In this interview, Dennis Prager asks historian Victor Davis Hanson to imagine he is the U.S. President during the early COVID‑19 outbreak. Hanson endorses the limited measures the administration has already taken—travel bans and restrictions on large gatherings—but argues strongly against broader lockdowns, shutdowns of restaurants, and discouraging non‑life‑threatening medical visits. He stresses that keeping supply chains, farms, trucking, and retail (e.g., Costco, Target) operating is essential for economic stability and public health, warning that massive economic disruption could cause a “boomerang” effect on mental and physical health. Hanson compares the daily COVID‑19 death toll (1‑2) to the baseline U.S. mortality (~8,000 per day) to question the proportionality of shutdowns. He critiques the reliance on early Wuhan and Italy data, noting demographic, cultural, and healthcare system differences that limit their applicability to the U.S. Hanson also expresses distrust of the Chinese government and the World Health Organization, advocating for domestic production of fuel, food, pharmaceuticals, and medical supplies. He highlights the United States’ leading per‑capita critical‑care bed capacity as an under‑appreciated advantage. Throughout, he calls for a balanced, data‑driven response that avoids “suspended‑animation” economics while protecting public health.
Chapters
So I'm going to put you on the spot as I put myself on the spot on this. You're president of the United States now. What would you recommend?
Well, I would have recommended all of the things that the president has done about large gatherings and travel bans, and I think otherwise he's everything. But what I would not do is discourage or stop, as we just heard today, medical visits unless they're considered life-threatening. Because what that is essentially doing to hundreds of millions of people in the economy is saying you're not going to go get a particular test that may, that may tell you something that could affect your life and your health immediately. And then I would also be very careful. I wouldn't have a lockdown of people in their homes. And I would not— or shutdown of entire commercial— I don't think we need to shut down restaurants that provide needed nourishment for people if they follow, you know, reasonable guidelines. I know that just here in California, the Harris Ranch on I-5 gives people meals. It allows commerce to continue. And they're very careful about cleaning. They've separated their tables. But the idea you would shut down that enormous hub of restaurants and things. It's, it's really depends. It's the lifeblood of California. And what I'm getting at, Dennis, is that when people go to Costco or Target and they see all those things in the shelves, that's all predicated on the idea that somebody, as I look out the window, is out there working right now and farming and trucking and resupplying and taking a level of risk. And that allows the professional classes and teachers and people like myself to stay here on my farm in pretty much isolation and safety. And then venture out and get needed fuel and sustenance. But that doesn't just appear out of nowhere. These are people that if we shut their ability to eat and their ability to travel and their ability to make a living, then that's going to eventually boomerang toward us. We've already wiped out $6 or $7 trillion of liquidity and capital and thousands of jobs, millions of jobs. And that's going to have a mental health toll, a physical health toll. So all I'm suggesting is why don't we just watch things and remember that that as bad as it is now, we're still right around 100 deaths. And we have about— since the virus broke out, we have 2 or 3 deaths per day, uh, of a society of 330 million people worldwide. We only have 7,000 deaths. That's less since the virus broke out than die every day. Every day we have about 8,000 people that die in the United States every day. 3 million a year. And so when we're losing 1 or 2 people a day to the coronavirus and we have another 8,000 dying from all sorts of things, viruses, bacteria, it's, it's really, it's hard to contemplate that you would destroy economy when we don't know really the degree of infection. We don't know the degree of lethality and we're modeling after worst case scenarios based on the first 2 or 3 weeks in Wuhan and the special situation that's surrounds Italy. And Italy, as you know, anybody goes to northern Italy knows that it's a virtual expatriate Chinese community now, and it's very elderly population. They tend to be in apartments, and that's where the elderly of Italy go to. It's sort of like Florida is to us. And then there's a much higher degree of smoking, and custom and practice in Italy is to be much more physical when you greet somebody. So there's a lot of criteria that we're not even thinking about. And their medical— I've been in an Italian and a Greek hospital. And I can tell you that Southern European medicine— I'm not being culturally insensitive— is not comparable to Fresno County medicine. Just is not. It's so far less impressive and less thorough. And so I think we're reaching a point of no return, that if we go much further, this suspended animation economy is not going to snap back without aftereffects. And that's what I'm worried about. I'm also worried about the Chinese government Because there seems to be a narrative going that Trump is responsible. The Chinese have been demonized. They're actually helping. We need to trust more globalized transnational world health organizations. The southern border never needed to be secured. And, uh, Joe Biden is a voice of sanity. And this is what the media is telling us, and it's counterintuitive. China is really culpable and the World Health Organization is culpable. And whether we're going to survive this depends on America's producing their own fuel, their own food, and hopefully very soon their own pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. And we should distrust any illiberal authoritarian communist government like the Chinese. Almost everything they say has to be suspect. But yet we get this weird narrative that we're xenophobic, we're racists, we're not cooperating with the World Health Organization. We banned travel. We shouldn't have cut off international. And I don't get it because how can we be both too active and then yet xenophobic by doing the most effective thing that you can do, and that's cut off direct flights from Wuhan, China, 1 or 2 every day in the United States, not to mention the other 20,000 a day going back and forth. So it's not coherent and consistent, the public and the media reaction to what's going on.
I have a chart in front of me from Forbes, the countries with the most critical care beds per capita, and the United States is in first place on earth of the number of critical care beds per capita. Germany is second, Italy is third, but Italy is a third of what we have, so it's It's a little, um—
I don't think we give our country credit enough. You know, Dennis, we have 60 million people, 50 to 60, that weren't born in the United States who are residents. 1 out of every 4 Californians was not born in the United States.
All right, hold it there again. Forgive me. Victor Davis Hanson's piece is up at DennisPrager.com.
