The Daily Signal - A Commonsense Approach to COVID-19

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Are lockdowns ever necessary? Will the new COVID-19 vaccines be safe? How risky is it to travel for the holidays? What new medical treatments do we have for COVID-19? Dr. Kevin Pham, a visiting policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, and Doug Badger, a senior fellow in health policy at The Heritage Foundation join the podcast to discuss all this and more. We also cover these stories:  The left is actively working to undermine the integrity of our elections. Read the plan to stop them now. Learn more now >> In spite of legal challenges from the Trump campaign, both Pennsylvania and Nevada have certified their election results. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 30,000 points for the first time in history. The governor of New Mexico has shut down some grocery stores for two weeks. “The Daily Signal Podcast” is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, and Stitcher. All of our podcasts may be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You also can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail].  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, November 25th. I'm Rachel Deltudis. And I'm Virginia Allen. How can we celebrate Thanksgiving safely this year? Is it okay to have dinner at your grandmother's house like you always have? Today, our colleague Kate Trinco, editor-in-chief of the Daily Signal, talks with Doug Badger, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and Dr. Kevin Pham, a visiting policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, to find out how we can still celebrate the holiday and keep. our loved ones safe. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. In spite of legal challenges from President Donald Trump's campaign, both Pennsylvania and

Nevada have certified their election results for former Vice President Joe Biden. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Governor Tim Wolfe tweeted, today at PA State Department certified the results of the November 3rd election in Pennsylvania for President and Vice President of the United States. As required by federal law, I have signed the certificate of ascertainment for the state of electors for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In his statement per Fox News, Bob Bauer, Senior Advisor for Biden for President, said that it's readily apparent to everyone besides Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis, that this election is over and that Joe Biden won resoundingly. President Trump made a surprising appearance at the White House press briefing on Tuesday to announce the exciting news. that the Dow Jones Industrial Average

surpassed 30,000 points for the first time in history. Take a listen to the President's brief remarks per Fox business. The stock market's just broken 30,000. Never been broken, that number. That's a sacred number, 30,000. Nobody thought they'd ever see it. That's the ninth time since the beginning of 2020. And it's the 48th time that we've broken records in,

during the Trump administration. And I just want to congratulate all the people within the administration that work so hard. And most importantly, I want to congratulate the people of our country because there are no people like you. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.

The governor of New Mexico has shut down some grocery stores for two weeks. About 12 stores in the state have been forced by a public health order to close, which mandates that institutions that have four or more rapid responses of COVID-19 cases reported during a 14-day period are to shut down for two weeks. The stores affected in New Mexico include, per the center square, two Walmarts in Albuquerque,

and one in Santa Fe, and Albertsons and Roswell, a Smith's Food and Drug Center in Albuquerque, and New Mexico Food Distribution Center in Albuquerque. Seattle's city council members voted Monday to cut the police department's budget by 20% in their city. Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin said in a statement that she plans to sign the bill implementing the budget cuts. Seven of the nine Seattle City Council members had originally pledged to cut the budget by 15%, but were largely still willing to support the 20% cut. I applaud the City Council for taking a more deliberate and measured approach to the 2021 Seattle Police Department budget, Duncan said in a statement. Councilwoman Deborah Warez said,

defund police by 50% was a slogan, and it was an empty and misleading slogan. It caused damage, it caused pain, it caused trauma, it caused anger. Seattle police officers have been leaving the police force in much greater numbers than anticipated. As of the end of October, 134 officers had resigned, and in October alone, when only seven officers were expected to depart, 23 officers left the Seattle Police Department.

