Were not going back to the precoronavirus normal anytime soon. Crowded rock concerts in giant arenas, sold out broadway shows, football stadiums, filled with 100,000 people just packed next to each other. I think its pretty unlikely any of those things are going to look how they looked before. Were going to stand further away from one another. Were not going to crowd into spaces. Were going to wear masks. Workplaces that can do it are going to try to stay empty as possible, not breathing each others air, and that principle two that were not going back to normal, even in places like texas where restaurants will open on friday. Those restaurants are only allowed to have 25 capacity. In georgia, famously the most sort of out front on this, some barbers are only allowing one customer in the store at a time. Others wait outside 6 feet apart. Most people or i would say almost everyone understands that things need to change. Those are the principles we all seem to agree on. The question is what is in between those two principles. Right . What is a safe responsible way of reopening. We like to call on this show, door number 3. The option that is either an uncontrolled pandemic or economic depression. And i got to say, this should not be some weird culture war question, despite the effort of some to make it some in order to detract from the manifest failures of the president to march people out to sacrifice themselves to the dow, it is a difficult complicated question that the world, every world leader, every state in the union is dealing with and theres actually a specific goal every society is trying to accomplish, and that is this, to keep the rate of transmission of the coronavirus down so that each infected person infected on average less than one other person. Okay. This is the key benchmark. If the transmission rate is less than one, the disease is declining. If the transmission rate is more than 1, the disease is spreading. Angela merkel who plans to be doctor of chemistry explained as they were gearing up to reopen their economy. [ speaking in foreign language. ] ge first of all, just imagine for a second having a leader that thought of the question of how to reopen society with that level of nuance. But thats whats necessary. When germany started to open up, they had the infection transmission rate down to. 8 below that 1 threshold, but the coronavirus started creeping back up to an infection rate of one because this virus is so contagious, so few people have immunity. In singapore, many have covered as a Success Story because it has been, they are dealing with a second outbreak which is essentially forcing them to enter back into shelter in place, and the reason is because they ignored a marginal community. Migrant workers who live packed in dormitories on the outskirts of the city. The margins dont stay the margins for long with this virus. Other places like taiwan and south korea have been able to keep the virus, through testing and Contact Tracing. Seattle, with its huge shelter in place order, they have gotten their infection rate down to where they started to lift some restrictions on things like farme farme farmers markets, outdoors, people can buy food. Thats whats so important that Angela Merkel was saying, the margin of error is small because of the way exponential growth works. You can find yourself back where we were two months ago, two months ago, two months ago, february 29th when there was literally one confirmed death. Before it spins out of control and we lose 60,000 lives in 60 days. And there are so many deaths that one funeral home is moving bodies if uhaul trucks because they dont have enough room. The question of how and when to reopen society is a hard problem to solve but a worst Case Scenario would be after we have lost many tens of thousands of lives, and knowingly pushed our economy to the brink of a depression and seen the sacrifice that the unbelievable national sacrifice americans have made in so many ways, after we have done all of that, to squander on some blind hope and culture war propaganda and end up in the same place a few months from now. Joining me now is Jeffrey Sachs, author of the the ages of globalization, also has been writing about this topic as well. Dr. Sachs, this sort of technical question, it seems one of those moments where looking out in the comparative world and in some ways trying to take it outside of the hot stove of American Culture war politics seems crucial. Chris, thank you so much for the clearest explanation that i have heard on television or the media since this epidemic began. We have heard nothing but nonsense for weeks and weeks from the white house, and we have 60,000 deaths. And the fact of the matter is many countries have suppressed the epidemic. China did after its initial outbreak. Taiwan. Vietnam, hong kong, japan. You have new zealand, australia, so its not purely a hypothetical, and it has nothing to do with the culture wars as you pointed out. It has to do with one simple idea, exactly what you said, which is that each infected person must be stopped from infecting more than one other person. That means several things. It means Early Detection of every case. It means early quarantining or early isolation. You ask, can you be safely at home or will you spread it to family members. If its too crowded at home, you have to go to a public quarantine, which could be a hotel room, for example. It means that in public, people wear face masks and respect the physical distancing. It means that any place that does open up is monitoring temperature, screening for symptoms. It means that we have a Public Health system that contacts each case every day, hows your temperature mrs. Smith and are there other people you know close by, your family members, your children, your parents who you think have symptoms. We need to contact them. Right. Are there people at work that we should be contacting. Whats Contact Tracing. This is