 back to ThinkTech. This is Coronaville. What's next on a given Thursday? And now before we start, a few words from our friend Sylvia. Welcome to Coronaville. What's next? Which plays on ThinkTech Hawaii every Thursday at 11 a.m. Today, one week after the inauguration, we will talk about how hard President Biden is working on COVID, and how well he and his team are doing. J. Fidel is our host, and our guests are Tim R. Pitchella, Cynthia Leasing-Clair, Stephanie Dalton, and Winston Welch. Our panel will discuss President Biden's team, the status of his COVID relief bill in Congress, his attempts to require masks and social distancing, his efforts to get more vaccine, the numbers of vaccinations so far, the shortages and supply line issues, the timeline to vaccinate the country, the threat presented by the variants, the disparity among the states, and how well we are doing as against Europe and Asia. Our plate is certainly full today. In any event, we and the new administration have found that dealing with the pandemic is and will be very challenging. Okay, that said, Tim, how well is Joe Biden doing? How well is his team doing one week after inauguration on COVID? I think the operative point you just made was one week. Look at the Trump administration with 10 months at the helm and how little they did, and Joe Biden one week has moved the ball forward down the field exponentially faster. And so I think he's doing an outstanding job. I was a little concerned that he increased the projection of vaccinations to be injected into people's arms and really not having to handle, I think, on the production schedule. So that's kind of betting on the come, as they say. But I think he'll accomplish it. I think he'll hit his target goal. And we will get these vaccinations in hand. I think they'll do what they have to do regarding the variant virus. And they'll have to adjust and move their strategies one way or the other to deal with that as well. But I think he's doing an excellent, excellent job. And his administration that's tasked with that are also doing an excellent job. What about the COVID relief bill in Congress? Sounds like that's an important bill, really important. Is that going to get through? Are we going to have trouble with the Republicans? And what can Schumer do to make sure it gets through? Despite rhetoric of unity and cooperation with Mitch McConnell and the other GOP centers, that only goes so far. I think they're at a point now where if you're in the way and you don't want to work with the new administration for one reason or another, maybe you think they're not justified to be there in the first place, they're going to push them aside. They'll get the COVID stimulus taken care of via the budgetary resolution process. They're not going to wait around. They're not going to stall. And then all that can Mitch McConnell and his ilk delay the game. Give us a moment on the budgetary process. Okay. Well, see, I think if things don't move along, they're going to move it within a week from now. How do they do that? How does the budgetary process give them an advantage they wouldn't otherwise have? Well, it's the votes. You don't need a super majority for a budget of votes. You need 51 votes. And Kamala Harris will be the 51st vote. So that's how they're going to do it. I don't think they want to play hardball so early in the new administration, but I think they will if they have to. And Mitch McConnell has kind of thrown some, you know, some diversionary tactics in the water. I think that only goes so far now. The diversionary tactic I'm referring to is the impeachment trial where Mitch McConnell was all, you know, said on the Senate floor how guilty Donald Trump was of inciting the attack on the Capitol. And then said he doesn't want to entertain the trial until Donald Trump is out of office. Now that Donald Trump's out of office, he doesn't want to entertain the trial. So what kind of political shenanigans was that? And I think that really set the tone in the wrong direction for Mitch McConnell and the other GOP senators, but we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Cynthia, how are we doing on COVID? You know, I've heard most recently that the numbers are a little better, but do you have any idea about where we're going on this? They're still super, super high. It's not really so much that they're better, but it's that they're kind of starting to go on a downturn a little bit, but we're still just astronomical. Worldwide cases, 101 million, 68,455. Deaths, 2 million, 180,021. In the U.S., our cases are 25,620,883, and our deaths are almost 430,000. Our worst days, our deadliest months of the year, I mean, of this whole time here in the U.S. anyway. In April, we had 60,000 deaths. In December, 77,000 deaths. And in January, 81,477 deaths in one month, just in the month of January, which we are not even totally out of yet. And we're having, you know, three, 4,000 a day. So, you know, let's get it local. Here in Hawaii, we've got, we've had 25,442 cases. And we've had 404 deaths. Now, that death rate went up, jumped markedly just recently. And it was because they were entering in some backdated cases that had not originally been contributed to COVID. So, we've had here in Hawaii, 109,808 vaccinations administered. All totaled in the United States, we have 47,230,950, wait, 230,000, sorry, 950 distributed. And administered, we have only 24, less than half, or about half, 24,652. Wait a minute. I totally got those wrong. 