to the risk of the past, the technology might be coming to its own. And maybe you don't like that either because of privacy, etc. But just stating it as a fact, facial recognition is going to make it really hard to disappear, right?

So immigration and facial technology are gonna bump into each other and that's gonna be a big story coming up.

The New York Times is reporting that the death rate for 2020 was the highest above normal ever recorded in the country, surpassing even the 1918 flu pandemic. Now I put that out there. You know, New York Times reported it and I tweeted it and I asked if the skeptics, pandemic skeptics, have they been convinced? You know, is this enough to finally convince the skeptics that there was a real pandemic and it really killed a lot of people? And the answer is nope, not even close. Not even close.

So, and I'm always amused at what level of information it would take to change anybody's mind. And let me tell you the pushback. Number one, and by the way the pushback is valid, all right? So even though it came from the New York Times, it looked like it would be a pretty big claim to make if they couldn't back it up. But we have questions. If you look at the 1918 pandemic, the Spanish flu, you see that they too had a gigantic spike in deaths over the baseline. No surprise, right? But the following year after the gigantic Spanish flu spike in deaths, it was way under the death rate. So the amount that the next year was below the average largely compensated for the amount that was above the average the year before.

So what do we know about the death rate from coronavirus so far? Nothing. We don't know anything, because until we have another full year we don't know if we're going to have that same situation where there's a spike and then a gigantic below-average year. If that happens we're going to be close to break even and it's going to look like, what is the theory, the dry tinder theory. That the people who died of coronavirus are the people who were very, very likely going to die in the next 12 months from whatever comorbidity they had. Now maybe they didn't know it, but the data might actually show that that's what's happening.

So can we look at this data and say, my God, it's clear that this virus was extra, extra deadly? Nope. Because we don't know how the numbers come out. And importantly we don't know how many of those deaths are because of the lockdown. Right? That's what you want me to say. How many of you were just saying, Scott, say they're also deaths because of the lockdown. Say it. Say it, Scott. Okay, I said it. I think everybody agrees that there is some number of extra deaths attributed directly to the pandemic lockdown and extra suicides, extra doses of everything.

And then here's another question. I asked about the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, how well were we counting deaths? Because I feel as if a lot of people probably just died at home, didn't they, in 1918? And if you have a pandemic maybe people end up in the hospital because it takes a little while for them to die and maybe they get counted. You see where I'm going. In 1918 maybe all that happened was they were good at counting COVID deaths but they were bad at counting every other kind of death, because maybe people just died at home and didn't get recorded somehow. I'm just speculating. So I don't know if the 1918 deaths tell us anything and I don't know if the 2020 deaths tell us anything. And they're also not done because I think they cut off in September of 2020.

So every time I think I'm going to learn something because data came out, have you noticed it doesn't work no matter what you do? Oh, we got this new fresh data. Now we know. No, we don't. We don't know anything. How did you feel about data five years ago? Think about it. What was your belief about any kind of data that you saw in the news about a big issue five years ago? Didn't you think it's probably true? Right? You know, not always, because there were lots of things that weren't true always. But five years ago you probably said to yourself, well it's probably true. It's in the news. What do you say now? Don't you say it's probably not true? I feel like that's a big shift, right?

You know, there's almost nothing I could see in the news in terms of new data that I would actually just believe the first time I saw it. I would say maybe. I might talk about it like it's true but in the back of my mind I'd be thinking maybe, maybe not. So that's a big change in society that we've moved from believing data that our officials give to us versus assuming it's not true. And I believe there's some extra freedom in that, meaning that maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's a really good thing that we don't believe official data. Maybe that's a big improvement.

There's something going on in India. And like everything else in the world we don't understand it. So India, we thought was doing unusually well and couldn't explain it. But now India is doing unusually not well. I'm still not sure we can explain it. I think they may have changed some social distancing standards but I don't know if that's the reason, because we never know. But we do know that their hospitals are overrun. So we know something's happening because the hospitals are over