Rush Limbaugh: “No matter how many people die from coronavirus, it’s not going to equate to the damage done to the U.S. economy”
Limbaugh: “We have to remember that people die every day in America, before the coronavirus came along”
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From the April 16, 2020, edition of Premiere Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): We’re at a point now where no matter how many people die from coronavirus, it’s not going to equate to the damage done to the U.S. economy.
Twenty-two million people have lost their jobs. Stop and think of this. This is not some academic number. This is a number that’s affecting everybody. The 22 million who are without work, the rest of us who are without what they do — we are without the job, the production, the service, whatever those 22 million people do, we don’t have.
It is hurting all of us, and it’s scary that there are still people who want to maintain this, and have it get even worse — literally scary. But this is — as I have been saying, I’ve been overusing the word — this isn’t sustainable. It hasn’t been sustainable for a month. It has to change.
We have to get serious about some things, and we have to admit some things to ourselves. And we have to adapt — which is what we human beings are great at doing. We adapt to whatever we find.
This is why the apocalyptic nature of climate change is ridiculous — we’ll adapt, whatever happens. The climate is always changing, the argument over whether man’s doing it — we adapt. Human beings always have. Others in the life chain, other animals adapt, or they don’t make it. Some people call adaptation “evolution,” I want to stay away from the word. The point is, we’re going to have to adapt. And by that, I mean we’re going to have to adapt, and accept that people will continue to die after we reopen the economy.
We have to remember that people die every day in America, before the coronavirus came along. We have to remember — I love the flu comparison that I gave yesterday, this is stunning. And by the way, the modeler — who hasn’t yet been right — was on TV again today, saying he’s breathlessly going to have new data this afternoon. And the new data is going to project even fewer deaths than the current 61,000 deaths that his model is projecting, by August.
In 2018, in that year’s flu season, 810,000 people were hospitalized, and it did not put any pressure on the American hospital system. You don’t even remember it, nobody was even complaining about it, because we’ve accepted the number of flu deaths — because we’ve got a vaccine, people think there’s something we can do about it. The number of hospitalizations from COVID-19 doesn’t even approach 100,000. We have not stressed the hospital system.
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But now, with 22 million weekly jobless claims — the new number is 5.245 million, so if you add that to previous weeks’ claims, 22 million people. This data proves that the number of deaths from the severe economic downturn will dwarf the deaths from the virus — and there won’t be any need for padding.
This economy, if we don’t get it back up and running, is going to kill its own subset of people. There will be people who will die from it for any host of reasons. It simply isn’t a matter of debate any longer. It’s not a matter of discussion.
I saw Senator Kennedy from Louisiana on the tube last night, and I was so happy to see it because he was essentially saying what I’m saying now. We have to get the economy going.
We don’t have any choice, folks, we can’t wait any longer. There is no if's, and's, or but's about it. The number of deaths are coming in way below the projections. And, yes, I’m going to admit, people are going to continue to get this virus after we reopen the economy — and yes, Donald Trump is going to get blamed for it — and yes, Donald Trump knows.
We all know what’s going to happen. We all know what’s going to happen in the news. We all know what’s going to happen politically. It doesn’t matter. We have to be up and running. We cannot allow this to continue. It has gone on way too long. No matter what, this is not sustainable.