Dan Perkins: Twenty-two Million Out of Work but Not Without Income

The new weekly report of claims for unemployment came out last week, issued by the Department of Labor, and the number of new applications was 5.2 million people. This number was approximately 800,000 below expectations; there goes the model thing again.

Last week ending April 4, the initial claims were 12,526,711; therefore, claims dropped by almost 7.4 million. Also, the new unemployment benefits will pay employees nearly 100% of their base income.

The NFIB Research Center reports that 70% of small businesses have applied for PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) Loans, and over 50% of these businesses also have applied for the EIDL (Economic Injury Disaster Loan) grants.

As an example of models and models going wild, John Williams (Shadow Government Statistics) now estimates, based on his model, that unemployment by the end of this month will be 43%. Based on the real data in order for Williams model to be actual, unemployment will have to increase 5 times in the coming two weeks.

I would like to think that the American people are now more suspect about modeling than at any time in the past. Do you remember the modeler from the Imperial College in London, who said 500,000 Brits and 2.3 million Americans would die from the outbreak of COVID-19? Those projections caused what I called, “The Panic in the Pandemic.”

We were told two weeks ago that 60,000 Americans could die between the beginning of the outbreak until the end of August this year. Dropping the number of deaths from 2.3 million to 60,000 brings into question whether if we had a better forecast, would we have made different policy decisions? I think without question, the choices would have been different. Our government converted the Javits Center in NYC into a 2,900-bed hospital and brought in the U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort with 1,000 more beds to assist New York. According to NPR, on April 6, 189 patients were in the Javits Center and 53 patients were in the USNS Comfort.

According to the New York Times, USNS Mercy in Los Angeles has treated 31 patients, and it too has 1,000 beds and significant medical staff. Let me be clear: there is no medicine nor a vaccine for COVID-19. The treatment is just to treat the symptoms. We have been led to believe that a vaccine is 12 to 18 months away. If the vaccine being built is based on the initial COVID-19 strain and it mutates as Newsweek suggests, will the vaccines be of any use if we are dealing with a different strain?

Let’s take the forecast that 60,000 people will die and ask the question: if close to 700,000 people a year die in America from cancer, should we shut down the country until we have a cure? The CDC Reports the Burden Estimates for the flu season from October 1, 2019, to April 4, 2020 are:

39,000,000 to 56,000,000 people will get the flu

410,000 to 740,000 will have to be hospitalized

18,000,000 to 26,000,000 will have medical visits

24,000 to 62,000 will die

Why don’t we shut down every October 1 and reopen on Tax Day April 15? This is not the first rodeo for most of the medical staff advising the president. If distancing, face masks, and washing our hands is all we have to flatten the curve for COVID-19, shouldn’t the same thing be true for the annual flu?

In hindsight, I think we panicked in this pandemic and, as a result, caused millions of people to be out of work, as well as the loss of their retirement assets and perhaps their jobs. For many years we will pay a significant price for the mistakes made at all levels.

Perkins Twist: Every person in the world who became sick from COVID-19, and the family members of those who have died from it around the world need to join in a class-action suit against China. We want reparations for the loss of work and for the family members who have died, as well as for the trillions of dollars nations around the world have spent on this pandemic.

China has to pay in order to learn that it has to be a responsible citizen of the world, and that catastrophic failures have serious consequences.