Are Lockdowns A Really Dumb Strategy?

Guys, if this is working, I’m using new software Restream or something to simultaneously live cast to both Facebook and YouTube. I tried it earlier, just goofing off, testing the software, sitting there picking my nose, 1300 people are live watching me because the thing went live without telling me it went live.

So I’m hoping this isn’t a complete disaster, but we’re gonna to talk about lockdowns, were they a terrible idea. What are we gonna do moving forward for COVID.

All right, bottom line, here’s the deal. When we started this whole adventure in pain, 2020, with the COVID pandemic early on, remember what was going on in the early days, people were like, oh, this thing is going on in China. Hopefully, they’ll contain it. Oh, look what Wuhan’s doing, they’re going full, who buy on this thing, locking everything down. There’s all this stuff leaking out on Twitter that people are dropping like flies, new novel coronavirus that presumably humans have never seen, presumably. And we have no immunity too and is highly fatal. At that time, they were talking about five, six, 10% fatality in the cases that they were having, people dying on ventilators of ARDS, it looks like SARS, general mass hysteria.

Now, then people thought, well, maybe with WHO, and CDC, and everybody on the case, and the Chinese authorities and everything, we’re just gonna to lock it down there. It’s not gonna get out, and then you start seeing cases pop up. You’re like, oh, there’ll be contact tracing, like started to happen in Singapore, and Hong Kong and Taiwan. And they’ll totally suppress this thing, it won’t get out, it’ll be like the original SARS. There’ll be some leakage, but it’ll be self-contained.

Well, there were a few things we didn’t realize at that time, One is asymptomatic spreads. So this thing spreads with people who have no symptoms and therefore, don’t know they’re infected, but can be quite contagious, particularly a subset of them that we don’t understand why they do this, but they’re called super spreaders, who they’ll have no symptoms, they don’t know what then, they’re spreading it everywhere. Particularly in crowded spaces where they’re expelling a lot of breath, singing, shouting, et cetera, bars, crowded sporting events, things like that, subway, whatever it is. So at that time, then we didn’t know all this.

So the idea, and I was talking about this too, as well. Okay, this will lockdown, it was a near miss. Hopefully, we’ll be okay. The Chinese are doing this thing. Looks like it will be under control, wrong because what happened next was what we saw in Italy. So Italy had a large population of migrant workers from China that ended up seeding a lot of the disease over there. So spreading it initially from its origins in Wuhan. Next thing, you know, it’s spreading like wildfire among one of the oldest populations on earth. In other words has the highest percentage of people that are over the age of 65 or whatever it is.

And so that’s a very vulnerable population it turns out, they started getting very sick. And then the media is filled with horrible images of patients in a prone position, dying on ventilators, hospitals overwhelmed and so on. And at that point, there were two countries that were doing something that was quite remarkable that really doesn’t have a lot of precedent, even during the Spanish flu. And that is locking everything down. So telling non-essential businesses to close, people to stay in their homes in a very, what appeared to quite a draconian fashion, and people were saying, oh, this is, I was saying it at the time, like this is crazy talk.

Like, first of all, you’d never be able to pull this off in America ’cause the Chinese need that surveillance state and the general compliance with authority and the just draconian-ness of the whole thing to be able to make it work, and they shut everything down. The Italians actually had blanket stay at home orders. The Pope was sitting at home, doing services from home. It’s not been seen in modern memory.

The flu pandemic of 1957, 1918, we never saw this level of response. And a lot of epidemiologists, a lot of scientists, myself at the time was saying, “Dude, this is insane.” Like the cure is gonna be worse than the disease because we’re just blanket doing it. We don’t know enough to say this is something we should do. Then we started watching the images out of Italy, seeing the numbers start to shoot up in New York and watching this thing, overwhelm healthcare systems, particularly in Italy and New York and saying, wait a minute now, oh, oh, maybe there’s something we don’t know here. This thing is spreading in a way that we don’t have a grasp on it. We have no treatments and no vaccines for it, yet. This was in the early part of this and it’s really quite terrifying.

And do you remember how afraid people were including probably you, I know, I got to a point where I was like, I might legit be a little scared now whereas before I was seeing it very much through a critical thinking rational sense, but there was a point where I was like, “We should lock everything down.” So the origins of lockdowns then started.