straightforward. What is unbelievable in america is we have reached 60,000 deaths and not done the basics, and those countries that i mentioned, chris, have death rates that are 50th of ours or a hundredth of ours, so this is not hypothetical, our country, we have a leader who is the worst president in our history. Such an idiot, im sorry to say, but americans are dying by the tens of thousands because were not doing the basics and today, incidentally, the wall street journal ran an editorial about our zero, exactly this, but they dont even look at their own news stories, which have the asi asian successes. Lets look at how other countries are doing it. Were not so stupid in america that we cant learn from the others. You know, i thought that the Vice President s visit to the mayo clinic, hes the only person not wearing a mask in violation of rules and protocols. His response was, which was not a crazy response, basically he says, im tested for the coronavirus on a regular basis, everyone around me is tested for it. You test for it, and matt igl i iglacious, what if we do that for everyone. The Vice President , so he can live a semino normal life. What if we expanded that idea for all of us so we were in a similar boat . Chris, you know, theres been a problem with testing because our system, our centers for Disease Control failed. America is breaking down in so many ways because we dont take care of basic government functions anymore, so the testing got way behind because our Main Institution for this failed, but if you look at those other Success Story countries, korea has several private companies that immediately got successful testing going. The many other countries, even without much testing went on the symptom basis, people isolated. They went for quarantine, and they had Public Health officials that were tracing the contacts. This is so basic i cant even tell you. The first page of epidemic control is trace the contacts. When did President Trump say one word about tracing the contacts, not until now. 60,000 deaths later. This is what were facing. Its a mad house that were having this in this country when there is so much knowledge and experience of what to do, but its true also, by the way, cities across this country and governors, theyre debating the date to open, not preparing the Contact Tracing, not hauling confirmed cases, not preparing the quarantine. This is the tragedy. Were wasting our time because as you said completely correct, you can get the case load down very far. But if you just open up again because of exponential growth, everything shoots up again, so its not a matter of the date of opening, its a matter of preparing the alternative to the lock down. The alternative is whats called Public Health. You isolate cases. You quarantine, you test. You trace contacts. Can we do this in america still . Do we have any sense of learning the most basic things when our lives depend on it . Thats the real issue. Jeffrey sachs, thank you so much for sharing your expertise tonight. Well, thank you, thank you for what youre doing. Its so vital. We need to get the basics out for the public. I want to bring in now the president and ceo of the center for American Progress ni nira tanden, appointed to new jerseys Recovery Mission by governor phil murphy. The center for American Progress, the think tank you work at worked at a reopening plan, and aei, which is a right wing think tank, they did their plan. The plans are not that different. Its not like we have got some big, you know, abortion rights level culture war happening among the people that know what theyre talking about about this question. Theres actually consensus and yet that seems so far from what the political debate has been. Yeah, no, i mean absolutely, and Jeffrey Sachs talked about the consensus and its not just center for American Progress and aei, its every major university, every institution, economists have all said we need to do Contact Tracing and testing, and separation. And i think the real problem is in the country that we have a leadership people dont trust, and we have a National Leadership that hasnt been clear and obvious about what to do, and i think the original sin here was that for whatever reason we didnt do testing right, but the president cant admit to that failure. Cant admit for numerous reasons so he has moved to reopen at a time when people are just not prepared. You so eloquently said and is so clear, you risk so much by reopening when you dont have case loads down and enough, and when you dont have the infrastructure to actually even be able to contain the virus, and that is the real danger of texas, georgia and florida, their actions, which is, you know, its a gamble. That is the problem. It is a big gamble. And thats why i think everyone should be working on tracing and testing and its unfortunate that theyre not. Yeah, the testing we should just note that one of the things that countries do have in common dealing with that is they test a lot so they have low positive rates. If youre testing a lot, you want to be in a situation where youre not getting half positives or 30 positives. Right now, the u. S. Were getting 18 positive, thats way too high, countries like south korea, a numerical capacity issue that we can do. Its america. We should be able to figure it out. I mean, the most important thing actually is to be able to test everyone whos sick and really Test Community test, meaning youre testing places that you havent seen a virus, you know theres a virus, and you know the virus isnt there. The problem in the United States is that our Testing Capacity has been so low that people who are sick cant get tested, but were not testing anyone on the front lines who arent sick. And the thing that is incredible is that these states are considering mandating people come back to work and not giving them testing. I mean, that is the moral and Public Health failure because that is where you get the