Now stay tuned for Kate Trinko's conversation with the Heritage Foundation's Doug Badger and Dr. Kevin Pham as they discuss how we can all safely celebrate Thanksgiving this year. It's because of support from listeners like you that we can continue to produce podcasts like Heritage Explains and SCOTUS 101. And you can help us keep it up by going to www.com.com. slash podcast today to make your tax deductible gift. Joining us today are Doug Badger, a senior fellow in health policy at the Heritage Foundation, and Dr. Kevin Pham, a visiting policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Doug and Kevin, thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much for having us. Thank you, Kate. So there's so much to get into on the coronavirus front. But let's start with Thanksgiving. California, rather infamously, has said that Thanksgiving gatherings should be limited to three households should be held outdoors and shouldn't last more than two hours. Oregon's governor, Kate Brown, has suggested that neighbors call the police if they see people violating her rules about COVID-19 during this time period. And one of those rules is that no more

than six people can be indoors at any given time. So on the flip side, though, we're seeing memes online spread with messages like, well, if you have a big Thanksgiving, get ready for small funerals at Christmas. So what factors should people consider as they decide what to do on Thanksgiving and what would you say matters most? And what is the media overhyping? Doug, let's start with you on this one. Sure. And Kevin can speak more effectively to the medical aspects. There's no question that we're seeing a big increase in cases right now. It's not unique to the United States certainly, but it is something that that is concerning. And I would say in particular, for people who have older relatives or older themselves, they would think very carefully about going to large indoor gatherings at this

point or even family gatherings because of the risk of COVID. Obviously, this is one of these diseases that in some ways, fortunately, is serious and life-threatening predominantly for older people. I mean, 80% of the deaths are among people 65 and older. 95% are among people 55 and older. And so there are people at heightened risk, and certainly with respect to the nursing home population, it's even higher. So I would try to make smart decisions.

And particularly taking age and chronic illness into account, you don't want to expose someone you love to an infection that could result in a very serious illness. Right. And I want to add to that it's not just that there's a disease that's about that could seriously affect our older Americans, our elders. Because that's true with many diseases, especially influenza is particularly deadly. What's different about COVID is that it's extremely infectious, extremely contagious. And so if one person gets it, they'll be able to transmit it fairly readily. And the problem that we're most concerned about, the whole reason why we're asking everyone to wear masks where they can't isolate or distance from other people is because there's a short period of time where you're not showing any symptoms and you're able to transmit the disease. And that seems to be when most of the transmission is occurring because if you're not sick, then you're out about. You're in the society and you're in the community interacting with other people.

And so because of that, infections are able to get around very far in society very quickly. And we need to be wary about that and understand that that's why we're asking everyone to be so careful. And after that, then, yeah, it's extremely important to be aware of who's in your circle, in your orbit, in your community, in your family. If you have someone who is, you know, 85 years or older and you're interacting with them on a daily basis or even regularly every week or something like that, then you have to be extra careful with your own health because of this infectious. because of the contagiousness. You don't want to be an accidental vector for getting the virus there. That having been said, you know, what I'm doing with Thanksgiving is I'm not going

home to visit family who includes a lot of older relatives. I'm having a what's called, you know, a Friendsgiving. I'm having a couple of people over for lunch on Thanksgiving Day. And we're all of the lowest age group. So, you know, there are ways to do this carefully. And it's just up to all of us to take responsibility for our own health and the health of those are around us. So as we look ahead to Christmas, to Hanukkah, New Year's, one of the complicating factors is that not only do we have to juggle the risks with indoor gatherings, but many Americans must travel to be with their loved ones.

So what is the impact of people taking planes, mingling in airports, or, you know, mingling in roadside stops if they're driving? Is this something that could potentially exacerbate the spread of COVID in a serious way? Kevin, let's start with you on this one. The answer to that is certainly it can. Any place that you have a hub of travel or a hub of people, people who are coming together where you can't necessarily keep some kind of distance between yourself and a stranger, you don't know what their health status is. Anytime that happens, then you stand the risk of an infection without you knowing about it.

So far it's been a theoretical concern. Hopefully we won't see that become materialized into something more practical. But air travel thus far has not been linked to any outbreak. So it does seem like we can do this safely. It's just, again, it's incumbent on everyone to take those precautions. And I think masking indoors is going to be a very, it's going to play a very important part, especially in the airports, especially in the airplanes. Airplanes have special filtration systems, but they really rely on persons' respiration staying close to that person and then being filtered out. So that's going to be important.

