Sirius xm but amtrak for cnns election coverage, the need to make an emergency trip to florida, lots of uber car rides. I said that we allowed one son to keep College Spring break travel plans and that i have not yet canceled any of my upcoming live presentations around the country. There seemed no in between. And your reaction. Many appreciated my words even if misunderstanding what i was saying like finally, someone with the guts to say the emperor has no coronavirus. Thank you, michael. Not exactly. Others told me to go to fox or called me irresponsible. Even wished me ill. You are playing hard and fast with peoples health, you idiot. I taped your show, as a test. Never tkpwefpblt i dont wish harm on anyone, but karma if you get covid19, and only luck prevailed if you dont. Youve hurt americans. The reaction was intense. So i thought you might want to take my temperature today. After all, much has changed. The World Health Organization classified coronavirus as a global pandemic. What we thought we could do a week ago we simply no longer can whether because we have figured out its too risky or because lots of doors once opened are now locked. This week i found myself checking on sick and older loved ones. I worry about the most vulnerable among us. After Washington State governor jay eupls lee issued an edict, a canceled a speech outside seattle which would have had more in attendance than the 250 people permitted. And i canceled another at Arizona State university where classes moved online for at least the next two weeks. When i went to washington, d. C. To participate in cnns tuesday election coverage, i found myself alone in the cafe car. Grocery shopping in the suburbs on thursday afternoon in philadelphia felt like the wednesday before thanksgiving. The place was packed. Like many other stores, the toilet paper was gone. I live in montgomery county, home to 18 known cases of coronavirus. Now under a directive from pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf that closed gyms, schools, and entertainment centers. The son of ours came home to a university now under orders to move out by tuesday and prepare for online instruction. His final month of college will be nothing like he had hoped. And i watched as my retirement evaporated as the dow lost more than 6,000 points since its peak february 12th. Thursday was the largest oneday drop since 1987. Friday the largest single gain since 2008. Its taken resolve for me to follow the advice of my friend, jack bogle, the late legendary founder of the vanguard group, who used to advise to own the total market in an index fund and hang on for the long haul. Looks like i wont be attending any flyers playoffs game after all, north phillys home opener. I had a caller on sirius xm, rich from tampa. He suggested the nation take a twoweek timeout for testing, assessment, cleaning, a time to slowdown, social assistance, and get a hold of the situation. Thats what the nation seems to be doing, albeit organically and ad hoc, not with any federal admonition, despite the president s declaration of a National Emergency. That pretty much sums up my approach. Concerned, cautious, but carrying on. Mindful of the data as to who among us is most in peril and determined not to allow our worst fears to become selfactualizing. I want to know what you think. Go to my website this hour, smerconish. Com and answer this weeks question. What concerns you more . Becoming ill from the coronavirus or its Financial Impact on your life. Dr. Jeremy faust is an emergency physician at brigham and womens. An instructor at harvard medical school. Doctor, i know you are concerned about infrastructure. We are not talking about roads and bridges in this example. Explain. Great to be back, michael. What i am concerned about right now is that we have been promised tests. I think the conversation has moved on that. Im pleased to see people have accepted the rationale that more testing is better, even if it reveals more cases. That sounds scary, but i think that argument is gone and its won. Now the question is where are the tests in people are waiting for them, but in some areas they are building out the Test Facilities in advance, but in many areas theyre not. Im worried there is going to be a bottleneck. We have to fix that. I got on the phone as a oneman wrecking crew reaching out to public officials. Whats really reassuring is that all sounds good, lets talk tomorrow. But yesterday here in boston the Mayors Office told me, look, we 100 agree. We will call you tomorrow. Right now we are dealing with the school closings. I said thats really important except they may or may not help. But the tests setups, getting the tents and Assembly Lines together will save lives. So that is what i am trying to do, to push us to turn the tide. We have to keep our eyes on the prize. Lets talk about what the results might be. Because last week here on this program you said you found the diamond princess to be an interesting lab experiment. It occurs to me, dr. Faust, that if were testing on a very limited basis and were not testing everyone, that may throw off the fatality figures. Am i wrong . Absolutely correct. Its the argument that i made before. The fewer people you test, the more refocus on the very sick people and we hear fatality levels or in a very hrafralarmi. We are not testing so many more people who have the virus. The problem is fear and uncertainty. That is a moving target. Because im not worried personally still doesnt mean you or your family might not have different risks. Fear and anxiety itself does not in a service of coherency action is counterproductive in some cases. Not only do we do the wrong things. But if we dont do the right thing, im worried we will be in a paralysis where nothing positive happens. By the end of the week, i dont think that helps the situation. We need to do is to actually focus still on the areas of concern that i mentioned, the really atrisk people. I want to talk about social distancing in the context of fear. Is there such a thing as too much social distancing . I want your learned opinion. Thank you. Thats a great question about social distancing. Everyone has the assumption that more is better. In reality, the easy decisions sounds great. But there are downsides. A great column in the times last week about some of the downstream effects of School Closures that might be bad. If you actually look at it, the cdc just released a guidelines to tell schools what to consider in terms of closing. Not just closing them. They see that the kids may go home and be more exposed older people. People have lost faith in their institutions. Thats concerning. But the cdc that in my experience is staffed by grownups. They know what theyre talking about. They occasional lip get something wrong. Im the first person to say that. It doesnt mean that most of the time they dont do a reasonable assessment. They help schools look through every single thing. Look if you have a confirmed case, close down a day or two, clean up and considering starting over. The cdc, and i agree with them, is saying take it day by day and respond to the facts on the ground. Dont just assume more is better. Okay. Final question. And i hope this doesnt sound too flip. But you talked about how far in the future we should cancel plans. A srebg procedures just put out a statement canceling all concerts through the end of april. There it is. At least until may 1. How far in the future should we be canceling our plans . This last week has been the longest year of my life. And so i just think i expect that to occur to keep occurring as we move forward. To cancel things that are far down the road to me seems premature. There is really no down side to say, look, were going to carry on with the best intentions. No one is going to secondguess you if at the last minute or closer to an event you determine it is not necessary. Every social distancing decision has to be based on the facts of who is going to be attending, how can we change things. And i really want to start hearing about nuance. We cant be shut down forever. We have to turn the tide at some point. When that happens, we will learn to Work Together to move forward. Dr. Faust, thank you. Appreciate your expertise. Thanks for having me. What happens to the economy with all of this social distance something austan goolsbee, council of economic advisers under president obama wrote this in the New York Times this week. Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than china. That is because facetoface service industries, the kind of businesses that go into a stale spin when fearful people withdraw from each other. If people stay home from school, stop traveling and dont go to sporting events, the economic consequence would be worse. You were not advising people to go out but making an assessment as between the difference between the chinese economy and the american economy. True . True. And the thing is, that was written now it seems like forever ago. That was written at a time when people were just trying to factor in how big an impact will this have. If you look at china, it was a very big negative impact in china. And i was just trying to caution people, hey, get ready. Because if the same thing that happened in china happens heres its going to be worse. And since then, italy effectively shut down most commercial activity. So now that is the lesson. And i think everybody has to get on board here with what i call virus economics. It is different than regular cycle business economics, first of all, pause the most important thing you can do for the economy has nothing to do with the economy. Its to slow the spread of that virus. Because as that happens and people are a trade and they need to distance from one another and withdraw, there is going to be a severe slowdown in the economic data. And so anything you can do to slow the spread of that is in itself good stimulus or good at rebuilding the economy. So paying people who are sick not to go to work through paid leave in a normal calculus of the economy is bad for the economy because theyre not going to work. But in a virus, thats the best thing you can do because it slows the rate of spread. And the second thing is youve got to make sure that what is hopefully a temporary phenomenon doesnt morph into a permanent phenomenon by people going bankrupt, people cant pay their bills and things going wrong on that side. All effort has got to be on trying to slow and mitigate the effects on the health side and the permanent effects of damage to peoples lives. Because you see it everywhere. You know, its not it is gig workers. Its not just gig workers. Theres all the Service Sector of the economy, which is the majority of the economy, is really, really hurting at this moment. Heres what im taking away from austan goolsbee. The best economic stimulant is getting control of the virus. This is unlike 2008 and how do we address this banking collapse, we need to control the virus. Good things will then flow economically speaking from that. Step one, yes, thats exactly right. What would you say to folks who are watching their retirement evaporate . If we get hold of the virus, does it all come back . Look, i hope so. One of those people is me. The first thing i tell people is dont look. Dont Pay Attention. This is exactly why, you know, as you say, the conventional wisdom is if youre a long hold investor, dont Pay Attention to these daily gyrations. Now, that said, our hope would be that if we have a peak of this virus and then it goes down, Economic Activity would come back. And as Economic Activity comes back, our hope will be that the stock market would also come back, that the people will be able to go back to working at their jobs. And so thats why the critical component here is to prevent what would be a temporary shock from turning into a permanent problem by people losing their jobs, going bankrupt, unable to make the payments in this period where we have got to get by. We need to the floor a lot of sympathy and empathy on the economic side as well as on the health side because there is a great danger here. Were going to see numbers, most likely, that we have never really seen before. Its going to be different than 2008 in that way. A normal serious recession, lets say, would have output fall by 5 . That would be a pretty tough recession. If you look at china, alpha fell Something Like 20 . The intensity of what we are about to see in the data, look, you know your standard of living has been severely altered because of social distancing. Thats good advice. Austan, thank you for your expertise. We really appreciate it. Great to see you again. Dont forget this question this hour at smerconish. Com. We will give you the results later in the hour. What concerns you more, becoming ill from coronavirus or its Financial Impact on your life . Up ahead, so about coronavirus and its effects, however might it impact the president ial election . 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Who has a presser to announce they are staying in the race . The answer, the it turns out is Bernie Sanders. He used the time to pose the questions to joe biden tomorrow night on cnn which will have no Live Audience because of coronavirus. And let me be very frank as to the questions i will be asking joe. Joe, what are you going to do for the 500,000 people who go bankrupt in our country because of medically related death, and what are you going to do for the working people of this country and Small Business people paying on average 20 of their incomes for health care . As i watched the presser, i tweeted this observation, trying to picture bernies thinking. Joe, how can i pull you farther to the left and make it more difficult for you to beat trump . He continued to raise all of his major talking points, medicare for all, college for all, student debt, mass incarceration, immigration system, income disparity. Lest anyone think he was trying to put joe biden down, he closed by saying this. Donald trump must be defeated, and i will do everything in my power to page that happen. My feeling is if sanders walks biden into pleasing sanders supporters will that necessarily help or hurt joe biden in november . Maybe he is taking one for the team by extending the campaign he knows he cannot win but before dropping out he wants to try to shake bidens candidacy. A more cynical view, perhaps now its all about bernie. In 2016, he stayed in longer than his Expiration Date and caused Hillary Clinton to spend time and resources that would have been better trained toward the general election. And now he could be behaving the same way. Joining me now to discuss is dr. Abdul al syed for governor of michigan who supports Bernie Sanders. How do you see this in terms of what it does for the sandy . Bernie recognizes the most important thing we can do is beat donald trump. That means we have to turn out every last voter. And that means the young folks who were so excited about bernies message. So if we have a choice in the fall, its going to be because Bernie Sanders brought the Party Together and realize