outbreaks. People come back to work, and then they spread it, and then youre just dealing with it at the end when we dont even have an ability to contain it. It is like completely shooting in the dark and hoping no one dies. Its scary, and no country is handling it like this. Ive gotten emails from viewers from both iowa and georgia who have said similar things which is basically, and the Iowa Governor kim reynolds made this clear yesterday, if youre scared of your health and you dont go to work because of it, youve left your job. You dont get unemployment, the way unemployment works in america, if you get laid off or fired, you can get unemployment. If you quit, you cant. You have a situation quite perverse in georgia and iowa, if you feel like my workplace isnt safe, youre out of luck, and thats not good for epidemics, thats not good for epidemiological purposes whenever you think about the moral aspect of it. I mean, the big problem with this virus is that essentially everybody, every Single Person is at risk, right, so when individuals are forced to make decisions, if a person who is not feeling well is forced to make the decision to go to work for their livelihood, any Single Person can be a super spreader. So when youre telling people that they should go to work when they feel sick or that theyre going to be at work with other people who could be sick, then you are inviting a real possibility of contagion, and you know, its really almost the opposite of what we should be doing from a Public Health perspective. Neera tanden, thank you so much. Just to make this point. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you, neera. Appreciate it. Sorry. Its the miracle of skype that i thought i was done a minute ago. Well talk to you soon. Thank you very much. New data from the cdc says we are significantly undercounting the death of coronavirus, the debunking of coronavirus truthers, next. Deb coronavirus truthers, next i got this Mountain Bike for only 11. Dealdash. Com, the fair and honest bidding site. An ipad worth 505, was sold for less than 24; a playstation 4 for less than 16; and a schultz 4k television for less than 2. I won these bluetooth headphones for 20. I got these three suitcases for less than 40. And shipping is always free. Go to dealdash. Com right now and see how much you can save. There are times when our need to connect really matters. To keep customers and employees in the know. To keep business moving. Comcast business is prepared for times like these. Powered by the nations largest gigspeed network. To help give you the speed, reliability, and security you need. Tools to manage your business from any device, anywhere. And a team of experts here for you 24 7. Weve always believed in the power of working together. Thats why, when every connection counts. You can count on us. The coronavirus truthers as we call them have taken up this line about the virus, and oh, actually, you know, i know that the obituary pages are full, and no one can buy a sympathy card but its not that deadly and dangerous as the death toll continues to climb past 60,000, 2,000 new deaths day after day. And every day brings new evidence of how absurd those very claims are. So the New York Times citing cdc data now reports that the u. S. Death toll is actually far higher than whats been reported. Now, people of course in america and everywhere, they die of all sort of things every day in this country, flu to cancer to heart attacks, homicides, driving accidents, suicide, and states and cities collect all that data, called all cause mortality. One way we can get a sense of how hard states can be hit hard by the coronavirus is just by looking at those current overall mortality totals and comparing it to the same period of time say last year. Thats exactly what the times did. And lo and be hold, they found excess deaths everywhere they looked. Some of them were positively reported coronavirus deaths and many others were not, though they were likely due to the virus. Each state they looked at has a huge spike, and crucially it is even bigger than what you would see if you took into account the reported coronavirus deaths. Look in new york city, the gray lines at the bottom are total deaths in the previous five years. The red line is this year. The overall death rate just shot up so dramatically. If you were looking at the chart and it wasnt labeled, you would say what happened in march. Heres new jersey, and michigan, and massachusetts, and illinois. They all have this huge spike, that red line in deaths, again, represented there when you compare this year to previous years, and guess what, the evidence from across the world tells the exact same story. The Financial Times using the same approach. All cause mortality, found global coronavirus deaths could be 60 higher than reported. The death rate in belgium, for instance, is 60 higher than the historical average this time offof year. In spain, 50 average higher. We are seeing this everywhere. And its an illustration of why coronavirus trutherism is not just so dangerous but also so deranged. Im joined by dr. George q. Daly, who cowrote an opinion piece in the washington post. Maybe we can start the broadest possible way, which is in terms of two months ago, how scientists were dealing with this new virus, and how deadly they thought this was, and two months later after the ravages, how did those sort of expectations and the data line up . Well, i think based on what we knew two months ago, we knew this was a highly contagious virus, and the early results out of china suggested that a shockingly large percentage of infected patients were dying. Maybe as much as 3 , maybe 6 . And now two months later, we realize that some of the hot spots, italy, new york city, and beyond, have suffered a just astounding burden of death. Now, we dont know the underlying complete percentage of individuals who have seen the virus and thats why these recent survey