Now, California, where I live in the Bay Area in particular was one of the earliest US states to do stay at home order, shelter in place, which I thought was a terrible, terrible terminology. It sounds like we’re in some kind of earthquake or terrorist act, it generates fear. But to the degree that it worked, it worked because the idea was they were all talking with different language at the time.

So they were saying, we’re trying to suppress the virus. We’re trying to mitigate the virus. We’re trying to bend the curve. We’re trying to flatten the curve. Now, what does all that mean? Well, nobody was very clear ’cause all those things mean something different. When you talk about suppressing a virus, what you’re saying is what New Zealand did, what Taiwan, Singapore did, and what Wuhan ultimately did, and China in those provinces that were most affected. suppression means you lower the reproductive number of that virus.

A reproductive number is for every person infected, how many people on average do they go on to infect? If the number is one, you never have an increase in cases, but you never have a decrease in cases, each infected person infects another infected person. And it just goes like that. But usually, it’s more than one or it’s less than one. If your reproductive numbers less than one, you are suppressing the disease because each person who’s infected infects less than another person. And it eventually dies out until you get somebody traveling in from a hotspot or migrating in, and then you get a new outbreak that you could squash with suppression.

Certain countries did that very early on. America had no chance of pulling that off. And the reason is, we had the virus coming from both coasts. We had New York, we had the Bay Area, we had Washington state. On top of that, we didn’t have the infrastructure, the political will, or the culture to say, okay, yeah, we’re gonna sacrifice a lot of our liberty and privacy to be able to allow aggressive contact tracing. On top of that, we couldn’t test because CDC botched the first rollout of the test. The one reason to exist at all and it was botched for a variety of reasons, which I’ve talked about elsewhere.

And now, you have a situation where this thing is already spreading rapidly and exponentially. So the question then is with lockdowns, meaning shutting non-essential businesses, telling people to shelter in place, closing schools, stopping elective procedures in hospitals, right? So people aren’t going to hospitals anymore. Well, if you’re doing that, you better have a reason to do it. And at that time, the stated reasons were all over the place. One was, oh, just don’t even know what’s going on. We’ve got to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Okay, that’s mitigation, that’s bending the curve. That means you want that reproductive number to be just a little above one, so that, you know, it’s still spreading, but it’s not gonna go exponentially fast and overwhelm our hospitals. Not enough ventilators, not enough PPE, frontline healthcare professionals dying because they’re not safe from that. We don’t have the resources, right? That’s called mitigation.

Now, that’s one approach, that’s bending the curve. And at the time, you guys remember what I was saying, I was like, “So how far do you want to bend this thing?” ‘Cause that makes a difference. You can go extreme, which is gonna cause all kinds of agony, but you better stick with that because that’s a suppression technique. Suppression is getting that reproductive number below one, which means that you’re eventually gonna get to zero, assuming no outside infections come in. And that can work, but you better have the political will and the economic wherewithal to shut everything down for a long time and then spin up contact tracing and testing in a way that you can really, it’s like fighting a fire. All the embers get squashed. You focus on the main blaze, you dig these fire lanes, you do all that and the fire goes out. Well, there was no way we were gonna pull that off. It was clear.

Now, certain States were able to get a vestige of that, Rhode Island. For example, they did significant contact tracing, et cetera, and were able to pull that up. That’s a small state, right? In a small geography, kind of like New Zealand, which was a country that was able to do that because they’re geographically isolated, it’s small population that was patient with the economic pain of shutting everything down. So they were able to do it. Well, US didn’t have that, and they didn’t have clear messaging. Like this is what we’re trying to do.

Well, if the goal was mitigation, then they should have said that because mitigation, it’s a very different approach. You’re trying to slow the number of infections, so that you don’t overwhelm everything. You protect lives that are most at risk. You’re trying to reduce the total number of lives because what happens if you let this virus just go without any mitigation, suppression, whatever. Well, hundreds of thousands of people die. And part of the reason, the US and Great Britain locked it down instead of taking the Swedish approach, which was no mandatory lockdowns, voluntary stuff, and some rules about no gatherings bigger than 50 people. And the population voluntarily started to do the social distancing, and avoid large gatherings, and things like that. But they kept their economy mostly open. They kept their schools mostly open, Denmark did the same thing, kept the schools open, and they took a very different approach. But the US said, well, okay, we’re gonna do this very extensive lockdown, why?