And the other thing, too, which would be very helpful, is if people, if people try to make. an effort to get themselves tested before traveling. You know, if you if you test, you get you test negative, then it's going to be a lot safer. Now there's the there's the outside chance that you'll have a false negative, but if everyone's testing, then you'll be able to catch probably the majority of cases. And if people who test positive decide not to travel, then there's going to be a lot less COVID-19 traveling around the country. On similar lines, what metrics should lawmakers and individuals deciding about risk level comfort be looking at when they are considering the state of COVID-19 in their area.

Doug, what do you think? Well, I'm going to challenge the question, Katie, for a little bit. I think the theme that both Kevin and I are sounding is that people need to be taking responsibility for themselves, and they need to be making smart decisions. The decisions you make are highly dependent on facts and circumstances. As Kevin said, for him getting together with some friends on Thanksgiving, well, and the younger age group is, you know, a very safe alternative. For an older guy like me, my wife and I are going to have one couple over. We're in Florida.

We're going to eat outdoors. And we're going to take extra precautions. One of the real errors, I think, that has been present in our public policy on COVID. from the beginning has been this command and control in which people are told to be confined, businesses and churches and schools are shuttered. And what happens from that is some people understandably react negatively to that and are maybe more likely to take a defiant posture that maybe takes the illness a little too lightly, where else? Okay, we need to make decisions for ourselves.

We need to make informed decisions. And so of anything, I would say that the way public policy has been done on COVID, too often has focused on confining people and limiting their liberties, rather than helping them get informed and making good decisions. about their own conduct. Well, I think that's a great point. So let me rephrase the question a little bit. And this is why I love working with Doug.

He always calls me out. No. But so, you know, I've heard conservatives online have sometimes debated, like, is it the number of cases that matter or the number of deaths that matter? And then, of course, you know, we see media reports, which for someone like me who's not a data analyst, it's hard to know, like, this many cases per 100,000. Is this bad or is this to be expected?

So as an individual, when you're making your decisions, what are the numbers you should be looking at to get an accurate sense of how bad it is in your area? Well, I think the first thing I'd look at would be my driver's license. And depending on my date of birth, I would have a pretty good idea of what my risk of serious illness are. The second is Kevin notes, for those who aren't in a particularly high risk group, they have to think about the folks with whom they come in contact on a regular basis and be concerned, as he says, that you don't become a vector of the disease for someone for whom it is very serious. Obviously, if you're in a community where there is a widespread outbreak, and you mentioned a few things, obviously, number of cases, a number of deaths and all that's in your local newspaper, and you'll probably see pretty easily from the local, just again, from the local news without having to go to specialized websites, what's going on in your hospital? If you're seeing a situation in which hospitals are getting crowded, death rates are rising, and your case levels are much higher than they were, say, over the summer or last spring, then you're probably in an area where you should be taking some extra precautions. So per your earlier point, Doug, states and localities across the country are really replaying the spring. We're seeing lockdowns happen in LA, New Mexico's having some, and I expect they'll be more announced in upcoming weeks.

What did we learn this spring about lockdowns and whether they work or not? And specifically, because these lockdowns really dramatically differ from each other, they focus on different things and shut down different businesses and places. Are there particular lockdown measures that are more or less effective? Kevin, let's start with you on this one. I'll answer this question, but I think Doug's going to have a better, better answer, or at least a more in-depth answer, but from my perspective, what the lockdowns in spring, what we really learned from it is that there's a couple of things that we can learn from it. Number one is that it did what it was intended to do as it was originally intended, which was

to flatten the curve. If you look at the curve in the number of cases and in deaths, they hit a peak in April. The cases peaked early April, and then deaths peaked mid-April, and after that, the whole curve scalps, you know, we didn't just flatten the curve. We, we sliced the top off it, essentially, which was a good thing. It did come at a tremendous cost to our economy, but, you know, it did, as I said, what it was originally intended to do. But the sort of mission of flatten the curve became to crush COVID in America. And that's really an unrealistic, that's really an unrealistic goal. Even when we have a vaccine, then it's going to take a little bit of time for that to get out to the community, to the broad community.

