Best of The Program | Guests: Hunter Howard & Rio Giardinieri | 3/24/20

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Welcome to the podcast.

Have a great show for you today.

Some interesting things about coronavirus.

Who's handling it well?

Is Andrew Cuomo really handling this well?

Some people seem to think so.

I don't really see it, to be honest with you.

We also have two people who actually had or have coronavirus.

One is still in the hospital, and one has taken the drugs that have been showing some promise and that President Trump discussed at his press conference the the other day, do we have a possible treatment here?

We're hopeful and we talked to people who have actually experienced not only the illness but also the potential treatment.

And Phil Robertson joins us to tell us about his new show in the quarantine with Phil.

He's been quarantining himself for a very long time and he's completely not really even adjusting his life at this point.

He'll get into that as well today's program.

Also encourage you to go over to Stew DoesAmerica on your podcast app, click subscribe.

It would make me happy, probably cures coronavirus, although that's not exactly proven yet.

So, I appreciate you doing that.

We've got a new show coming up tonight looking at some of the comments from James Clyburn and how he wants to never let this crisis go to waste.

It's coming up on Stew Does America as well.

And here's the podcast:

you're listening to

the best of the blend back program.

All right, so let's get our coronavirus update.

All the numbers are from Johns Hopkins as of 5.30 a.m.

Central Time.

Total confirmed cases worldwide, 392,000.

That's up about 50,000 from yesterday.

Total confirmed deaths worldwide are up

3,000 to 17,000.

Total confirmed recovered is only up 3,000 itself.

All 195 countries on earth have confirmed cases.

The only place in the world you can go is hanging with the penguins in Antarctica.

No confirmed cases there.

5% of active cases worldwide are considered serious, requiring hospitalization.

That's steady 5%.

Yesterday, it was at 5%, but it was down in February from 19%.

I want to make a note here.

13% of the confirmed cases in America do currently require hospitalization, but that number is expected to drop toward the international average as more people are diagnosed through the testing.

The U.S.

now has 46,168 confirmed cases and 582 deaths.

We are up almost 10,000 confirmed cases and about 130 deaths in the last 24 hours.

The U.S.

has 295 officially recovered against the 582 official deaths.

So somehow or another, Joe Biden realized yesterday that it wasn't 1997 anymore and decided to get some of that high-speed internet into my recreation room.

That's a quote.

In my recreation.

He still has a rec room?

I haven't seen one of those since the Brady bunch went off the air.

Anyway, he is making his teleconferencing in his rec room on this new high-speed internet that the kids are all crazy about.

So he made, he's going to make regular broadcasts combating coronavirus.

He made yesterdays from his home in Delaware and it did not go well at all.

Do we have a little clip of that?

Here he is.

The teleprompter broke down and he did not know what to do.

I'm glad the president has finally activated the National Guard.

Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics.

We need to activate the Reserve Corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with

these crushive cases.

And

in addition to that, we have to make sure that we are in a position that we are...

Well, let me go to the second thing.

I've spoken enough of that.

The president must use the defense production act.

Wow, okay.

So that was his press conference.

Comforting.

I wish he was in charge right now.

But he says, you know, now we've got to use the military.

Well, yesterday, a thousand-strong military unit arrived at the Javits Center in New York City.

Wow, yeah, but we need the military to start building hospitals.

Well, that's exactly what they were doing, turning the Javits

Convention Center into a thousand-bed emergency hospital.

It'll be the first of four emergency hospitals in New York State.

They should be open within seven days.

Dozens of National Card droops have arrived at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan Monday morning.

President Trump approved Governor Cuomo's plans to set up the beds in the 1.3 million square foot convention center on Sunday night.

FEMA will oversee the facility as well as the staff and stock the center.

Is there no more free travel in the U.S.?

Florida's Governor DeSantis is ordering all inbound travelers arriving from New York or New Jersey into a mandatory 14-day quarantine per an executive order that he signed yesterday.

DeSantis said in an address that more than 100 such flights arrive daily into the state.

He believes each contains at least one person infected with the new coronavirus.

He said he's been in contact with federal officials about curtailing such flights, but he has not yet received a response.

He said people will be screened when they arrive and told they must self-quarantine.

He said those travelers will not be allowed to stay with family or friends because that is the one way the virus is spread.