Because the Imperial College of London had a report early on that said, millions of people will die. 81% of the population will get infected before we achieve herd immunity, where there’s no more targets for the virus. And are you willing to do that in the absence of aggressive lockdown? Well, turns out that that data was based on incomplete knowledge that we had at the time. Science is always evolving, so you’re saying, well, okay, now we have new data, let’s update the model. We update the model. It’s like, well, no, maybe that’s not true. And so at the time though, that was scary enough to US officials that they said, even Trump came out and said, “Yeah, this thing is bad. This thing is bad.” I’ll never forget when he said that because it was a pivot for him changing his messaging. And at that point, people were like, okay, they’re scared enough to do it, but what ended up happening?

So states with very aggressive lockdowns, like California, the shelter in place when they started to open saw a surge in cases, why? Because they never accomplished a suppression strategy. So they didn’t get the virus gone or to levels where we could contact trace and test to squash the little embers. But we then reopened a lot of sort of more broadly. So restaurants indoors with some spacing,, some bars reopening, things like that. Well, what ends up happening? You get, again, an exponential surge in cases.

Now, a lot more on younger people who can often be asymptomatic or have minimum symptoms, but deaths do rise as well. And hospitalizations go up, but not as bad as in the beginning. Now, if you look at like Rhode Island, they didn’t really have that ’cause they actually squeezed things down. And now, here’s the interesting part. If you look at New York, so New York did have this lockdown, but still had an exponential surge because the thing was already out of the bag, people were infected. It’s estimated up to 25% of new Yorkers have already been infected and recovered from COVID-19 from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So what happened with New York? They got overwhelmed rapidly, but then dropped just as rapidly. Now, what’s going on? Was that the result of lockdowns, well, certainly they contributed, but what else was going on?

And this is where it gets interesting. And we’re gonna talk about it. So the lockdowns themselves have not solved our problem, but what did they do? They inflicted enormous economic suffering, and they inflicted enormous cultural and social suffering, and mental suffering because this has never happened. Small businesses may never, certain businesses are gone forever. Your local pub, your local restaurant, that dry cleaner, they’re gone. Trillions in treasury lost mortgaging future generations, 400, 000,000 jobs worldwide wiped out. Now again, early on fear, panic, incomplete data.

Okay, but what have we learned now? So should we go back to lockdowns when we have surges? What do we do in the future? What do we learn from this? This is what we learned, and I’m summarizing, and some of this is me editorializing, but it’s based on data that I’ve been following since this thing started.

This disease is significantly more fatal than flu for older people and people with comorbidities and some very unlucky young people, but for very young, for kids, and adolescents, flu is much worse in terms of fatality because it can actually affect young people much more. So what we found is if we’re not gonna suppress the virus, we’re trying to suppress it. Well, what are the high value solutions that actually work minimizing lives lost knowing full well, look, if your goal is zero lives lost, then you gotta own that. And how are you gonna do that?

You lock everybody in their house in a plastic bubble. Don’t let anyone go anywhere. Well, that’s a culture of safetyism that I’ve talked about where everyone has to be saved. You cannot make that work. It’s not feasible in this country and it’s not desirable because the side effects of that are devastating, which we’ve talked about. COVID-19 is an iceberg, the tip of it are deaths, hospitalizations, long haulers, all the stuff you hear about, the base of that iceberg that’s under the water is economic devastation, lives lost due to suicide, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, mental illness, fabric of society tearing, education for poor kids who rely on public schools devastated and a year of education lost, what’s that gonna do to their future earning? To the cycle of poverty, and violence, and substance abuse and everything that goes with that?

So you cannot have a zero lives lost, so anyone who’s telling you stay home, okay, pump the brakes, think about that rationally. That’s not a simple answer. Now, on the other side of it, people saying, oh, this is a hoax. There’s no, people who were mask weak. This is all a fraud to keep Trump out of office and to whatever, okay. Go to a hospital, spend five minutes in intensive care. Talk to people working the frontlines, talk to people who’ve lost a loved one, it’s not a hoax. It’s a serious deadly disease. Okay, so now, we know all this. Here’s what we’ve learned.

