Lets start off with a topic we talked about earlier in the program. Wrote, why its mostly safe to reopen the schools. Younger children urgently need to get back to their classroom and the evidence from europe shows no wider harms. As you see the schools opening across the country, has your opinion changed on that and what were you trying to get at in your opinion piece . I would say the reopening experience we had thus far confirms and is consistent with the evidence weve had around the world and that evidence is overwhelming when it comes to children under the age of 12. For reasons we dont fully understand, younger children dont appear to not only are they actually themselves at very serious illness or death from covid19 but they also appear to not transmit the virus to adults and this is counterintuitive for a lot of people. Most of us have been parents are used to our kids picking up whatever bug is going around at school and bring it back to us. The idea that coronavirus doesnt work that way is counterintuitive to a lot of people. Whenever schools reopened particularly for those younger childrendid not see transmitting the virus to adults or to their parents. Have a strong case in that instance of reopening schools, but it may be that one of the reasons why europe has had success over the summer is because the schools reopened. When they reopened schools in thatpring, it may be actually reopening schools served as a brake on the spread of covid19 because the kids for reasons we dont fully understand may have developed some sort of lowlevel immunity to the virus and thereby limited the transmission to others. Host tell us about your think tank. Tank are a nonprofit think and we focus on expanding Economic Opportunity to those who leased have it. Economyhe 21st century work for everyone. Host in terms of covid19, you talked about research from europe. How difficult has it been for your organization to keep abreast of the latest Scientific Research, the studies coming out during the pandemic since it broke earlier this year . In a certain way we are living through a renaissance or an explosion of Scientific Research in realtime. My father was a molecular oil just. The traditional way of doing Academic Research is you do a study, you come up with something and then the journal spends six month reviewing it and finally a year later your research is out there. We are something completely different happening now due to the necessity and emergency that we are in. Journalsernetbased were people will put preliminary findings online before theyve gone true that through that traditional process of academic peer review. Research isnt as rigorously vetted, the fact that its coming out in realtime means people are able to learn from each other very quickly and our knowledge and understanding of the virus has improved over the last month. Host our guest is avik roy. For supporters of joe biden and republicans. , undecided and all others. New trump pandemic advisor pushes controversial herd immunity strategy, worry Public Health officials at a picture of dr. Atlas, an advisor from the hoover institution. Tell us about the concept of heard immunity and you agree do you agree with dr. Atlas in this case . Theres two things to mention. What is heard immunity and what are dr. Atlass actual reviews. Or population immunity is basically the principle that at a certain point if the Broad Community or population in a particular country or region develops immunity to a virus or any other infectious agent that basically even if not everybody has 70 nity, lets say 50 or or 30 , if a certain percentage of people in that population have developed immunity to the virus that the virus has difficulty gaining any traction. It cant spread with the exponential speed that it does in a naive population because a lot of people are immune. To a forestight be fire. Forest fires happen when theres a lot of dry kindling wood in a forest. If the trees are healthy and they have been well fed and they are somewhat wet because they have water content, its a lot harder for those trees to burn down. Similarly, the idea of heard immunity is at a certain point if the population is immune to the virus are enough of it is, the virus cant take off. There are two ways to achieve heard immunity. One is through a lot of people getting infected with the dangerous version of the virus. Another version is when you have a vaccine. World, you have a vaccine, most people get the vaccine and it cant develop any traction. You can have a combination of both as we hope to do in this situation. Host are there cases where we have used the heard immunity to conquer viruses . A heard immunity is not strategy per se. Its basically a what are your alternatives. If you take the example of influenza a hundred years ago, the great pandemic of 1918, we didnt have vaccines back then. The technology of vaccines was just starting to get underway. So there was no alternative. You could shut down society and they did at times particularly in cities like philadelphia that had really bad out rakes of influenza. We effectively had heard immunity regardless. Sweden isappened in sweden had a deliberate strategy where they said we will than that large gatherings, maybe really enclosed spaces like bars that get very crowded, but we will keep schools open and we will otherwise have a relatively light