He didn't say specifically how self-quarantine is going to be enforced.

He said it may actually, I'm quoting, be a criminal offense if you violate the quarantine order.

Florida law says it's a second-degree misdemeanor to violate a quarantine order that could result in a 60-day jail sentence.

Notice he didn't have a problem when all of the kids were on the beaches for spring break.

That was an obscene scene at the time, and all the kids were like, oh, die, we're not going to get it.

It's fine.

They're all now testing positive for it.

New video from Spain shows the hospital triage.

People are on the floor in the hallways just waiting for a bed.

Videos appear to show dozens of patients, some covered in sheets, most wearing surgical masks, laying on the floor in hospital hallways as they await for some bed to somehow or another become available.

It's one of the largest hospitals in Madrid.

Spain had 385 deaths and more than 4,500 new cases diagnosed just yesterday.

It has more than 850 infected persons for every 1 million citizens.

That's the third highest in the world after Italy and Switzerland.

But perhaps echoing Spain's rapidly out-growing outbreak,

the Big Easy now is being criticized for not shutting down Mardi Gras celebrations and parades and parties over the warnings of local and national health officials against those large gatherings, which came as early as February 8th in the U.S.

Louisiana Governor John Bell Edwards says his state now has the fastest growing cases of COVID-19 in the world.

Citing statistics from a University of Louisiana Lafayette study, Edwards said the growth rate of the state is headed for a steep steep upward trajectory similar to what Spain and Italy have experienced.

He said Louisiana has the third highest number of cases per capita in the U.S., behind New York and Washington, respectively, but the rate of growth per capita exceeds any single hotspot in the world.

You know,

if it was going to break out, I mean, you would think Vegas or New Orleans.

I mean, there's something in the water down in New Orleans.

Edwards announced a stay-at-home ban for his state that will come into effect on Monday at 5 p.m., excluding citizens leaving home for essential services.

There's no word on whether the state's 1,200 drive-through margarita stands are exempt from the order, but I think anything that limits alcohol at this time is not a good thing.

Nobel Prize winner, doom and gloom forecasts are likely overdone.

This one comes from Dr.

Michael Levitt, who is credited for correctly calling early that China would get the worst of its devastating outbreak long before many other health experts predicted they would.

On January 31st, China had 46 new deaths compared with 42 the day before, which Levitt recognized as a slowing of the rate of growth.

This suggests the rate of increase in the number of deaths will slow down even more over the next week.

Levitt won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

You know, they give those away like candy now.

And he ultimately nailed the call.

Listen to this.

I mean, you want a prediction that comes right

in mid-February.

He said there would be a mid-February peak with a total tally of

80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths.

As of March 16th, China had counted a total of 80,298 deaths, so close without going over.

And he said there would be 3,250.

There are 3,245 deaths.

The 80,000.

The country of almost 1.4 billion.

Yeah, 80,000 was the total cases, right?

You said deaths.

It was 80,000 cases.

Total cases.

No,

sorry.

80,000 cases.

He said there would be 80,000.

They had 80,298.

And he said there'd be 3,250 on deaths.

There's 3,245.

I mean, that guy, can we talk to him?

I mean, I would like to

talk to him.

And he's optimistic, too, which is pretty rare these days from the experts.

Yeah, and maybe this is a guy we should listen to.

Maybe this is just a guy that we should listen to.

Now, we said we would never go for it here in America, but we are.

What was the thing you thought was just so disturbing that they did stew in China?

Well, they were.

Besides welding people in.

Yeah, welding people into apartments came to mind right away.

There was something they were doing that we all said we'd never put up with it.

The massive surveillance state that they constructed around pretty much everyone there to the point where they were I mean, they were going, they were giving reporters QR codes to have to scan to every building they were going into so that they could be tracked.

They were being tracked by drones.

They were being

surveilled in every part of their internet access.

Not to mention the million people or so they threw in a camp, which is a totally unrelated incident, but also problematic.

So the Chula Vista Police Department in California

recently doubled its fleet of drones, purchasing two of the machines from a Chinese company called DJI.

The police department told the Financial Times that they would be outfitted with night vision cameras.

We have not traditionally mounted speakers to our drones, but if we need to cover a large area to get an announcement out, and if there's a crowd somewhere that we need to disperse, we could do it without getting police officers involved.