We’ve learned a couple things, the thing spreads through droplets. Occasionally, can be airborne. Turns out masks, which initially there was really no good evidence that mask would help us. The more and more we see what’s happening, you look at a town in Germany that actually asked everyone to mask up and they saw their cases drop compared to other German cities, that rate of infection like halved. When you see what happens in Asian countries where masking was an important thing, in Germany in general, where masking seems to have helped. Some calculations have said that 10% of the GDP could be saved, allowing you to open up if everyone just universally masked, I don’t like cloth masks. I never have if we spun up surgical masks, but any kind of face covering prevents droplets, but also the increasing evidence is that you’re preventing a high dose of virus from entering your system. You’re protecting yourself, which means you may have turned a fatal case where you were dying on a ventilator into a case where you’re barely have symptoms, but you develop immunity, okay?

So we learn masks actually probably work. Why do I say probably, because we haven’t done a randomized control trial with mask, it’s very hard to do, but there’s a lot of evidence that it’s a low cost, high yield solution. Why do people resist it? Because they just simply have been watching the news. They don’t know people who’ve died of it. They haven’t seen good evidence. They’re not compelled. And honestly, we screwed this thing up by shutting everything down by tisking Americans and saying, stay home, wear a mask, do this, you’re a butt hole if you don’t. Worst possible way to affect people whose moral matrix actually says, don’t you tell me what to do. I do what I think is right based on my understanding of it.

Well then, let’s connect where our understanding overlaps, right? I had to be convinced that mask are a decent thing. I have always said that lockdowns are a terrible idea, except maybe in the apex of my own fear for my family, right? To go back and watch these videos, it’s Interesting to watch how I’ve evolved on this. And that’s how science works. You update your prior data and then you come up with new conclusions. Okay, so mask work, aggressive lockdowns too blunt an instrument. What else?

Shutting down all businesses doesn’t work. But what about just the most risky endeavors? Big public gathering, indoors especially, turns out being outside is a great idea. Get outside, right? The second thing is bars. Probably a bad idea. Hate to say it, guys who love the bars, but that’s where a lot of spread has been documented as particularly in countries like Japan. Bars and restaurants, indoor restaurants. So have people sit outside, space them out inside have good ventilation, probably can’t do bars ’cause people are shouting and drinking, right? Other businesses, mask up when you’re inside, it’s not that hard to do. It’s not a huge imposition, protects you and protects others. That’s it, right? Communicate that clearly.

Schools, there’s no one answer for this because certain hotspots. But if you look at Sweden, you look at Denmark, they opened schools early or never closed them. They look to teachers, they have no greater risk in their teacher population than the rest of the population. Let me repeat that, in Sweden and Denmark where they looked at this, they had no greater risk in teachers than in the rest of the population. So we were worried about our teachers, we don’t wanna sacrifice them like we sacrificed our frontline healthcare workers who did it because that’s what they signed up for, right? But they didn’t really, no one signed up to die on the frontlines of a battle that wasn’t resourced, right? So probably open the schools because the damage of poor education is way worse than the small risk to children and the small risk to teachers. So do that, but use precautions. If children can wear masks, have them wear masks, teach hand-washing, distance them out as much as you can. I know it’s not perfect. I know teachers are gonna yell at me, but you know what? It’s just the truth.

So if you do that, then you allow parents who now have that childcare that they’re paying for with their taxes to go back to work at their essential and nonessential jobs, bring the fabric of reality back into alignment with our own moral matrix in this country. And watch there’ll be a few more excess deaths because Sweden had that, but they were still less than the UK, right? More than Denmark, but less than the UK in deaths per capita. But they’re generally happy with their government and their decisions that they’ve made, and they have less economic damage. Okay, so these are the trade offs that we make.