touch. Their argument has been because a vaccine is not forthcoming in the timeframe that we are Health Damage the from lockdowns can be pretty we keep ourf havemy mostly open, we may some deaths from covid19 but we will emerge from lockdown faster. The argument of the swedes is ,hat if you lockdown and weight you have the damage that comes from lockdown but you havent developed any immunity to the virus and then when you reopen, the virus has basically the same impact that it had before. Thats the theory. Host let me get your response to an argument. We are talking about 200 million plus americans getting this and a fatality rate of 1 , thats 2 million americans who will die in the effort to get hurt immunity. Those are preventative preventable deaths of our loved ones that we cant let happen on our watch. There are a lot of ifs in that sentence that you just recounted. We dont know the percentage of people that need to be infected in order to achieve heard immunity. Some people looking at the influenza model assume its about 70 . Others look at the data emerging and say its more like 20 . We dont know the answer and everyone who is expressing a percentage is guessing. We are all guessing. Percentagee that the is much higher to achieve heard immunity, thats a problem. It is whatce of percentage of people who are infected are actually at risk of serious illness or death. Not thecase 1 is correct number. Early on we were seeing a much higher whats called the infection fatality ratio. Partly its because most of the infections and deaths were happening in Nursing Homes. Debts in the United States from covid19 have been occurring among vulnerable seniors who live in Nursing Homes and other assistedliving facilities. 0. 6 of americans live in those facilities, so almost half the deaths in the u. S. Are occurring in 0. 6 of the population. You think every day the headline in the newspaper would be what are we doing to protect vulnerable seniors in Nursing Homes and yet we are keeping schools close. There are 57 million kids in america aged one to 15 and only 36 have died of covid19. Understand where the risk is and where the fatality ratios are. Here is to really work harder to protect high risk individuals, highrisk communities like seniors in Nursing Homes, but also understand that for children, the infection tally ratio is extremely low. Its like one in 2 million. We have the opportunity in those instances to reopen society and the open schools. Host we have calls waiting period we will start with hawaii. We have our own issues in hawaii. Hopefully you wont cut me off. Im going to throw a few names at the doctor. I noticed you are an md. Michael leavitt, who is not a physician but as a biophysicist, and his concepts on the statistics more importantly what im curious about is a lady who is a professor at ucsf named Monica Gandhi who is with a lot showta that people are actually getting immunity by wear a masks, tcells, not antibodies. Protocols, testing you are talking about letting kids stay in school, that is fine, and protecting the elderly. But there are elderly teachers into substitutes in the schools and if masks are not well enforced, we have the danger of transmission. There are studies both ways. It shows for adults above 25 and above, the chance today of the probability of death from covid19 relative to influenza, covid19, you are three times more likely to die from that. For children, the probabilities go the other direction. If you are a young child, Something Like eight times less likely to die of covid19 than the flu. Were more likely to die from influenza, yet we do not shut down schools for influenza pandemics. Covid19 is a serious disease. Death is not the only problem. We do have pretty good statistics on death that we could compare to influenza versus covid19. A lot of people ask this question because they are trying to understand. Of people are saying it seems dangerous but how dangerous is it things to what we cant encounter every day. With on what we see today the transmission of covid in the many,about three times as what it is for the flu for older individuals or middleaged individuals. For children, it is much lower. For those of you who are. Iden and harris supporters, florida. Pines, nelson, go ahead. Caller it is refreshing to hear someone who actually knows what hes talking about. Regarding this pandemic. Of covid inen a lot my own family. I am 71 years old my wife and i contracted it but neither one of us got sick. Brotherinlaw contracted it and they were both hospitalized but they survived. , my father, who was 94, contracted it and he passed away from it. We have experienced all of the various, different aspects of the effects of covid19. Right now, i was tested a couple weeks ago for the antibody. And according to the results, my wife and i have the antibodies. We have 0 of getting the covid again. And therefore, we can not give the covid to anyone else. But the question is, how long with a antibody last . Another aspect of this to shut down the what have you another important aspect of this is my son lost his job as a result of the shutdown. Despite all the various inconsistencies in the shutdown, that covid has continued to spread up until a certain point, which seems to be a result of herd immunity taking place, which now seems to be putting a damper on the spread of covid more than