Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily podcast today is Monday July 20th 2020. I am John

Poghord's the editor of commentary magazine with me as always associate editor Noah Rothman

Hi Noah. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rose of high Christine. Hi John. An executive editor

Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Okay pop quiz you guys as you know we are experiencing an unprecedented surge.

The horror of the virus is upon us nationwide terrible circumstances are approaching

California governor Gavin Newsom basically threatens a complete second statewide lockdown.

He announces that he believes that most schooling in the state should be remote for the you know for the foreseeable future.

Pop quiz how many people in a state of 39 million died of the coronavirus on Sunday.

Would you guys like to know number because I told you already so it's not fair.

This is like a presidential debate you gave us the question already. Yeah the number is 14.

There have been 7,714 deaths in California 14 on Sunday.

And the LA Times puts it as follows Gavin Newsom announced statewide restrictions on July 13th

so again hauled all indoor dining and close bars movie theaters zoos and museums.

More than 25 counties including Los Angeles will be forced to close Jim's places of worship hair salons and malls and nail salons.

14 people died in the state of California on Sunday.

Anyone? Is there like a week lag though sometimes you hear about weekend lags of reporting.

Okay so let's say that it was 20 28 people who died.

So I this it's been really bothering me the way that we hear the pandemic being discussed now and we've talked a lot about possible reasons why the sort of narrative has become more alarmist recently and obviously you know in a presidential election here that makes sense.

But it what's disturbing to me is that I as just an individual American trying to make decisions about mine and my family safety.

It's difficult to know how to do that when the alarmism is very high but the number of deaths is either remaining steady or decreasing in some places and the shutdowns and lockdowns are all going back to what they were very early in this pandemic but the numbers don't seem to justify that either.

I know we're seeing a lot more cases right we're seeing more people test positive in a lot of areas and that that number going up I think probably does alarm the public like that that's concerning.

But because we're doing better with treatment and because the people who are getting sick aren't as aren't the most vulnerable populations in many cases they're recovering from it.

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