So moving forward, it’s quite simple. I’m gonna say this right to the camera and to our leaders. Never do what you did in the beginning. Again, we have learned that that’s a blunt instrument that probably hurts more than it helps. Next, masks and social distancing for the period of time that we’re concerned about spread will help open businesses, open schools, use the precautions I mentioned. Other thing I didn’t mention, testing. Michael Mina, Harvard epidemiologist has talked about rapid salivary testing that isn’t very sensitive, but if you do it every day, you could catch yourself when you’re the most infective, that could open up even more stuff because you’re really, okay, if you’re sick, go get the followup real gold standard test from Cepheid or we had a Dave Persing on our show talking about that, and that would allow us then to get a better handle on who’s infected, and that would allow us to open up even more.

Now, here’s the last piece of this. And by the way, so everybody’s talking about convalescent plasma. Everybody’s talking about the vaccine being rushed. We’re gonna do other shows on that, so stay tuned on that. What’s the end point for this? So I think a lot of people in this country who are a little bit opposed to masking and a little bit opposed to lockdown, a lot opposed the lockdowns and thinking, maybe this thing is a bit overblown and maybe it’s just like flu and all that, okay. They are very concerned that this is gonna become a kind of a perpetual horror of control. So you’re always gonna wear a mask. You’re never gonna open bars. This thing’s never gonna end. It’s gonna be constant. Or it’s just gonna last till the election and Trump loses and then it’s just gonna suddenly disappear.

You know what, they’re not irrational for thinking that. If you watch enough media on both sides of the political aisle, you could believe anything, right? But here’s what I think is actually happening. If you look at New York and bring it back to what I talked about New York in the beginning, if you look at what happened with New York, you had a surge in deaths early on. You had a surge in deaths early on, and then it got 25% infection prevalence. We think, we think, best data we have, it’s not great. What does that mean? Where is that herd immunity threshold? The Imperial College of London said it was 81% of the population needed to be infected before it peters out. What is herd immunity again? Real quick review, when the virus is trying to spread, it’s trying to spread, it’s finding susceptible hosts. In the beginning, this is a new coronavirus.

Remember, I said that people were saying, oh, this is totally new, humans have never seen it. Well, we were wrong about that because it turns out we have some T, most likely, again, this is early data, and I may update this later, we have T-cell mediated immunity that remembers encounters with other related coronaviruses, the common cold, for example, even things that are a little less related, even vaccinations like BCG, that ramp up, sort of T-cell interfere on mediated immunity. And that may provide the population some degree of preexisting immunity to this novel coronavirus that we had no immunity to, probably not true. Why do some people have an asymptomatic infection and others get really sick, could be that they have this preexisting immunity. Also combined with the dose they get, their genetics, their comorbidities like diabetes, lung disease, obesity. A lot of the young people who are getting sick are morbidly obese. So and have these inflammatory cascades and cytokine storm and that kind of thing.

So this idea that there’s some preexisting immunity has ramifications for herd immunity, why? And I’ve done a whole video on this, because the virus is out there trying to find susceptible hosts. In the beginning, it spreads exponentially and it finds the most susceptible hosts. Turns out elderly nursing home patients that are 0.6% of the population are 45% of the deaths, according to one study. Why? Because they have waning immunity, they’re elderly. They don’t have robust immune, memory sort of declines over time and they’re susceptible, right? So if we had just protected them in a targeted way, we would have saved countless lives for almost no cost, but we didn’t, so that’s another thing we did wrong that we need to do better in the future.

Sweden made the same mistake. If they had just protected their nursing homes, their death rate would have been vastly lower. And we wouldn’t even be talking about how many per capita they’d lost. They would have been the success story of the world, not destroyed their economy, and had very few deaths while staying open and woke about the whole thing, right? It makes me want to move to Sweden, except I love America. So initially you take out all these susceptible people, people with poor existing immunity, people with comorbidities, the elderly, but then the virus is like, shoot, I promised I wouldn’t curse for mom. It has nowhere to go because the other targets are not great targets. They have a little existing immunity, they’re asymptomatic. They’re not super spreaders. When they get infected, they don’t generate as much viral copies. Oh, and they’re wearing masks. So they’re not spreading it as much.