47,230,950. I totally butchered that first one, sorry. That was distributed. Now, administered is 24,652,634. The states that are doing well, that have the highest numbers of administered doses is Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and New York. There are 16 states that have less than 50% of their doses delivered, that were delivered, that have been administered. And one new quick thing is that they finally found the South African variant and it was in South Carolina. It has arrived and it was with somebody who had not traveled out of the country yet. So, if they were exposed by someone here. So, it's already here. We know it's in the United States. Yeah. Yeah, don't be limited to the, what is it, the one that most recently popped up, as Cynthia mentioned. In fact, there are three variants, right, Stephanie? And there are 500 cases around the country in one or the other of those variants. So, what does that mean? What is the variant mean? Is it of concern? Stephanie. Oh, a huge concern. Yes, because it's East Coast now and West Coast. So, I mean, I was planning to go back in another month and I mean, seriously, if that's starting to go around, I will rethink this, but one precaution and one hopeful piece of remembering is that the same kind of vaccine as they're using in that wonderful PCU Center around J about the, for the, the RNA based vaccines, those, those, that is the technique that's used to take care of Ebola. And that's why we don't, we didn't get more than one case or two cases in Ebola in this nation. So, we keep forgetting that we've already done this and snuffed it from the get go with the same kind of technique we're using now for, for this virus. And I mean, why, why this has taken so long to get us in the, in the groove here on the tech, the scientific vaccine that works is this beyond me. But anyway. Let me ask you more about this. You know, the thing about the, the variant is that the more cases, the virus mutates. Okay. All viruses mutate. This one is no exception. The original coronavirus mutates. The more cases of coronavirus you have out there, thanks to Dr. Trump. Okay. The more mutation you have. And the more mutation you have is the more the random possibility that it will mutate in a way that's more detrimental to humanity, which is exactly what has happened. Exactly. If we had snuffed the original coronavirus early, we wouldn't have the variants. It'd be a real long shot. But now we have all these cases and we have three variants that we know of. There might be more variants. Well, it's, yeah, I mean, it's going like crazy. And that's why I think that that would be the secret put urge behind getting all these vaccines out because we've now reached critical. Okay. I don't know what they would have called it on the Starship Enterprise, but we're at where those sirens, those bells are ringing because these suckers are about to come together. And we could be looking at a big wipeout here. So but, but we are armed and many of us now are already protected to a degree. So but, but this is not a good situation. I mean, Biden truly is correct. This is a war zone. I mean, we are on the edge and that anybody is thinking about anything else and not about our survival is really scary for us as a nation. So that's kind of like not the good news today, but the good news actually is with having to do with your previous questions, Jay, is that Schumer is going right ahead, bravely, courageously trying to get this COVID next COVID bill done so that they're going to actually do it by vote. He wants to just do put it through by 51. And he says he thinks he can do that according to the items that the articles I've read. And so that's critical to the COVID because there's the money for the states. The states are really stripped down on their budgets for handling all of this delivery system. So that that has to go. And so I'm just really very, you know, excited about the way Schumer in addition to finding but Schumer now is really acting out. He's pushing up against the Republican resistance, reluctance, whatever they have going on with them. So if we've got the 51 votes and they can go on go by partisan is much less important than we need the money. But I like to add that I got a shot last week a week ago. And was with HPH and was with in the peer one or peer two over there. And they they also took my wife who is not not in the first tier, but she was my my accompanying person. And we both got shots and they were as sweet as they could be. It was the aloha spirit all over the place. And they were efficient and sweet. The whole experience was positive. However, a buddy of mine was going to go down with his wife yesterday. His wife was rejected because she was not in tier one. And that is part of the the change in policy that happened in the interim, namely that they don't have a lot of they don't have enough. And so they're cutting off the accompanying person now. So it's a little tighter. And you can only hope that the Pfizer there's enough Pfizer around to handle the second shot. But you know what is where does that leave us Winston? You know, we we got to worry about this. These these vaccines don't kick in immediately. Some of them may not be as effective against the variants. The variants are spreading. I think there's more more than 500 in the country don't probably understated. And all governments have a way of understating cases, including as a scandal going on about Andrew Cuomo and the people who died in senior facilities today. So what do we do? What does the average person do if he's not in tier one or she's not in tier one? Right now, what what's what's the mindset? What's the action? Give some advice for you Winston. Same thing that I've been spouting the whole year, Mr. Fidel, which is exercise individual responsibility and don't be a sociopath. When you go outside in public, we don't have a problem with this in Hawaii. I mean, you know, no Karen's here that I've heard of, but you know, every or the male versions. But if they do, I it's we wear a mask here. Now CDC is telling us we're double mass. So they say put the the more protective one closer to your face. So if you start feeling faint for non air getting in, which hopefully is you put your cotton mask on top and then the the more medical mask underneath. But essentially