The coronavirus situation continues to degrade abroad as America prepares at home, and Nancy Pelosi

blows up a bipartisan stimulus bill. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, My Savvy Fan, secure their internet. Join them at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. By the way, when I say hackers are really active, I heard from like several family members yesterday. They got hacked. So like, get your VPN now, ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. Okay. So I hope you had a wonderful and non-relaxing weekend. I hope you had a relaxing weekend, but let's be frank about it. None of this is relaxing. All of this is guaranteed to lead to anxiety. Even I, your placid host, I normally have fairly low blood pressure. Well, my wife took my blood pressure recently. Let's just say it was way above normal. And that is, I think, fairly normal for everybody at this point. We're all in this together. I mean, I've got my Churchill poster up behind me. We're in it together poster. The reality is that this is a crisis of proportions that we have not seen in my lifetime, I think in virtually anybody's lifetime, certainly since World War II. And the extent of the crisis is not yet known. And that's what makes this so difficult is that when it comes to trying to figure out exactly where the data lead us, we are short on data at this point. And so on the one hand, I'm hearing calls from some people saying, you're taking this whole thing too seriously, not that many people have died yet. And on the other hand, I'm hearing people say, you're taking this, you're taking this way too seriously. You're not taking this seriously enough. You're suggesting that we should keep an eye on the economy. And really, at this point, we should just be protecting life. Now, here's the deal. Here's where I am right at this moment. I think I am where a lot of people are right at this moment. I am perfectly willing to put everything on hold until we know what exactly the projections look like. Because we have not yet seen the curve bend down in any

Western country other than South Korea. South Korea would be the only outlier. We have a couple of

Asian countries, Singapore, Hong Kong, that presumably the curve has bent down. We cannot trust the

statistics from probably either Hong Kong or China, considering they're directed by the Chinese

Communist Party, which lied about this thing in the first place. But because we have not

seen enough statistics yet, nobody knows exactly where we stand. So right now, what we are gambling

is potential future economic loss from which we could recover against a certainty of loss of life.

And we don't know exactly how much loss of life there's going to be. My prediction is that by the

end of this week, especially looking at the European countries, not even looking at the United States, looking at Italy, looking at Spain, that by the end of this week, we're going to have a much better idea of where exactly things stand. And that's true in both terms of the economy and the guarantee damage to the economy that happens when you shut down the entire world economy, forcibly, the way we have done at the government level, and in terms of loss of life, because what we've seen in

Italy is mild optimism at this hour, because while tons of people are dying, particularly

in northern Italy from coronavirus, some 650, 700 a day, it seems like that may be evening off

and leveling out. Now, one of the things that you should be aware of when you look at the charts is that the chart that really matters is the day on day growth, not the cumulative stats. The cumulative stats don't matter very much because, again, if you're going to look at cumulative stats, they're always going to continue to grow because none of the cases ever really come off the border. Very few cases tend to come off the board because there's like a two to three week lag time before somebody actually comes off the board.

What you really want to see is whether the number of new diagnosed cases and new deaths is

leveling off day by day. Hopefully the rate of growth levels to zero. And in that point,

then you can declare that the pandemic is basically over. Although again, you may get a second wave pandemic. So we don't have that much information yet. We just don't know. And because we don't know, in the absence of information, governments are acting because what other choice do they have? If this thing goes worst-case scenario, then two million people die. And if this thing is case is best-case scenario, presumably we'll know that over the next couple of weeks.

That's why President Trump was getting all sorts of flack this morning because he was watching Steve Hilton's show on Fox pretty obviously.

And Steve Hilton, he did a monologue about the potential of an economic catastrophe and how many lives that would cost.

What kind of damage that was going to do?

And he got all sorts of flack for this because we live in this weird internet world where you are not supposed to even think about at this point the tradeoffs of government policy. Now, there's no question there are tradeoffs to government policy. Millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs right now. And that is, in fact, a tradeoff. Now, we can say that that tradeoff is certainly worth it when we don't know the extent of the possible loss of human life. We can say that right now. But to say to people, they are not even allowed to consider the tradeoffs of government policy, that as we gather information, we're not allowed to better calibrate government policy because if we save one life, then that is worth everything. That obviously is not true.

I mean, that obviously is not true throughout American policy. Forever and always, we are going to calculate the extent of public policy losses on the one side versus public policy gains on the other side. Right now, the big problem is I keep saying over and over is lack of data. And so I'm not going to be sucked into the game where I say, I know that things are going to level off. I don't know things are going to level off.

...