And so we learned that it can do it, but I think what's more important here is what we didn't learn. We didn't learn, apparently, that these things are not sustainable over the long run. I think part of what's responsible for the current rise in cases is that people are tired, tired of being told not to do this, not to do that. And they're seeing the differential enforcement of these rules. People can't go to a funeral with all their loved ones, but we're having these massive public funerals in multiple cities for people who are held in high esteem by certain political groups. When people are seeing that, then they realize that the people who are making the rules of policymakers, they're not taking their own rules seriously, and they're not our kings,

so why should we follow their rules? And that's having a major impact on how people take serious, seriously people are taking this disease. And what we have not learned from these lockdowns is making the situation worse, in my opinion. Doug, did you want to speak to the lockdowns? Yeah, I think Kevin summed it up. You know, in March, remember, we didn't have tests. And partly because the CDC test didn't work and partly because the FDA and CMS wouldn't allow alternative testing. And so suddenly we found ourselves with people showing up in New York hospitals and particularly elsewhere in the Northeast with this dread disease. And we began to get this idea that, wow, this thing is spread much farther and much more quickly than we thought. And the lockdowns were, as Kevin said, a reasonable response.

But certainly national lockdowns of indefinite duration aren't. sustainable and it's just not going to happen. Again, I would say if you're there, it is conceivable that we will get areas where perhaps hospitals might be overrun or overrun or their capacity heavily taxed where it might be on a localized episodic basis. The lockdown may be part of a broader strategy to preserve hospital capacity. But lockdowns are an expedient. And somewhere along the way, they were sort of repackage as a solution. They're not a solution. They're not a solution here. And they haven't been anywhere else in the world. Any country that's been successful at combating the pandemic has either not used lockdowns or if they've

used them, they've used them only as an adjunct to more effective policy interventions. So there's been good news on the vaccine front in recent weeks with trial results indicating that the vaccines for COVID-19 largely work. So let's start first with the practicalities. What do we know about when the vaccine might start being available and how many folks do we need to get vaccinated to get herd immunity? Doug, let's start with you on this one. All right. I'm going to have a short answer, which is Kevin. So with herd immunity, we're still not 100% sure about how much, what percent of the population needs to be immune to this virus.

And I do say immune because the people who have been infected and have recovered, they're going to count towards this herd immunity. We've been under the assumption that's going to take about 60 to 70 percent of people being immune for us to achieve herd immunity with COVID-19. With other diseases, it can be as low as like 50 percent. But since COVID-19 spread so fast and you're going to need a larger percentage of people, it will be immune. And it's a little bit hard to track who has been infected because there seems to be a very large number of completely asymptomatic cases. So we could actually be a little bit closer than we thought.

But anyways, that happened said, we're looking at, we're looking about 60% of people being immune. That's sort of the goal here. And that's that's a large, that's a large number of people. we're talking about 330 plus million people in this country. And so the rollout of the vaccine is going to be really important. It's going to be targeted, which all of the COVID precautions, all the COVID measures that we should have been taking, they should always have been targeted.

And so I think the rollout of the vaccines, the plans that they're going to have for it is one of the bright spots in the pandemic response in America. It's going to first go out to those at risk and those who work with those. at-risk so nursing homeworkers and then first responders and then slowly over time I can't really give it a timetable because I don't know how long it's going to take this is more a logistical concern but over time then the vaccine will be made available to the broader public and once that starts happening it's going to take a couple months and then you'll have a large number

of people who are vaccinated obviously in some communities it'll be easier to get more vaccines out and other communities it's going to take a little bit longer but you know When it starts getting out into the community for anyone who wants it, then we should be seeing cases start to plummet. And along with cases, hospitalization and deaths should start to plummet after that. So polling shows that many Americans are nervous about taking a vaccine, one that's so new, that we don't have any long-term testing of. Kevin, what do you think about the risks of the vaccines,

and how should Americans face how they decide whether to take it or not? I'll start by saying that as soon as one is available to me, I am going to get it. People have challenged me and said, you know, you first, I will say, gladly, I will raise my arm to get a vaccine. I think we're going to have to try to figure out how to do a Facebook live of you taking the vaccine, Kevin. I'd be happy to do it. When that happened. What I would say to those who are hesitant about is, you know, I completely understand. This is the fastest the vaccine's ever made all the way through the trial process.