The outbreak has changed.

My view of expanding the program.

I think we need to expand it as rapidly as I can, said the captain.

U.S.

officials have warned about the threat of Chinese-made drones, that they could pose a threat to the United States.

The company that the police department is purchasing from, DJI, is the world's largest player in the civilian drone industry.

But DJI is based in Canada.

Spencer Gore, the chief executive of the U.S.-based drone company, Impossible Aerospace, said, He is working like crazy to help equip other law enforcement agencies with drones.

We just can't keep up with the orders from law enforcement agencies and health departments.

So how do we feel about that one?

How are we feeling about drones and our police department using drones?

Sub-optimal would be the first thing that came to mind.

Not the optimal, sub-that optimal.

That is, I mean, I guess like you could make the argument in a case of, you know, where everyone's supposed to stay away from each other to break up a crowd.

If it floats over with a speaker, it's maybe not that bad.

I mean, I know they've done that in crowd breakup situations before, but it sends a pretty creepy message.

And

not in love with it.

Yeah, yeah.

Remember, Stu, we were at CNN,

and we said that there were drones being used on the southern border or the northern border.

I can't remember which one it was.

I think it was on the northern border.

And they were being used for drug trade up on the northern border.

And people went ballistic.

They went crazy.

And it was on the border looking for drug people.

We don't do that.

We don't do that.

We don't use drones.

I remember just shaking my head thinking, oh, we will.

And soon you won't have a problem with it.

And here we are.

Here we are.

This is going to change everything.

Tomorrow night, we're going to show you the things that are hidden from you, the plans that are being made, made, the plans that are being drawn, and the things, for instance,

they are trying to pass in

this new stimulus bill.

It's terrifying, and the power is never coming back to you.

We have to stay vigilant if we are to keep America and keep the country that we all know and love.

That's tomorrow night at 9 p.m.

Eastern Time.

You don't want to miss it.

It's our Wednesday night special.

It's a special on the government being more dangerous than the virus.

And I think every American needs to watch it.

It's live tomorrow night, 9 p.m.

Eastern on Blazetv.com.

Use the promo code Glenn, Blazetv.com, promo code Glenn, and you will save 10%.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

This is the Glenbeck program.

Welcome to the one and only Mr.

Pat Gray from Pat Gray Unleashed.

Pat, I don't know if you've seen the very, very

the very, very

talented and riveting Joe Biden in his latest

video from home, but I'd like to play it here.

Here's Joe Biden

in his little podcast room in his home.

I'm glad the president has finally activated the National Guard.

Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics.

We need to activate the Reserve Corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with

these crushive cases.

And

in addition to that, we have to make sure that we are in a position that we are.

Well, let me go to the second thing.

Okay, yeah, go to the second thing.

The president must use the Spoke Production Act.

I mean, he is out of it.

So bad.

He's out of it.

I mean, why would you let him do this live?

Just claim it's live.

Just tape it.

Tape it 50 times until you get one okay and then air it.

Does he not have one single advisor with with common sense?

Seriously.

That's so bad.

He's just negligent.

Something happens with the prompter, and he just cannot continue.

And he's like,

Time for medicine, mommy.

I don't.

I tend to think that the advisors that he has around him are absolutely smart enough to be telling him, this has got to be recorded.

Let's do it recorded.

And I think he's fighting it off.

No, no, come on now.

I've been doing this for 30 years.

It must be recorded.

I think that's what it is.

It's got to be because it's too common.

You know,

like we saw the advisor with him walking through the crowd when he was getting that argument.

She obviously was like, You got to get out of this.

This is a terrible moment.

Everyone's seeing this on camera.

And Joe's like, shh, like he's right.

He thinks he still has it and he's trying to hold on to it.

And all of his advisors, I think, probably know, but they can't stop him.

Yeah.

It's ugly.

That could be true.

So wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

what do you think that maybe his advisor is andrew cuomo

just saying

andrew cuomo why i've i'm convinced that andrew cuomo is wants to be the president

have i got the right cuomo right yes not the tv cuomo sorry not fredo

the governor of new i'm talking about the governor i think he i think that's everybody's gonna say look he's completely out of control and Cuomo's going to come through this because he's already wearing the tight-fitting, you know, governor t-shirt.