Oh, and they’re social distancing voluntarily because they’re not idiots. And oh, they’re not traveling all around the world. Well, what happens? The reproductive number starts to drop innately. And at a threshold of 25%, you may have the equivalent of suppression where now, it starts to really decline, then you can do testing, contact tracing, and wipe it out. If it recurs in little patches, yearly, people develop overall immunity. We get to the point where we develop a vaccine that’s safe and effective and has been studied okay, right? Not rushed, but studied appropriately. At that point, you vaccinate starting the most vulnerable people, healthcare professionals, the elderly, people with comorbidities, and then expand from there.

As we see community immunity blossom at a lower level than we might’ve thought, preexisting T-cell immunity, immunity lasts longer than we thought. If you get reinfected, and there’s already a case of a person who was, this is early stuff, who was reinfected with a different strain. So it wasn’t dramatically different, but was clear, he picked this one up in Europe and the original one was in China, and had a mild asymptomatic case. That’s the best news I’ve heard, yet. It means that there’s immunity of this thing and like a cold, you can get it again, but you ain’t gonna die, right? Imagine the first Native American who caught a European coronavirus, they died, right? Because they’d never seen this cytokine storm, huge immune reaction, but subsequently, we develop a collective immunity and I think that’s what’s gonna happen. We’re gonna see this thing start to cool down.

We’ll get to a vaccine at some point here, hopefully not too rushed, right? We make sure that the phase three trials are showing safety and efficacy in a population of 30,000 people versus placebo, which is what they’re doing. And then we’re able to get on with our lives, prepare for the next pandemic. And that means simply opening up the economy, being strategic about it, protecting our most vulnerable, wearing masks when we can’t social distance. And then when the numbers start to decline, then we can talk about opening up the bigger events, doing those other things. And in the meantime, getting better treatment options, dexamethazone, remdesivir, convalescent plasma. I’d like to see a randomized control trial for that before we say anything, but hey, try it. I’m not against emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma, I am against saying that it’s a 35% reduction in deaths, that’s not how you frame that. The absolute reduction in deaths is much smaller and it’s based on a retrospective trial that isn’t a randomized trial and it wasn’t versus placebo. So that’s the problem with that. But we need to study the crap out of it, right?