And part of that is, actually, I would say most of that is because of the government action in underwriting all the risk it takes and developing a new truck. So the safety precautions have not been shortchanged. They are going through all three phases of pre-market trials, clinical trials. And in order to participate in Operation Warp Speed, which all these have done, all the candidates have done so far, they all require at least 30,000 participants and a median follow-up time of two months, which isn't as long-term as some people would like. But we do have a decent amount of follow-up information. Not quite a year yet, but the first people started taking the vaccines were over the summer.

So we have several months of long-term data. And we have all these people who have received the vaccines. And none of these vaccines have had a strong. enough reaction except for one astrozanica vaccine none of these had had a strong enough reaction that would cause a halt in the testing and these are over over 30,000 plus across all three of the current the current frontrunners of the vaccines and we're talking I think talking at least at least 200,000 participants so any of these three vaccines are probably going to be very safe and I had mentioned that they stopped the astrazanaic

trials for a little bit. But after investigation, they determined that it wasn't caused by the vaccine. And so they continued on again. And EstraZeneca was just complete certain endpoints and they're going to be seeking EUA soon as well, an emergency use authorization. So there's a lot of safety data behind these things. Obviously, no one's had one of these vaccines for longer than years. So I do understand people's concerns. But I think those concerns are going to be very small. the chance of something that is going to be very far, very far outside of a normal range. And once again, once a vaccine gets authorized, I'm going to take it. Great. So on the policy front, we've seen that lawmakers are not hesitant to take action.

But are there particular actions they should be taking or areas they should focus on? Doug, I'm going to turn this one over to you. Thank you. Yeah, I would talk about three things that I think are essential. The first is nursing home safety. We are seeing an increase in cases in nursing homes. That is very, very concerning. 40% of deaths associated with COVID have been among nursing home residents. And an increase in cases among the frail elderly and congregate settings is very, very concerning.

I'll let Kevin talk. Kevin's laid out some specific policy prescriptions that the government should follow. and protecting nursing home residents. The second and the thing that's very, very important is that the FDA approve home rapid tests that don't require laboratory analysis. Let us test ourselves. The FDA is reluctant to do it. They did approve one home test recently, which is great, unfortunately.

Still requires a prescription. It costs around 50 bucks. That's simply not conducive to the kind of broad, widespread screening where we get to learn our COVID status on a very fast basis. And we get to repeat that test multiple times. There are a test that have been developed that cost about a dollar each. They're just paper strips. And, you know, you take a saliva sample and you get the results in 15 minutes or so. These can be, these cost about a dollar to produce.

We could have 10 or 20 million tests perform every day. We could be testing kids in school each twice a week. People could test themselves in their homes before going to family gatherings. But unfortunately, FDA hasn't approved them. Dr. Fauci last week of all people in an interview said that if you could do one thing on testing, it would be flooding the zone with tests. and in particular tests that you can do at home. And I certainly hope the FDA will find its way in time for Christmas to allow this kind of widespread testing to go on.

Once people know what their status is, they can take much more intelligent precautions than what we're doing right now. And the third thing, as I mentioned, is to provide temporary, isolation facilities. People could voluntarily use. The hotel industry has been clobbered by this, by the pandemic and the shutdowns and the reluctance to travel. They would make excellent facilities for people. If they don't want to go home and expose their family to the infection, they know they've got a positive test, give them a place to go to recover without exposing other people to the infection. If we can identify people who are infected and separate them from the uninfected, we can do what lockdowns can't do, which is actually begin to push back and reverse the course of

the pandemic. I think those, that kind of voluntary isolation quarters, that would be a really, a really great thing for the society at large. But, you know, if we can't do that for, if we can't that broadly, then we should at least be able to do, speaking of nursing home, we should at least be able to do that for nursing home workers. You know, if they work on, if they're on, for instance, on service for two weeks at a time or so, you know, maybe we can house them in a dormitory, test them first and then keep them isolated there. Can't go out. They'll have their food come to them. You know, it's sort of reminiscent of the NBA bubble situation that they had to protect the NBA workers and the players and everything. If it's, if it's good enough for LeBron James,

It's good enough for my grandma, honestly. You know, we should, as Doug had mentioned, as we had all been mentioning, all of our focus should be on those who are at the most risk, which is those in nursing homes. They are confined to our residence and they're indoors at the time, and they're full of people who are at the highest risk. So you're concentrating all the risks in these buildings, so all of your focus should be on protecting them.