Like,

I'm in the war room right now.

Look at me.

I'm doing all these things.

I was just out building some houses for the homeless and decided to come in here and do this, too.

I mean, he's, I think he's horrible, but he's better than Joe Biden.

And I keep thinking this is the guy who's going to come in at the end.

That's an interesting one because I think objectively, the only reason people think Cuomo is doing a good job is because he's doing a better job than de Blasio, who's a complete disaster.

But I mean, this is there.

He's in the middle of overseeing the biggest disaster of this entire crisis.

Yeah.

And he was the one saying, we're not going to shut it down.

That's crazy.

That's not going to happen.

And two days later, shut it down.

I don't see why anyone thinks he's doing a competent job here.

Yeah, he told me.

Because

he can blame the president.

Although he's not doing that.

No, he's speaking.

He's actually praising the president, which is, I don't know.

The whole thing's really weird.

Because he made a big deal out of the fact that he was talking to his business buddy.

And his business buddy was all freaked out that the rumor was he was going to shut down New York.

Oh, no, we're not going to do that.

Like you said.

And then they did it.

Wait.

You just bragged about the fact you're not going to do it.

Now you've done it.

And your numbers have increased in about a week and a half from around a thousand to twenty-three thousand.

So about half the cases in the country.

Yeah.

It's bad.

It's really bad.

It's bad.

You know, let me ask you this.

Have you guys seen?

Go to

shoot, where was that?

Here it is.

Go to the website.

Do you have your

iPad with you or anything?

I don't pat.

Go to covidactnow.org.

CovidactNow.org.

This is why your state must act now.

And it's giving you a prediction, or not a prediction, it's a model, a predictive model, to see the projections for your state on when your healthcare

system is going to be overwhelmed.

And if you go to New York, let me just go to New York, you click on that, you will see that with limited action, hospitals are expected to peak at about April 12th.

And we are just barely there.

I mean, it's almost a straight line up from April 1st until the 12th, just overwhelming the hospital.

But they have,

are they doing social distancing and they just closed everybody in, right?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, they want you full shutdown basically, yeah.

Right.

So they peak at around April 20th.

Now, here's the interesting part.

Go to Texas.

If you go to Texas where we're at, and really nothing seems to be happening here,

you are peaking two weeks later, April 28th.

But if you look down at the number of dead with no action in just Texas, they say estimated deaths 583,000.

Three months of social distancing, 430,000.

Three months of shelter in place, 5,000.

Yeah.

Now, where are they getting these numbers?

Three months of social distancing to 430,000.

Where else are we seeing that kind of death?

Yeah, and you know, where?

Because you could say.

We're early on in this process.

Obviously, we've seen places like Italy that have blown up, but not like this.

You've seen, but like, not like that.

You see, like, for example, you could project New York turning into a real mega disaster right now, although those numbers seem completely ridiculous to me.

But the other thing is, we've seen Washington

have a real, the early big blow-up and then not turn into a mega disaster, right?

It seems to have recovered a little bit.

Now, it was sort of cordoned off in that one nursing home at the beginning, so maybe that was, that's the way out of it.

But this is what I find so interesting about this, and why the only reason I have any hope that this could potentially have some sort of

logical resolution is that it's unlike a global warming where they say, if we don't act now, everything's going to go terrible.

And every year that goes by where it's not terrible, they just say it's more years down the road.

It's 10 years from now.

It's always 10 years from now.

This is like two weeks, three weeks.

Yeah.

So, like, we'll know really soon.

Yeah, we can.

Well, you should know.

What's the date today?

The date today is March 24th.

March 24th.

Okay, so in three days in New York, if they took no action.

In three days, the hospitals should be overloaded.

In three months of social distancing, the hospitals should be overloaded by April 3rd.

So, you know, they didn't do the three months of shelter in place.

So it's got to be by April 7th, which is what, next Tuesday, Wednesday?

And if that growth is as extreme as they say, over the next few weeks, we're going to have multiple examples of completely out-of-control situations.

If we don't have that,

then

we have to realize that somewhere in their projections, it's just not right.

And that is going to, I think, change the way that we handle this.

Yeah, we have 786 people in Texas with the virus right now.

786.

Look at this.

No action in the state of New York.

This is New York City where everyone's living on top of each other.

