Democrats blame President Trump for a pandemic that hasn't happened yet.

Biden aims for a South Carolina comeback, and Bernie's record just keeps getting worse.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Stand up for your digital rights.

Take action at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. Well, coronavirus is on the tip of everybody's tongue. I don't mean literally because then a lot of us would be dead. But coronavirus is obviously in the news, and it should be in the news. It's very scary stuff. The reason it's very scary stuff is because no one knows anything. And so when you hear folks in the media talking as though they know something, as though either they know that this is not going to become a major issue, or they know that it is going to become a major issue, understand no one knows anything at this point. And one of the reasons nobody knows anything at this point is because China has been actively quashing the information coming out of China about the extent of the coronavirus. How many people have been infected,

how transmissible it is, how deadly it is. There are two rates that you really want to know about

when you're talking about a virus. The first rate is the transmissibility, right? How high is the

transmissible via bodily fluids like Ebola, for example, or is it transmissible via air?

If it is transmissible via air,

how hard is it to acquire the virus? This virus appears to have a very high rate of transmission,

meaning it appears to be very easily transmissible. This is why you saw that situation with the cruise ship, the South Korean cruise ship, or the Japanese cruise ship, in which the cruise ship,

the Diamond Princess ship, was quarantined for like two weeks and suddenly

everybody on board had this virus. It is very easily transmissible. The problem is we don't actually

know the death rates because we don't actually have good statistics from China as to how many people

have acquired this virus and how many people have died from this virus. So latest statistics

suggest about 80,000 people in China have acquired the virus,

and about 3,000 people in China have died from the virus. That is a significant death rate.

That's a very high death rate compared to, for example, the flu. So the flu has a death rate,

a mortality rate of about 0.1%, maybe a little bit less than 0.1%. This virus has a death rate, at least according to the Chinese model, that is well in excess of 2%. It may be approaching as high as 3%. Now, we don't have full information as to which sectors of the population that's most affects. Is it affecting young healthy people? Is it affecting older people? I'm going to give you the information that we have to start because I think that we ought to start with the information that we do have before we start all the speculation. Because everyone in terms of politics and the economy is politicizing this thing. You have people on the Democratic side of the aisle who are already claiming that President Trump is responsible for the spread of coronavirus, despite the fact that we are still in double digits as far as the number of Americans we know who have acquired coronavirus. And then you have President Trump out there suggesting that this thing is all a media creation, that there's no reason to worry about coronavirus at all. You've got the stock market, which has plummeted 10% since it's open on Monday. The stock market closed to an all-time high on Friday, it close to 29,000, and it is all the way down at about 26,000 as of this morning.

So that obviously is driven by lack of information rather than plethora of information.

If there were more information, we'd know whether this thing is a buy market or a sell market.

If we knew that this thing were going to cool off and that it was going to die out, people would

...