responsible. So I think it will affect the election. On the other hand, we haven't really discussed this, but of course, you guys discussed it to some extent last show, is that he will try, I believe he will try to avoid the election, avoid losing. He'll win at any cost. That's his initiative on things. So that brings me to my last question to you guys. Okay, seeing the landscape ahead of us, seeing all these potholes and bombs going off all around us, what's gonna happen in the next week? I know that's an unfair question. Cynthia, what's gonna happen in the next week? Well, we're gonna start to see some updates all around the country. We're gonna start to see a resurgence of this virus and it's going to continue and turn into a giant wave is what I think. But over the next week, we're just gonna see an increase in numbers and an increase and hopefully an increase in awareness from people. That's what I'm really hoping. And Stephanie, are we gonna see an increase in activity on this issue from the White House? Do you think the White House will realize this and step up? Do you think we'll get any guidance and support to resolve these problems? Or will it be the same old turning its, the White House turning its back? I'm blocking questions. Yes or no? Well, I absolutely, I mean, he's gonna do nothing. And I'm just concerned that, the Korean man is leader man is acting weird over there. So I think we're forgetting that we're also sitting here on a planet that is not the garden of friendship. So we are also still vulnerable and we're down in so many ways. So we also have to have somebody have their head. This is another reason why Trump is inappropriate and unsuitable for this office. Because no matter you have all of this crisis in the country, we still have to look out for ourselves in the neighborhood of the globe. And pray, pray that, you know, no disaster fantasies here, but we could be hit. I mean, who? Well, that raises a very interesting point is something we ought to follow on this show. And that is this, just as people are affected by being cooped up and they're affected by the threat of the pandemic. They're affected by the change in the way the world order works. So are countries. So are leaders everywhere. And so if Kim Jong-un, you know, sort of contained his aggressiveness before for whatever reason, maybe he's gonna act differently going forward. If Xi Jinping contained his hostility to the United States before, maybe it'll be different in a time the pandemic runs rampant around the world. I don't think a pandemic leads to rationality. It's just the opposite. Okay, you guys. Oh, Trump just got rid of the Open Skies Treaty or the Open Skies Act. Is that what it's called? Wait, I have it right here. Yeah, the opens, which is gonna make it harder for people to, what is it called exactly? Yeah, so what's gonna happen is we're not gonna be able to keep as good a track of the Russian military and what they're doing. And neither will our allies over in Europe that have an even better, closer eye on him. They won't be able to keep as close of an eye on him either. So all this unrest around the world, we know how Russia feels. We know how Putin feels about it. And we know how Trump feels about Putin. Yeah, exactly. Don't forget, Trump wants to resume nuclear testing, that's a step, a huge step backward like 50 years. And don't forget that he wants to do a July 4th parade, a military parade in the streets of Washington and get everybody out there for another big event. It goes to your question. How is he going to stop the election? So he's gonna meddle and plan to his own likes and get us, God knows where by the end of this term. Well, as always, talking to you guys here at a given Wednesday and next week we'll do it Thursday. You know, it always makes me feel better. I feel so much better now about everything. Thank you for this comforting discussion. Just to ask your fans. Cynthia Sinclair, Stephanie Dalton. Thank you so much, you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Aloha. Stay safe.