No action.

Estimated death, 392,000.

Three months of social distancing, 292.

Now go back to Texas.

Let's look at Texas.

Three months of social distancing is 430,000 deaths.

No action, 583.

That's not possible.

That's just not possible.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

And the CDC's estimates of doing nothing.

The high-end number they came up with was 2.2 million dead.

So this is way more than this.

We're talking about two states.

We're already at a million, right?

I mean, if you added up all these states, it would be much, much higher than what the CDC believed was possible.

And I believe the London university that has been giving out a lot of the scarier sort of models, you know, I don't know.

It doesn't seem, I don't know.

Pat, do you feel that?

Not at all.

I go back and forth on this a lot,

admittedly.

But like, it's, I know, I never get to to this situation,

but you listen to some of these experts and they're like so confident.

And you could tell the difference between an Al Gore and these guys.

These guys are saying, like, look, in two weeks, we're going to wish we completely shut off society.

Like, Al Gore is like, in 40 years, there's like, how can you can't even judge those things?

Well, I'll be cannibal

in 38 years.

And then 38 years pass.

Well, that's because of some of the actions I took.

It's going to be another six years.

And they just keep pushing it back.

Exactly.

But this is like, you can't do it.

It's too immediate.

We're going to be able to, you know, Gavin Newsom said in eight weeks, 26 million people just in California are going to have this.

There's no way that's going to happen.

If that happens, we're going to be happy to shut down society, right?

Yes.

You're not going to have an argument for this.

This is why I think the president said yesterday, it's not going to be months.

It's not going to be months.

I don't think he bought these projections from the beginning.

I really don't.

I don't either.

I think, but he was surrounded by a bunch of people who are experts.

You know, he's just thinking he's the doctor himself.

No, nope.

I don't think he bought into this at all.

And, but all of the experts said, Mr.

President, and now he's seeing, well, wait a minute.

He's seeing numbers like this and going, well, hang on just a sec.

Where else are we seeing this?

I mean, Mexico.

What's happening to Mexico?

Mexico, they're still,

they're practically having a lick your face marathon in Mexico right now.

Oh, yeah.

And it's not overrunning in Mexico.

Now, it may come yet.

But I think this is why the president said yesterday, it's not going to be months.

He's betting on his gut.

It's not going to be months, but we'll reevaluate.

Maybe it is.

And he's looking to next week.

And if these numbers in New York and California aren't starting to pile up as they were predicted, I think he's going to start taking the economy and opening it up because I have news for you.

As a guy who's in the target range, Pat, you're in the target range.

You know,

in Italy, they're saying, if you're 60, don't even bother coming into the hospital.

We can't save you.

We're too overrun.

Well, I got news for you.

If it is my children have an America left,

And I have to go in and work with a bunch of 60-year-olds just to keep this economy going and we're working while they're sheltered in place.

I'll do it.

I mean, I'd rather die than have the nation die for my children.

Absolutely.

And I think the one unacceptable variable in all of this to Americans is if Netflix slows down their streaming speeds.

If that happens, all bets are off.

They're already saying it.

All bets are off.

They're already saying it.

Wait, wait, don't panic.

Let's watch those numbers when we see those speeds start to come down.

Then we'll arrive.

These projections are already saved.

They're going to go to standard definition.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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And if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

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Thanks.

Hunter Howard tested positive for coronavirus.

He's a 50-year-old man.

He's a guy who lives in Dallas.

He came home from Aspen early in the month and he got a low-grade fever, turned into a dry cough, led to headaches, all of the signs, and he was diagnosed with coronavirus.

We go to Hunter now.

Hi, Hunter.

How are you?

I'm doing great, Glenn.

I'm feeling much better.

Thank you very much.

I'm glad to hear it.

So you're a relatively healthy guy.

You were out skiing and you don't have any real underlying health problems, right?

That's exactly right.

I didn't have any pulmonary issues.

I don't have any immune suppression issues.

So I had about five days of,

it was a very, very bad flu, but it was, you know, it kept me down.

And if I didn't know what the symptoms were to be looking for them to understand kind of what the striction to my lungs and the difficulty breathing, you know, I would have thought it was the flu, but you know, because of the timing of it, I realized with the difficulty breathing that there was something a lot different going on.