it says we should all be wearing N95s or KN95s or something along those lines. The Germans have have moved to that standard and said, if you're going out in public, you have to be wearing these masks now. Of course, there's under reporting. COVID's never going away, Jay. That's the bad news. It's always going to be with us. Some variant of it is going to be with us like the flu. And I unless I just don't see it happening. However, Dr. Fauci did say, as these new variants pop up, they will also create different vaccines to attack them as necessary. So they were able to pull this off in a year. We'll have to wait and see what's coming up. But some of them look pretty scary. You know, the Brazilian one in analysis seems to have completely reinfected the population or something's going on down there that we that I'm not clear on. I read here, I was I heard about the British version, which is more lethal and more infectious. And the South African one and the Brazilian one. But then I read, it was yesterday, the Danish variant was here and found in Hawaii. Did you read that? And so there are dozens of variants that they're certainly tracking out there. And we'll just have to see which ones pop up. But in the meantime, you mask up, you wash your hands. You don't go out if you don't have to. If you're getting your shots, continue getting your shots. They're coming out. Johnson and Johnson is coming out. AstraZeneca. There's other ones on the horizon. We will all be vaccinated within a short period of time or have reasonable herd immunity. So, you know, Winston, there was a piece that I caught recently about how in Europe, they had seen the variant and acted on it. And they have researchers who are working on, you know, what do you want to call it updating the mRNA, whatever technique to deal with the variant. And it shouldn't be all that complicated, but they are working on it. Unfortunately, in the last days of the Trump administration, they didn't do anything about the variant. They didn't do anything about anything. So, yeah. We're playing catch-up. Our researchers are playing catch-up now on the variant, which is not, this is not a good thing. No, and there's something that, there's something they know that we don't know. When the US came out with something that said, if you leave the country, just be prepared because you may not be able to come back as soon as you think you might be able to. That came out yesterday from the, I think it was the State Department. And Israel has completely shut off all air traffic in and out of the country. So, they're realizing this is what we, they have to do to protect themselves. And they're the gold standard as far as immunization goes. And so, they're realizing, let's just wait and see. So, we've got a lot of pain coming up in the next few weeks and couple months, but we will get beyond it and take care of yourself and take care of others. And that's the only message that we can continue to have until we reach some herd immunity and serious levels of vaccination. Well, Tim, a lot of this suggests we ought to look at the timeline. We have various things going on here. We have the new energy in the Biden administration, that team, it's a good team. They're doing everything they can. They recognize the severity of the epidemic pandemic. And they're doing stuff that, you know, that we would do. I mean, that rational science people would do as opposed to the previous administration whose name shall be erased. But my concern, my question to you is, how long is it going to take before you get a handle on this? You still have the infection going on. It may have a dip right now, but complacency will probably increase it. And I worry about complacency and I worry about the variant. So, we really, you know, what's your thought about how long it's going to take? And the main question I'm really asking is, what about the economy, man? You know, you can send money out to people, but we still have to rebuild the economy. How much time can we wait while we're dealing with this pandemic before the economy really goes in the drink? Got any thoughts about that? Two thoughts because you asked me two questions. And that is, I'm actually a little bit optimistic because it wasn't long ago that there were those that were very hesitant to taking a vaccine at all. And we're starting to see statistics point that Americans are starting to accept the concept of the vaccine and more willing to take it and have it administered. So, I find that very optimistic news because obviously we're not going to get to herd immunity without cooperation from all the Americans. We possibly can, as far as accepting the vaccine. But now that we have the introduction of variants, that puts us back a bit. And we're going to have to figure out new techniques to handle the variant. As far as the economy, well, Jay, you listen to the previous administration and the economy was rosy because the economy consisted of three things, the Dow Jones, the Standard and Poor's, and the NASDAQ. That was the economy. And I'm here to say that the economy is not the stock market. The economy is unemployment. It's gross production, national production. It's confidence by production managers. It's production output. I mean, we have all these economic indicators. And yeah, they're on the weak side. But the Dow Jones, you wouldn't know that because 1% owns 50% of the stock market. And we have 10% of the Americans owning 80% of the stock market. So happy times are here again for those select few. Well, actually, the market went down a few days ago by 600 points. Yeah, well, when you're at 30,600 points is a drop in the bucket. A fine opportunity. You know, and that's how we do it. So the economy is fundamentally, we're in recession territory. And though we haven't recognized it. And Wall Street hasn't recognized it because, again, it's being propped up by the few and the special few, those with resources. So until we start seeing drops in the Dow, then people start to open up their eyes when, well, wait a minute, my 401k has been damaged. What's going on here? They should be saying that right now is what's going on with the economy? And what can we do to prop it up? And a big part of that is COVID's compliance. And until we get that, and we're not there yet, we'll continue to see our economy kind of slag and the lag behind. You know, Cynthia, we've been trying to figure out the psychological, sociological question of why people follow Trump. It's like a question and everybody's mine. I talked to my friends on the mainland. I mean, they're all Democrats these days, but, and I said, why, why, why people follow him when he did such an obviously bad job on everything? And he's so mean and nasty. Why do they follow him? And nobody has a really good answer. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, as we start to recognize, as, as Tim has said, the severity of the pandemic, as it, you know, may get worse as the stock market, which I believe it will get worse in the stock market, because the fundamentals are the economy and the economy is not doing well at all. I'm wondering if, if the people in the base are going to try to shed off Trump, you know, we've seen a lot of Republicans bail out of the party, but, but not, not that many when you count, you know, 70 million people voted for him. What do you think is going to happen here? It's just going to have a political effect. Well, you know, there's going to be a core nugget of them that will never come back. They are lost to the cult of personality. It's very difficult to bring people back from a cult. And you know, it's very specific. You ask the question why I have some answers about it. You know, you can look up the Dunning-Kruger effect and where it, the person who's trying to manipulate someone else, or the reason why people are going and falling prey to their manipulator is, is because it speaks to something within themselves that they want to see raised up higher, right? So they can feel better about themselves because they think those same kinds of things. So there's that group of folks and then there's, so it's not like one fell swoop that we can define them all with, right? So then there's another group that it's just the money. They don't care about anything else but the money. They got lots of money while he was in office through the stock market and other perks that they received while he was there. So there's that. And then there's a whole another group of conservative Christians who just wanted to get rid of abortion and to get their conservative judges on, you know, on the bench. So there's, I think there's different reasons why different people follow him and some people just literally fall prey to the misinformation, the constant lie. It's not just one lie. It's not just a lie. First, you know, he's undermined the whole identity of truth, what it is, right? It no longer exists. Now it's just alternative facts. And so that's once you get rid of the truth, and then you see the same lie over and over and over and over to the point where people start to believe it. And that's just common classic narcissistic tendencies of people that are just in a regular abusive domestic violence situation. The abuser will do those exact same things, undermine the person's ability to believe in themselves, right? And then feed them a bunch of stuff that's not true and tell them enough that they believe it. There was a piece that I saw this morning about how some of the social media, this is tripping off what Cynthia was saying, some of the social media organizations have not only cut off Trump, but they've cut off anyone who wants to make harsh political statements. I don't remember the definition. And so my question to you is, are there changes among the social media companies that are going to have an effect, either on the complacency we worry about, Biden's suggestion, and he's not going hard on this. He's not seeking legislation to require masks. He's not trying to do proclamations to require masks. He's just, he's laying it in on federal reservations, federal buildings. So the question is, how do the changes in social media affect this pandemic going forward? So for me, Jane, is that what you said? Yeah, that's for you. You know, it's a good question. And part of it is troubling. I noticed that the Mike Pillow guy got banned from Twitter forever because he said that the Donald won the election. Well, so did half the nation. And so are they all going to be banned from Twitter and Facebook? Seems counterproductive, because if that's where people are getting their messages, now I'm all for a course when someone's inciting violence or insanity. And also, they have a public responsibility. They have a corporate responsibility to stop things that are dangerous. So they've banned certain hashtags that people would look to find each other. That also has the effect of driving them underground and going to telegram, but it makes it a lot harder for them to find each other. So in that way, I think it's not the worst thing to ban certain hashtags. As far as people, maybe they need to take the tact of what they were doing with Donald Trump and saying, this has been identified as fake false information. But if you're reading that and you believe it, like Cynthia was saying, if you're programmed, it doesn't really matter what the truth is. So I think the messages, we just have to keep getting out as true messages as much as possible, telling the truth, being trustworthy. That's one thing this administration has on its side already, is it's not lying to us from the get-go. Every single word isn't a lie. Every proclamation from the press secretary isn't a lie. This was the smallest inauguration in the 20th century or the last century for the president. I think everyone would agree with