OAN host urges Americans to ignore study that found millions could die because of COVID-19: “People die on our highway systems every day”
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From the March 19, 2020, episode of One America News' The Tipping Point
LIZ WHEELER (HOST): There's a nugget of information hidden in the Imperial College report that nobody's talking about, no mainstream media outlet is reporting, even a lot of conservatives and Republicans have accepted the premise of the Imperial College report without question. When the promise appears faulty in multiple places. Let me back up.
The Imperial College report is being used by politicians as the premise for government's reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak. The Imperial College report hypothetically predicts that between two and four million Americans will die due to the coronavirus. It's no wonder people are paranoid and feel panic. The problem is the premise of the Imperial College report appears to be faulty. As we pointed out last night, the death rates Imperial College used in their model to predict the number of Americans who will die, is the 3.4% case fatality rate that's been widely debunked here in the United States. In fact, the latest death rate here in the US is 1.6%. And even that is most likely significantly inflated because we don't have widespread testing of people with mild or moderate symptoms, we're only testing, for the most part, people in high-risk demographics with serious symptoms. Imperial College also assumes in their model that until a vaccine is developed and deployed, the U.S. does nothing medically to mitigate the mortality rate of the virus when people contract it, even though existing antiviral medication is already found to be helpful in fighting COVID-19.
This background is important because when governments are forcing private commerce to stop, shutting down private business, which inevitably leads to economic collapse, the politicians mandating this economic collapse better have a valid reason for it. And if their reason is the Imperial College report, which is based on what appears to be a faulty premise, then we have a problem.
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According to Imperial College, that will work, but only if we do that extreme social distancing for eighteen months until a vaccine is tested and deployed on the whole population. If we relax extreme social distancing after two weeks or two months or six months or even a year, according to Imperial College the virus will come back and kill millions of Americans.
That's not what we've been hearing from politicians or experts in the administration, is it? No. We've been told to suffer through extreme social distancing for two weeks until the end of March, maybe a couple of weeks longer. And that's it. And this is where we get to the economic impact.
If we're forced into extreme social distancing, what happens when we come out? What happens to our economy? And don't be Greta Thunberg saying how dare you talk about fairy tales of eternal economic growth. The economy is not some inanimate object, some inert entity. The economy is people, it's you, it's me, it's my brother's small business in your mom's life savings, it's families providing for their children and paying their bills. It's real, it's us.
And by the way, according to the Imperial College report, everybody is still expected to contract COVID-19 even with extreme social distancing, just at a slower rate, the 'flatten the curve' theory.
But at what point will Americans on long term quarantine who are still going to contract the COVID-19 virus eventually, just slightly delayed by extreme social distancing, that will throw the economy off the cliff in the meantime, realize that people die on our highway systems every day. Most of those deaths are not the fault of the people who die and if we shut on our highways, we could avoid those deaths. But we don't shut down the highways. Why? Because they're a staple to a vibrant, thriving economy that people rely on for their livelihoods and well being. So we as a nation do what we can to mitigate the accidents that cause the deaths, but we don't allow the government to close the highways; we keep on trucking, literally. Because it's critical to our economy which is critical to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Americans.
Now I'm not saying we shouldn't do everything that we can within reason to prevent the death of our beloved elderly population from COVID-19. Of course, we should, my own grandparents were in this high-risk demographic, it's personal to me. But what is reasonable? What is effective? What is devastating and what's the balance? As Holman Jenkins Jr. asks in the Wall Street Journal and I quote 'Wouldn't it make more sense to isolate the vulnerable instead of quarantining everybody?'