All right, so that is the state of the state right now. Now, people on a tune out at this point, I’m gonna see if I can look at some comments, at least on Facebook and maybe on YouTube as well. If I can make this work. So on Facebook, “How does keeping nursing home residents away from their families protect them when they get sick, anyways, I’m curious, what’s your opinion?” Janine Yandora, this is a great question. This is the problem. So you isolate nursing home residents even more than they are isolated, and they will not probably not get COVID, but they will die of loneliness, depression, giving up, we’ve all seen this happen. They’re isolated enough. So I almost feel like individual patients have to make decisions. What risks are they willing to take? Each of us have to make those decisions. What risks are we willing to take? And then what are the benefits and the risks of that? An elder has some risks seeing their grandchildren. They could get an asymptomatic transmission and die, but there’s risks not connecting with their family. And they need to think about that. So it there’s no one size fits, right? We all know that person who would rather die than not have that opportunity to connect with their loved one. All right, I’m gonna to pull up some YouTube comments here. So the lady Mirage says, “So how do we feel about not allowing indoor dining when we’re living in a smoke cloud? I’m not trying to say I don’t agree with you, but our PhD lessened restrictions in California’s burning.” So this is the thing in California, now we can’t go outside. So the restaurants are open for outdoor seating, but now, you can’t go. So now, everybody’s back to using DoorDash or going and picking up food. Look, the world is a chaotic and complicated place where we measure risk and benefit. Honestly, I’m not sitting out there in this smoke. Right now, you can’t see out the window, it’s so smoky from the fires burning all around where I live and it’s affecting millions of people right now in California. So we have to adjust, we just based on the data we have right now. Now, by next week, maybe it’ll clear up and we’ll get back to our outdoor restaurant dining and then back to indoor spaced out restaurant dining in well ventilated spaces. And then back to just life when there’s enough suppression that we can do it. Let’s look at some more comments here. So YouTube, “I remember getting hired as an LPN at a SNIF, and the admin was only test-fitting two people on each shift for N95s because they’re expensive and we’d never need enough for everyone, that has ruined my head,” Kristen Dalton. I mean, that’s the thing, right? We were making these rationing decisions early on and now, we’re talking in retrospect at Hindsight’s 2020, but at the time, there wasn’t enough resources. People were scared and the hospitals were scared and they were saying, shut everything down. And again, did it save our hospitals from getting overwhelmed? It may well have. And in that sense, it was the right decision. Would I do it again? No, what I would do again is a modified Sweden approach. Now, if I were doing it again, this thing never would have gotten out of China because we would have aggressively tested, had a travel ban early. The travel ban seemed draconian at the time, people were like, what? Do the travel ban right away, close off airlines, stop all this stuff from happening. And you could have prevented this in the early days with aggressive testing and contact tracing like Asian countries did. They kind of had it figured out because and it’s not like they’re somehow better than us, right? This isn’t some weird nationalistic thing, it’s because they had practice with SARS and MERS and avian flu. They’ve been through this and screwed it up like we’re doing now. And they learned from it. Now, it’s our turn to learn from it. Facebook, Kristine Hollingsworth, “What’s your rec…” Oh man these things roll so fast. “What’s your recommendation?” Oh, Kristine, your comment is gone. It’s gone forever, I’m sorry. It just starts scrolling so fast that the minute 30 other people leave a comment, your comments already so far up. I can’t even find it again. Let me look on YouTube. “We knew since SARS, that China lies about pandemics, which is one of the lessons they learned,” Rio Hoshi. Yes, that was my mistake ’cause I believed Chinese authorities early on because I thought, okay, they’ve learned from SARS, they’re gonna be more transparent. They don’t wanna have egg on their face. Now, they don’t care. They’re filling the political vacuum that the United States has left open by fumbling with the pandemic. Now, they look all bad-ass because they use their communist superpowers to shut down their country and get control of something that they should have controlled from the start, right? So I understand actually, people who are very upset with Chinese authorities, I mean, they pretty much damaged the entire world. And so we need to this idea that, Oh no, no, no, let’s really hold people accountable her, right? Hold the CDC accountable, hold the government accountable, hold healthcare organizations accountable for not spinning up PPE and properly preparing for this, hold the public accountable for behaving like jackasses sometimes. We have to hold ourselves accountable, so we can do better in the future. But we also have to hold compassion for people behaving the best they can with the information that they have instead of being so judgy and awful to each other, which seems to be happening across the board on social media. If we turn social media, stop watching cable TV, we would have had a bunch of deaths that nobody would have heard about. We would have ripped the bandaid off, for chief community immunity, and we would have moved on. It would have sucked because people would have died. But the social, economic, cultural catastrophe that’s happened would not have happened. Now, there’s some bright spots. My kids are back in school, virtually, the teachers seemed to have gotten, they’ve really gotten their act together on how to do zoom lessons. My kids are reasonably happy. They’re in class all day with their compatriots on the screen. Discipline is managed pretty well. They have assignments and accountability, so there’s some bright spots here. We may learn that there’s a way to do school that augments, particularly in areas where it’s difficult to get to school or whatever, augments the current system, which we know doesn’t work that well as it is, our education system is difficult, right? So there’s gonna be some bright spots. Healthcare is gonna transform. There’s an interview coming that we’re doing with Zach Holdsworth of Hint Health, talking about how you can have payment models that actually thrive during pandemics and not pandemics that don’t do insurance to transform everything. That’s what we try to do at turntable. So on that note, I hope you guys do this for me. Hopefully, the video streamed, right? I’m using this restream.io, which I’m not sure I like, but we’re gonna find out ’cause I couldn’t see the comments in it, which was the whole point. If I stream this way, I can’t see your comments in it. I have to go to individual apps, which I’m gonna have to talk to Restream and throw a little like, well, I got 2,000,000 followers, you better listen to me and they’re gonna ignore me ’cause that’s how these companies are. Message restream.io and tell them, hey, we watch the ZDogh show, he wants better treatment, he wants to be able to stream. So on that note, share this video. Let’s have rational discourse about this stuff moving forward and constantly update our prior information, come with new information without yelling at people for waffling ’cause that’s not what science does. Science updates information and changes with the new information. All right, guys, I love you. And we are out, now if I can just figure out how to do this off, off.