that statement and probably Biden's press secretary could put that out and honestly say that. So you wouldn't say this was the biggest attended presidential inauguration ever. I think we're starting up in a better place to keep on getting out positive, correct news, not even positive, just real news so that people can deal with reality because if they're not even getting facts and they can't understand it, we don't stand a chance because everyone thinks it's just misinformation. So tell the truth, the whole truth as much as you can, and just keep on getting it out there. But banning people from Facebook or Twitter because they have incorrect ideas, I don't know is the most effective thing, but certainly there's things they can do to slow it down or stop it when it is indeed dangerous, like banning the hashtag altogether. Stephanie, continuing on that track, already we see the signs of campaigns for 2022 and for that matter 2024. And the Republicans are still together. There are certain Republicans who have left the party. There are new stories about how the parties under pressure may come apart, but for the moment, it's still there and it still supports Trump and it still is planning on a big rush for 2022. And I wonder how you feel all of this that we've been talking about affects that election because remember that time is a huge factor when Mitch McConnell said let's put off the impeachment for a couple of weeks. What he was really saying, I don't think we can deny this, was we know that this is going to soften in a couple of weeks. The Trump's chances at that trial, Trump's political support at that trial will change in the next couple of weeks and it'll change in his favor if we put it off. I mean, he's a real smart guy. I don't want to say how I feel about his morality, but he did that intentionally to help Trump. And by the same token, the fickle finger writes the news we'll have a million things going on and although Biden and his team would do a great job, the fact is we still have a problem with the pandemic and Congress. So, Query, how is it playing out now if we look forward to 2022? I think we're up against what we already know. First of all, those who can manipulate the media are far ahead of the game and Trump and other people are very expert at that and that's been going on and especially from the Republican Party for ages, decades. And going back to some of the stars we know, Newt Gingrich and all the rest of them that have gotten these bad ads out to us. But the most important thing about the media and in respect for what Winston's talking about is all of this is whack-a-mole. I mean, okay, Facebook may or may not be here in 24, I don't know, but the point is if it is whack, there's going to be five others of them someplace else. So there is only about the competent and brilliance of people that can manipulate that outflow that is going to yield tools for them to do what they want to do. We'd like people to do those things for good and for democracy and for what was our value system. But let's go back to something we already did do together and know so well. I mean, I'm a high school teacher, I taught at Radford High School for years, but if you will just not even worry about teaching high school and be a high school student again and remember your student body and your class, there are layers as Cynthia described, there's layers of people in there, exactly the same layers as are out here in the public now doing what they're doing. So we have to go back and look at the population and we have to go back and ask why do we have more of this domestic violence. So what are we doing? What's Germany doing? What's Trian doing? How are they? Oh, that actually leads perfectly to my last question to Tim. Tim, you mentioned Israel, for example, and different countries take different approaches. The World Health Organization is probably in better shape now that the US is going back in. Hopefully the United Nations will play in general a role to bring this effort together. But the fact is that Canada got cut off. It's not happy about that. And the US is not helping Canada. I'm sorry about that. I'm sure Biden is sorry about it too. We have variants coming in from corners of the globe. We have huge travel issues. We have right now, we have a protest, a series of protests around India. We'll be covering that later today that actually threaten this democracy in the view of some people. I mean, the pandemic seems to be disrupting things in general around the world. And I know it's a big question, and you have a minute to answer it. The question is exactly. The question is, how does the global process play out on this? Well, I think Winston actually alluded to it. The pandemic is here to stay. We're going to have to adapt. And human beings do that. They either change their environment or they adapt to it. And we will adapt to this ongoing COVID virus. And it'll become more, I hate to use this term because that's how it was used to begin with as a flu. It'll become more like contending with a flu virus. Unfortunately, this one's more deadly. And hopefully over time, as it mutates, it becomes less deadly and maybe more transmissible, but less deadly. So the economies of the world, the political powers of the world will all have to adapt. And every country will do it differently. Yes, Israel is the gold standard, but look at their population. It's so much easier to manage a virulent virus when your population is much smaller than, say, India or China. Their populations are tremendously high. So we will adapt. And I think that's the best answer I can come up with at this point. Okay. As Sylvia said originally, we had a lot on our plate today. And we will still have a lot on our plate going forward here in Coronaville. Thank you all so much. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Cynthia. Thank you, Winston. Aloha and please stay safe. Aloha.