Rapid testing should be used. The CMS guidance, I believe, said the workers should be tested once a week, they're, you know, ideally you'd be tested before every single shift, but as that's not, as that's not necessarily feasible, then keeping them dormed on the premises or something like that would be helpful as well. But the long story short is we, the only, there's only three ways that a case of COVID-19 can get into a nursing home. One is through staff or faculty as we had been talking about. And two is through visitors and visitations have been extremely restricted. So I don't think that's driving much of the increase in nursing home cases. And three is by forcing nursing homes to take to readmit patients with active infections,

which thankfully that's been stopped now. But that's been one of the main drivers for deaths, deaths and mortalities in the New York area and several other states as well. But we need to, nursing home residents aren't getting COVID-19 organically. It's coming in. And we need to really have strong controls on that access point. But so this has all been critical, but I do want to highlight something that has been done recently is CMS has decided to cover monoclonal antibody treatments for all Medicare beneficiaries, which would include nursing home residents. This would be a tremendous, a tremendous benefit because the best time to treat COVID-19 is before it becomes a serious infection.

And these drugs, these are monoclon antibodies. I believe the president received regeneron, I believe it was. these things have the most effect when you have a very or at least a relatively mild illness. And so if they're able to get that and they're already in the facilities, they might be able to run infusioned. If they're able to get that early and get it without cost, then, you know, we could be seeing a large impact, a large positive impact on the mortality in nursing home deaths. And that would be a tremendous benefit to what we're seeing right now. But long story short, we need to be protecting, we need to be focusing the majority of our efforts on the nursing homes. So, Kevin, you just mentioned some medical treatments that we have now that we didn't have at the beginning of this. And we talked earlier in this interview about how we now know, you know, people 55 and older are at far more risk than those younger, etc. But more big picture here. You know, we've had COVID for, I guess, close to a year now in the U.S. What have we learned? And do you have any thoughts about how many people are being affected by long-term health issues related to COVID?

So we've learned quite a bit. One of the most breathtaking things that we've learned is that what we were told initially on how to treat COVID-19 was exactly the wrong thing to do. What we were told from doctors who were treating patients in Italy and in China, we were told to avoid anti-inflammatory drugs and to ventilate early and aggressively. And, you know, this is, they were doing their best to try to keep their patients alive. I do not blame them for being wrong about this. They just got a sudden flood of patients and they were doing their best. But that information turned out to be exactly wrong. You want to, you want to spare the ventilators as much as possible because that only makes it worse.

And it makes it worse because the primary mortality driving factor is an inflammatory process that goes haywire. And that is sort of exacerbated by the use of ventilators. So that's one of the big things that we have learned about this. Another thing is that we've learned that it affects mostly, or, The most severe effects of the disease is mostly concentrated in those who are older. The risks of mortality start to increase at 50, but it really ramps up once you're looking at anyone over 65. That's another thing that we've learned. Other than that, we've discovered that some drugs have been particularly helpful.

Steroids in particular, it's an old drugs, dexymethosone. We've been using that for years now, and it has a real impact on mortality. A couple other, it gets a little bit into the weeds, but we've learned how to treat COVID-19 a lot better. And that's as far as we learned, things that we have developed are drugs like Regeneron, the Eli Lilly monoclonal antibodies. And we have vaccines online now, too. So there's a lot of things that we have now that we didn't have at the beginning. And not to mention, all the tests, we're routinely breaking testing records daily now. We don't even talk about it because it happens so frequently.

But we're testing, I think, 1.5 million people, or at least we're recording 1.5 million tests a day this month. So that gives us a lot more intelligent. It gives us a lot more capacity, capability to respond to an outbreak. And so we're able to do much more with this. Essentially, a case back in March is very different from a case today. Today, you'll get much better treatment today. So about those, and I know it's a very small percentage, but the COVID, patients who say that they're experiencing long-term effects, what do we know about that?