anything else. Host let me get you to respond to his statement. He said if you have the antibody, you have 0 of getting it again. Is that true . Guest let me express my condolences for the loss of your father. I am glad your sister and brother are doing better. We do not know how long immunity will last, if you have it because you have been infected, or even from the vaccine. There are now reports in scientific literature of cases of reinfection. There was one out of hong kong. I think there was one from the United States. And there are other anecdotal reports of reinfection. Part of the reason you are seeing reinfection, it is not about whether the antibody stay in your system, our experience with other coronavirus is, our best guess is immunity may last around six months, plus or minus. But one wildcard is the coronavirus tends to mutate a lot. We have already seen many different strains of the Novel Coronavirus spread throughout the world. Some are more dangerous and they kill more people. Some are more mild. And that could be part of why we are seeing different statistics in different countries, because they have seen different strains of the virus come through the populations. So there are many Unanswered Questions on how long immunity lasts, but we can hope it will last about six months. And most importantly, we hope that if there are mutated versions, that they will be less dangerous. That is our hope, but we do not know for sure. One thing we have talked about in our think tank is many people appear to be putting all their eggs in the basket of the vaccine, saying, lets lock down the economy until the vaccine comes. Its just around the corner. And we are hoping they will get a vaccine sooner rather than later. But we cannot be certain a vaccine will come back quickly. Never in our history have we developed a vaccine in a timeframe shorter than five years for a novel virus that we have never encountered before. Science has gotten better, so it is possible we could break that record, but we cannot be certain of that. We need to have a plan b, just in case they do not give as much immunity as we hope. Host so the white house is saying states should be prepared for vaccine disruption, why . Guest it is important to be prepared because if we are successful at developing a vaccine, what will be important at that point is to get the vaccine to the population, which requires an incredible amount of logistics. You have to scale manufacturing, get the vaccine to every part of the country, and you have to have people to administer the vaccine. The administration is trying to be as prepared as possible with the hope that a vaccine get through and be successful, up through the clinical trials. One other question that was mentioned is whether or not lockdowns are achieving their stated effect, to limit mortality. The evidence is not as clear as conventional wisdom would suggest. New york did a lot, they had a Strict Lockdown, yet they have had the most deaths per capita of any state in the country. California and texas, compare those states, similar when you look at the charts in terms of the caseload, deaths, but california had a Strict Lockdown and texas did not. There were predictions of when texas and florida would reopen their economies. Yes, they saw a latesummer increase in cases and deaths. But so to california, which did not take the same path as texas and california there have been overly simplistic commentary about how lockdowns work. And there is reason to believe that the lockdowns overshot the target, meaning a moderate lockdown, where again you keep the bars closed, limit large gatherings like sporting events and conventions, but you allow businesses to operate and function. You allow the schools to reopen. That could be the sweet spot, especially if people are doing social distancing and wearing masks, that we can restrain the transmission of the virus and enough that without overly disrupting or army the economy, and the kids and Public Health, not related to covid. So checkups and things like that. Host we are getting back to calls. Sue in massachusetts. Caller good morning. Host make sure that you mute your volume so you will not get feedback, ok . You are on the air. Caller alright. 180,000 deaths have occurred already. Its not a nothing deal. And nobody knows what is going on. Im 66. I have been isolated, because i am disabled. I am fine. Im negative. But this immunity thing that this guy is talking about give me a break. Wait until we are all annihilated before somebody know something. But putting kids at risk is insane. So, you know, i am an independent. I am voting for biden. I voted for governor baker, a republican, in massachusetts. He has kept us safe more than the president has. Host any response . Guest it is important to understand that the risk of serious illness and death from covid19 varies considerably based on your age. Younger people in general have a very, very low risk of death or serious illness from covid19. School age children, 115 in age, only about 40 have died in the entire country. 57 Million People in that age bracket, and only 3640 have died, that is about one in a million. So that is a pretty low ratio. When you thing about the other things that kids die from, drowning, car accidents, they happen at a higher frequency than about 39 or 40. We have to be aware of that. [applause]