. But first let me give you an idea of what's new and exciting.

Number one, people are starting to wise up to the fact that masks might be a good idea after all. Who saw that coming? All of us. So it's sort of a crazy, bizarre thing watching our experts slowly start to agree with the public. It's supposed to work the other way around, right? Aren't the experts supposed to have a position and then the ignorant public eventually learns what the experts teach them?

Well, that would be great except we just did it the opposite way, where all the non-experts, when they heard that masks don't help you but they do help professionals but they don't help you, you know, half of the world who's not an expert said, well, I'm no expert, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure masks help a little. And of course the non-experts were right. But that doesn't mean you should always listen to non-experts just because in this obvious example they are right.

For example, one of the most promising treatments apparently is hydroxychloroquine. And if you would listen to the experts they would have told you don't get so excited about this. But if you'd listened to the non-experts, let's say Trump himself or me or many people on Twitter, they had been saying hydroxychloroquine is great. So we might find out again whether or not the experts were right downplaying it a little bit or other people who don't know anything about anything were right. But that would just be two things. I mean you can't make some kind of a big general statement just because it might be that ignorant people were right about two things and experts were wrong about them. But that's just two things.

Let's talk about those projections because if there's one thing you can count on it's that experts are good at projections. They're making models. If you've been watching me for a while you know I can't stop talking about how accurate complicated projection models are. I mean is there anything they can't do? Yes, people we don't know do things we don't understand and then they produce graphs. These graphs are made by experts and we should trust them.

But when we saw the graphs there was one. Wow, just a small quibble that I have, but again I'm no expert. I'm no expert. It's not like I'm some epidemiologist because I'm not. But when I listen to the experts talk about their own graphs, one of the little tidbits that Dr. Birx threw in there was that when they were calculating what the curve could be without any abatement, you know that the steep one where two million people might die, and then they compared it to the lower curve, or if you do everything right, you know you really work hard and do everything right you might be able to get it down to 100 to 200,000 people dead. And then the good doctor threw in this little tidbit that at first I thought I heard it wrong and she said but of course these numbers include New York in the average.

So New York, which is completely different than anything that's happening anywhere in the country, you know there are a few other hotspots, they have their problems, but New York is what, half of all the problem? And New York is a especially steep curve. What kind of an average do you get when you take a whole big country that mostly doesn't have too many problems with a few little warm spots and then you throw in this one data point that's as big as all of the other data points? It's just one city. And then you take the average. Then that's the most worthless number you could ever have.

And I don't think I'm interpreting this. I believe she said that directly, criticizing their own graph. She wanted us to know, quite reasonably wanted us to know, that New York was in the average. Now if you're not conversant with modeling and math and spreadsheets and stuff maybe you didn't even catch that. But what would have been far more clear would be one model that's just for New York and then another model that maybe is everything else because everything else is so different from New York. And then that everything else I think would look a lot lower than their lowest curve. And then New York, if we try hard and put super resources into it, well maybe we can get that down as well.

Somebody says she seems credible. You know, she's very qualified of course. I was listening to it today while I was walking instead of watching it and somebody had heard somebody say she has a valley girl uptalk and I never noticed it before. And I think that when you watch her live you don't hear it the same way but if you just listen to her she has a voice that does not suggest scientific excellence. And you know somebody's gonna say how big a sexist. It has nothing to do with that. You know you could put a man into the same situation, it'd be exactly the same comment. It's just there's a certain style of talking this sounds authoritative, male or female, has nothing to do with gender. And she has the other kind. But I'm sure she's very, very capable. Everybody knows good things about her. But her voice, her voice maybe could be a little bit more professional sounding. Very small equivalent. But anyway that was to whoever said she sounds credible. Yes she does in terms of expertise of course.

So here's the thing. I'm still going to bet that the number of deaths are lower than their lowest estimate in that if you net out the people who didn't die because we shut everything down, which is gonna be in the tens of thousands, probably tens of thousands of people won't die in car accidents, won't drown in pools, well I don't know about pools, but a whole range of things they won't be getting killed at. So I'm still gonna say 5,000 net. Gross deaths might exceed that but net I'll say 5,000.

Now you should not take my estimate to be likely because what do I know? I'm just the guy who's been right about, okay, everything so far. But that doesn't mean it's gonna continue.

All right, so is it my imagination or are people definitely being nicer? President Trump seems to be modeling a little bit of nicer behavior. He had extended interactions with Jim Acosta which was not ideal but you could easily imagine that would have been worse. So just watching