Really the scariest part was the unknown, though.

The unknown of how much worse it might get.

At the end of the day, it wasn't that bad.

But as my breathing got worse, as the doctor said, stay away from the hospital unless you need ICU breathing support, then we'll help you.

And so then just

trying to think through, okay,

when is that mark going to happen?

When are going to need some more support from here, from an ICU ventilator.

And

did they give you any indication on...

Yeah, here's when you need that breathing apparatus or did they just trust that you would know?

I don't think they knew, to be honest with you.

You know, I think that they just knew that they didn't have the ventilators or the beds to kind of support people coming in, and that I was really, you know, supposed to know on when I needed that.

And so really zero guidelines to what that point might be.

And so at one point, I woke up and I was just, I heard my lungs working.

Like it was like a pip, my lungs were paper bags just crackling and bubbling as they were just, you know,

there's a lot of effort to breathe.

But

then I, frankly, for me, I was told by the doctors, take 1,600 milligrams of Tylenol,

not ibuprofen.

And I just had 2,000 around, so I took that and it cut the fever.

And I've been really doing better every day since then.

So that was about, that was last Saturday.

And it's been kind of uphill or downhill.

How long did you have it?

First, take me through the, what's the first sign?

And when did you go, holy crap, I might have coronavirus?

You know, it was about three or four days.

I'm not sure exactly when I caught in aspen, but I think it was a breathing ground in Aspen that weekend, unfortunately.

And so it was about three or four days before I started to get the low-grade fever and the headaches.

And then that was, then day five was kind of really intensified.

The fever got really bad.

The

fever got bad.

The body aches got really bad.

And I knew something else was going on.

That's when I got really the restricted breathing.

There's like a strap around my chest that was just making it difficult to breathe.

And so that was about three or four days of the intense

difficulties.

And then the fever cut.

And so, I feel very lucky, though.

Everything's on reading.

I'm in the healthcare world, and so I have a telemedicine company.

And so, I had access to physicians and people to help me out to help.

But even then, they didn't know either.

We're learning day by day on this.

So, you're a telemedicine guy.

Exactly.

And so, we've been providing a lot of support to people to understand this.

Yeah, this is, I don't think most people understand.

You know, I've been saying recently, to talk about redesigning the entire healthcare system now is like saying we've got to redesign the entire horse and buggy industry in 1920.

It's over.

And just telemedicine and the way things are going to change, it's going to relieve so much.

And this is really the time where telemedicine can really show off and you could accelerate that quickly because it's so good.

You're exactly right about that.

There's a couple of pain points that we saw a couple of years ago about just getting access to the right type of specialist.

Eighty eight percent of the country is medically underserved for basic care, let alone access to specialists.

So that's what we've been focusing on.

And then I'd like to give a lot of credit to CMS and the administration right now.

They have lowered a lot of the restrictions on telemedicine over the past couple of weeks where they had very strict guidelines on state by state regulations, state licenses, certain things you can and can't do.

And they said in the short short term, we're going to drop all of those and we're going to allow people to get access to the care that they need

during this process.

And we're not going to worry about regulations that might have been burdensome.

So, you know, a lot of credit goes to the administration, CMS, and

really kind of our

federal people who are kind of just dropping those to make sure people are getting the care that they need.

It's been amazing how quickly they're moving.

We're talking to Hunter Howard.

He's a Dallas resident with confirmed COVID-19.

So when you were diagnosed, did you go to the hospital or how did they diagnose you?

Yeah, so I was lucky to understand how the system works a little bit.

And when I started learning about my symptoms, there was nothing set up in town.

In fact, Dallas at that point only had 42 testing units per day to give out.

And they told me, we're only going to give you one of these testing units if you are needing ventilator support in an ICU right now.

That was on Thursday or Friday.

And then over the weekend, Baylor Scott and Wine had set set up a

the hospital system had set up a mobile unit in Dallas.

And so by then they had more testing units that were coming into town.

So I was able to get access to those units and get referred.

So I was referred by my physician into that system.

It was really about 20 minutes.

And just, you know, there are four nurses out there.

I want to give my absolute hats off to our first line of the nurses and healthcare responders who are putting themselves in harm's way.

So they were just so kind

and just really, it was about 15, 20 minutes to go through there.

