 To what extent, is there any evidence that COVID is mutated so that let's say it's more deadly in Europe than it is in Asia, more deadly in New York than it was on the West Coast where it was first discovered? No. It's important to remember that all viruses mutate. Most mutations have no functional significance. And we haven't seen any mutation that's changed the behavior of this virus. What a virus does in a certain area is more a reflection of who it's infecting. Is it infecting older people? Is it infecting nursing home patients? The United States has a very high problem with obesity and diabetes and hypertension. So you will see differing death rates depending upon what the levels of those cofactors are. It's not the virus, it's actually the host that's actually driving what happens. And you can see if you look at the mortality rate in somebody above 70, it's probably 15 to 20% that gets hospitalized versus someone who's less than 18 where it's probably 0.001% or something like that, or even lower than that. Lower than that, yeah. And does that, so is it really the nature of the population and where the virus entered? Is the difference between, let's say Seattle where it first entered and it was pretty deadly? I mean you remember that nursing home that just got crushed in Seattle, which is tragic. And then in New York where it seems to have just, particularly in Brooklyn and I guess Queens and Bronx, the people who probably commuted into the city, there it just has been devastating. Yeah, it definitely has to do with where it goes, what the population density is, how easy it can spread, what the state of the hospitals are. And if you go into a nursing home, it can basically run rampant in a nursing home where people have very, very little reserve to fight off any type of infection, let alone something like this. So this is something that we expected to see be really important, be a really important thing to get nursing homes fortified. And many nursing homes now are basically on lockdown where there's no visitors allowed, because that can, if you think of a nursing home, maybe has 200 people in it. In a small town, that could destroy your hospital if a nursing home gets infected. So it's really important, even as we go forward, as we start opening up that nursing homes particularly be guarded well from this virus because those people are at high risk. And we really need to make sure that they're not getting infected to a degree that causes the hospitals to crash. But I do think that it has to do with the comorbidities and where they are. And it's definitely, that's probably what the final verdict will be on Lombardy in Italy of why that spiral data control was the average age there in who was getting infected versus who gets infected in another place like maybe Germany where there was much younger, the younger age where people got infected. So what do you think about the people, there seem to be a lot of them who take a part of the United States where this is not really being very deadly, and then extrapolate, right, and then say this is no, this is just a flu, this is nothing different than the flu. Yeah, so that's completely wrong. It's not, it's not just a flu. And the fact is that there were certain factors that made it much more deadly in New York than in, than in Peoria, Illinois, or where, you know, the Midwest or anywhere you pick, even in Pittsburgh where I'm sitting. And you, you have to realize that this is a new virus that no human, no human has any kind of protection against it. And the fact is, even if it has a case fatality ratio of 0.5%, the fact that it can infect everybody. That's a lot of people, a small percentage of a big number is still a big number. And that's what you have to do. You have to think about. And the fact that you didn't get, that your city didn't get hit has to do with the fact that they're what you can't say that social distancing didn't do anything because people did start to put social distancing in place and did dampen it in many other places because everybody had the experience of watching New York and watching Seattle. And that's what caused that cascading domino effect of all of these governors, because there wasn't really federal guidance at this time. It was basically, we're seeing what's happening in New York and Seattle, we're scared, we need to take action. And they did. And we're spared in many places. And I think now we're beginning to learn that you can't extrapolate what happened in New York to everywhere, but the converse is true as well. You can't say that this was an overreaction in places like New York City, because it clearly was not. And it may have been an underreaction in New York because New York didn't do things quite quick enough when they had those first cases, the contact tracing, all of that kind of slipped through the cracks in New York. So I do think that there's on both sides of this, the false alternatives are being presented all over the place. And the whole thing has become politicized now, which has made it very hard for anybody to have any kind of objective opinion and not be pushed into one of those camps. But no, this is not like the flu. This is killing at a much higher, much higher portion of the population is going to die from this and dies of flu every year. And I think that that's an important thing to do. This isn't something that is easy to deal with. And if you've seen these patients dying, and it is very challenging to take care of them. And this shouldn't be minimized in any way because it's not as bad. It's not apocalyptic doesn't mean that it's not bad. So when you say it's 0.5%, that's five times the flu. Five times the death rate is a big number. You know, it's not like 20% more 30% more. It's, you know, it's 600% more. Yeah, that's, we still don't know the quite the number but that's kind of the number that's where people are starting to settle looking at it and I think it's obviously that's an average number so it's much higher in certain age groups and it's much lower in other groups but this is this is much more easier to deal with than the flu and flu we have a vaccine, we have antivirals, we don't have any of that with this. Yeah, I mean, you told me well over a month ago that the number was about 0.6 so you were right on top of this from from the beginning in terms of how deadly this probably would be. And those are the numbers coming out I think South Korea and some of the other places at the time. Take New York, and I know this is speculation but do you think if the right actions would have been taken in time given that the Chinese delayed and we didn't know about this early enough and everything but if the right actions have been taken when we had the information, could a lockdown have been avoided avoidable in New York City? I think they would have had to have initiated some social distancing but not nearly what happened there and I don't think we would have let this spiral out of control because remember we knew by January that this was going on, that there was human to human spread, that it was a respiratory virus. All of that tells you this is not a containable virus I told you that on the show a long time ago that it was going to be here and we're now learning you know for example the first death was at least February 6 in Santa Clara County in California which means that that person got infected probably early January so this was already here when we were having that conversation as I thought was the case. So if you would have at that time started to say okay we know this is here we're not going to have these silly restrictions on testing and say they have to be just from China because we know this virus has long escaped China. And we know that there's mild cases and mild cases are contagious we're not just going to test severe cases. We put that into place got the diagnostic companies working at that time quest and lab core these big national change and not and move removed all the bureaucracy then got into we need to get case contact tracers we need to not let any case basically slipped through because we have so few and then get rid of these ideas of silly travel bans from places where the virus was but it wasn't any longer we didn't know where the virus was and wasn't so how can you say let's ban flights from China but not ban flights from other countries when there were cases at that time in many other countries and in all the resources and distraction in the fall sense of security that caused and really got got on top of it. I think you could have avoided a lot of the shutdowns, you may, especially ones in that encompass the whole entire country you may still have had some modifications and places where they got hit hard. New York still probably was going to be a high risk place just because of the population density and the cosmopolitan nature of it but I think you could have avoided a lot of what was going to happen if we would have done this right and there was no excuse for not doing it right because people in my field have been including me have been talking about this for years and years and years writing reports and reports after report telling them this is exactly what's going to happen if you don't do this and then they actually didn't do what we said that they should do. What we need today what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes women are mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you step forward and actually supported the show for the first time so I'll do it again maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity go to your on book show dot com slash support or go to subscribe star dot com your on book show and and and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this to keep this going.