We don't know too terribly much about that because it's a relatively small percentage. Well, I can't say is that the severe disease manifestations of COVID-19 includes a large anti-inflammatory response. It's that cytokine storm that we've been talking about. What that is is the body's natural defense mechanism going into overdrive and it just dumps the zone with these inflammatory mediators trying to at that point though the virus is probably not not too present it may have been may have been largely destroyed at that point it'll still be present but the body is just trying to find every last instance of the virus and eradicate it and in doing so it's doing a lot of damage to the lungs and to the heart and to any other organ systems that

that's being affected by the cytokine storm and so because of that you can get a lot of scarring all around the body and it's it wouldn't make sense to have long-term lung damage long-term heart damage long-term long-term damage to anywhere where the virus has been or has affected downstream so it's entirely possible and there's why we really we really have to take this seriously because even if even if you're at low risk of death if you do end up with a severe disease manifestation then you could come come down with long-term damage and this is and this is one of one of the things that we learned too is some of the some of the signs that that you look at if you're trying to determine if you have COVID-19 or not and it's better to get treated earlier than it is to

get later back in back at the beginning people were walking around with you know mild flu like symptoms and then when they finally decide to go or when they finally feel bad enough to check into the ER then a lot of damage has already been done so we're getting we're getting people into treatment a lot earlier these days and that's that's also a tremendous benefit to to people So I know we're coming to the end of our time here, but I did want to just check in with you both about one last question. So I know you're not media critics, but you are health care professionals. So what do you think of the media coverage of COVID-19? Do you think the media is missing things or having a wrong focus or do you think they're doing a good job covering it?

I'm going to be a media critic here, Kate, and say that I think in many ways the media has misinformed people. more than it's informed people. It certainly has raised awareness of the disease, which is obviously very, very important. But I also think they've taken, in many instances, an almost partisan viewpoint on this, as opposed to one that would more aim at making sure that people understood their risks appropriately,

and understood how to best reduce their risk, not just of infection, but of serious consequences of infection. I wish it were different. There's the whole demonization of Trump and lionization of Cuomo and, you know, all of these side things that I suppose get clicks on your website. and maybe get eyeballs on your cable station. But they don't do very much to really help people get a better sense of what they should do in order to best protect themselves and families. I will say that the media has been exceptionally unhelpful during this time. My blood pressure raises every time I think about how the media has comported themselves

throughout this whole pandemic. But just to take a case and point, it's the matter of masking. I think they are a very good, lightweight solution. They don't cost very much. They're not a huge burden to people. I think they are a very small thing that can be used, and it may have tremendous benefit to society. It may.

But we know that masks are not a panacea. We've always known that masks are not silver bullets about this. There was an early drive for the N95 masks, because those are the only ones that would actually work to prevent getting infected from a respiratory disease. we've asked people to wear these flimsy little cloth masks, which again, I support that entirely because just a quick justification for masks, this is a respiratory disease. So it makes sense that you put a physical barrier in front of your respiratory orifices, then you're going to decrease the spread

and the velocity of your respirations, which if there's a disease on your respirations, then it'll limit the impact of your infection. So that's why it would help, it could help. But they're not going to prevent you from getting sick. If you're in the middle of the crowd of COVID-19, that that flimsy little cloth mask isn't going to do anything for you. You know, so, and the media has been treating these masks as if, you know, they are magic COVID-19 talismans that prevent you from infecting anybody else. If you're not wearing one, then you clearly want people to die and you're responsible for all these deaths in America.

And that's not helpful rhetoric. If you want people to wear a mask, you don't tell them that you're going to kill people for not wearing a mask. That's not how it works. If you want to help people, if you want to help the public health situation, then you're going to try to recruit people to your cause. And you don't do that by telling them that they're, you know, immoral, reckless monsters.

That's not helpful. And that is only a small case in point as far as my opinion about the media during this time. All right. Well, Doug and Kevin, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Thanks, Kate. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

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