It was

about a three inch long swab that they kind of stuck into my nasal cavity, which I felt like they were trying to swap the thing, to be honest with you.

But it was.

It was what needed to be done.

And I found out a day later by my doctor, and then I got a call by Dallas County Health and a caseworker assigned to me.

And it was really amazing how quickly our community stepped up to be organized around this.

So if you had to do it all over again,

what should we fix?

What was lacking?

Yeah, well, the most important thing that's lacking right now is just kind of access to the beds, the ventilators, the masks, and things like that.

So I was on a call last night with Dallas business leaders, and what we're talking about is moving from a population mitigation strategy to a case-based

intervention strategy.

And what I mean by that is

in in the short term, as we're learning about this incredible curve of how many people are getting sick so rapidly and

how contagious this is, we're having to employ population mitigation strategies that are really very severe, but that's a necessary strategy just to control the community

transmissions.

But what we're trying to do, we're talking about, okay, is instead of it being everything being guided by the healthcare leaders who are just looking at

the number of cases that are being

transmitted and just looking at those numbers.

What can we do in Dallas to make sure that we're caring for every man, woman, and child?

And so that's really kind of the shift from once you get a control of the transmissions in the community.

And instead of only having a population mitigation strategy, what do we have to do to build more hospital beds?

What do we have to do to get more ventilators in town?

What do we have to do to get more tests in town?

And so we have a pretty amazing group of kind of business leaders in Dallas coming together saying, what does the city need to support that?

What do we need to do

to help you?

Do you need locations?

Do you need beds?

Do you need rooms?

Do we need to convert some more businesses to converting ventilators?

And so we're working with the city of Dallas and the state of Texas and figuring out how can we support the community so that we can start moving from transition of long-distance population mitigation.

strategies to shifting into a case-based intervention once we know that we've got a control

that we can put every single person that gets sick in a bed, in a ventilator that's needed, things like that.

And that's some of the conversations that the business leaders in Dallas are hoping we can kind of move towards a combination of the population mitigation.

And we've got this.

Dallas has got this.

They've got our support from the business leaders, and we're going to give them whatever they need to make sure that we can control this

medically.

So, Hunter,

were you a believer in this

was as bad as they say it was when you went up to Vail?

No, I'll be honest with you.

I'm going for a friend's 50th birthday, and at that point, there's a little bit of information that was coming out about it, but it was still, you know, really mostly was happening over in Italy and China at that point.

And I, you know, had it, and I

had a kit, a mask that had an LED lighting on it.

I have a

video with my friends of me in the air and the airplane with a LED-lit

mask, and we're kind of making a joke out of it at that point.

And we knew it was serious.

We knew they would have to go to the places.

But it couldn't.

Not you.

Well, I had the case, I had the mask, but it was,

we didn't realize how serious it was going to get this quickly.

We did not realize that.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

That you didn't think it would happen to you.

Exactly.

Are you convinced that

we are going to see these astronomical numbers that the CDC is talking about now?

So that really comes into the population mitigation strategies.

And in certain cities, it's out there.

And we're working on two-week trailing indicators with the testing.

And so

what we're seeing today with the numbers are what happened probably about 10 days ago.

So the numbers are going up.

And more importantly right now is

what are the,

how is the chloroquine working?

So I have friends in the New York City healthcare system.

And from what I am hearing anecdotally,

it is working miraculously well.

So we have a guy coming on in 10 minutes and he says, I mean, he said goodbye to his family, everything.

The doctors gave him the hydrochloroquine.

And he said two days later, he's fully back.

And he credits that.

But the press and everyone, no one is willing to say that this is even a possibility at this point.

And I don't understand why.

This is an old drug.

You know, as long as it's under supervision

and, you know, we're doing it in the right way with doctor supervision.

I don't understand why more people in the press aren't excited about the possibility of this drug.

Glenn, I'm hearing from the healthcare workers in New York City,

you know, from the ER that it's working.

It's absolutely working right now.

And so it's still a little bit

anecdotal versus evidence-based.

We don't have a lot of the data around it, but

it's working, is what I'm hearing from frontline health care providers that are in the

making that stuff day and night.

We should be making that stuff day and night.

All right.

Thank you so much, Hunter.

I'm glad that you're feeling better, and thanks for your service to the community.

I appreciate it.