o, you probably ordered anything. Hi. So I've never seen an argument ended so perfectly. Have you? Have you ever seen an argument on Twitter that actually came to some kind of a conclusion? Usually you could argue forever. And if we'd only been arguing without the benefit of an animated graph, because it was the animation that brought it alive.

Now I'd like to tie this point to the point I've been making since day one about the task force. You've seen me just complaining endlessly that the task force gives you raw numbers and doesn't put them in context. So I don't care how many masks you delivered unless I know how many you need. It doesn't tell me if you've got ten percent of what you needed or 110 percent.

And my point is that they had the wrong people working so that the task force simply didn't have anybody on their team who was as talented as Tyler Morgan. So you know, a guy on the internet just totally nails this data visualization. What honestly, this is the best data visualization I've ever seen in my life in terms of getting you to an answer in a way that just ends the conversation. It's probably the best one I've ever seen.

So somebody like him should have been working with the task force to give us a picture, give us a graph, give us some kind of visual sense of are we getting close to getting enough supplies or not.

Here's my sense of it. I think we're going to overshoot the supplies. And I was happy when Dr. Birx was talking about the system, because you know I always obsess about a system rather than saying it's our goal to get everybody enough stuff. I always say, well, it's great to have a goal, but what's your system? If you don't have a system, you're not going to achieve your goal.

So Dr. Birx the first time gave a little detail of the system. So apparently at the federal level they do have some visibility into the hospitals. It's becoming apparent that at least part of the problem for them getting numbers about how much people have and how much they need, and I think this is very clear now, is that the hospitals were lying to them. And it must have been obvious. In other words, hospitals were saying, ah, yeah, we're going to need a million masks when they might have thought they needed a hundred thousand, but they didn't want to run out.

So everybody's sort of maximizing their selfish individual hospital benefit. And that's not a flaw in the people. The system causes everybody to try to maximize their individual benefit, and you hope things work out in the long run. But if they start hoarding, that doesn't work. You know, capitalism works even when everybody's selfish because the rules of capitalism and the transparency and everything allow that to work. There it doesn't always work.

All right. So Cuomo was saying he needed 30,000 ventilators. So what I think is that now that Birx has described the system in which the federal government has some visibility and they're overruling the requests from the individual areas, which I think is exactly what I wanted to hear, because in order to make sure that the places with an immediate need can get ventilators and stuff transferred to them, the government needs to look at the numbers of all the hospitals reporting and then act like an adult and say, you don't need a million of these. I know you want a million and I know you'd feel better if you had a million and I know you can pay for a million, but maybe this isn't statistically where we need a million masks.

So when Birx, the doctor, described that that was their system where the federal government had some visibility, that was the first thing I needed to know that I didn't know. I didn't know that they had visibility and they were also doubting the requests. That makes me very comfortable. I want the federal government to be playing the adult and doubting the need of individual things and putting a larger analytical frame on it.

So they're thinking, just things with that system in place and absent the government saying, oh, we have a big emergency in this one supply. If the government thought they were going to run out of supplies at this point, yesterday as of today's vantage point, I'm almost positive you would be hearing something like this: we're really short on this supply. But you're not hearing that, right? You're hearing sort of a general "we need more of everything." The fact that it's only general and nobody's saying, my God, we ran out of this one thing, we got to get these tomorrow, suggests that the government might be comfortable that we'll have enough everywhere. And that comfort might come entirely from their newfound ability to overrule the hospitals and move things where the federal government... but the National Guard at 7:00. So I get it.

I'm going to give the task force a C+ for reporting about how many materials that we need. I did give them an F yesterday based on the fact that they provided no context for us to know whether the numbers they were reporting were enough or too much. But I'm revising that today because now with the understanding that they have a system, the system is completely rational. From me as an observer, I would say yeah, that is exactly the system you need. I believe it exists. I don't think Dr. Birx is lying or misleading us that such a system exists.

So with the knowledge that that system exists and the fact that the government isn't calling out some specific supply that's an extra emergency and the fact that the estimates have gone way down strongly suggests that our government thinks they'll have enough of everything. Would you agree? By the way, would you agree they're just sort of reading the hints suggests that the government does think they'll still have enough?

Now that's probably a new opinion based on the fact that the death count estimates also went down and they built a system for adjusting where you need things. So I'm going to give them a C+ because I think there might be a valid reason for not giving us the details. One of them is they don't believe the details coming from the hospitals. So if they were to report it, they would have to simultaneously say, but we don't think the numbers are real. We think all the hospitals are lying to us to pad their supplies. Although I would have been okay with that. But given that they have a system, I'm okay with it without the details because I don't think there's a problem.

And I also think it's completely sensible if not completely ethical. No, I will say this. Let me say this. If the government thinks that we're going to make way too many ventilators and masks, they should still keep pushing as hard as they are even if we're not going to use them in the United States. Because remember, even though we want to be America first, it's a global problem. And if we don't get control on the rest of the globe or they don't get control on it, it does come back to us, right? So for selfish reasons you have to help the world. It's an enlightened selfishness, but you do have to help the world.

So if we make 10 times more ventilators than we need and we can share them with countries that don't have enough, I'd say that is ethically and morally required. I would say that's required at this point. What do you say? You know, if we have enough in the United States but we could make more, I think we're ethically morally required to make them if we can.

So at this point I'm pretty good, pretty good with what the task force is doing with supplies.

Let's see. I'm already seeing the debate of the people disagreeing whether the death counts are going down because we estimated them wrong from the beginning or because the mitigation works. Right. I told you that this debate will never end. And when it's done, we still never know. We'll never know. I mean, you might think you know, but you might not.

Speaking of death estimates, Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. So there are more than one model of death, but this model is at least notable enough that it was on TV and the TV news. And their model says that the new predicted death count is around 80,000. So the U.S. death count by this model, which is one of the big ones, is lowered to 80,000. Now that's 82,000 gross.

So that would be the number of people who were coded as dying from coronavirus in the United States. But over that period, which will be a few months, there will also be, and we know for sure, that a number of regular deaths will be avoided. So a whole bunch of regular deaths won't happen. So you have to net the 80,000 and how many regular deaths won't happen during this period. I don't know the exact number, but it's in the tens of thousands. So let's say it's 50,000. So let's say there are 50,000 avoided, 82,000 coronavirus deaths. So you take the difference. So it would be 32,000 deaths net.

And this is an official estimate. This is somebody who does this. It's not the Imperial model, but it's one of the ones that gets thrown in that conversation. And if it gets down to 32,000 deaths, that's just the current estimate. That's not the estimate assuming that we get even better at reducing the deaths. And do you think that will get even better? You know, do you think we'll do... do you think that it will get even better? I might.

So whose estimate will be the closest when we're all done? Remember, my estimate was 5,000 or less net. Suppose the number comes in at 32,000 net. Who had the closest estimate? The experts who said maybe 100,000 or 200,000, maybe a million, or the cartoonist? Somebody says there is somebody restating it down to the 60,000 level. Oh my God, I feel like I'm going to kill somebody.

Somebody in the comments says, have you given up on your