Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume explained on Tuesday why he believes the case for the ongoing national lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic is getting “weaker and weaker.”
“You say that with each passing day, the argument for this lockdown, this nationwide lockdown, gets weaker and weaker,” Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum said after introducing Hume on Fox News’ “The Story.” “What do you mean by that?”
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“Two things,” said Hume. “First the collateral damage from it is extraordinary.”
Hume explained that the initial reasons for the full lockdown was to “protect our medical system from being overwhelmed.” Except, he said, “hospitals are failing across the country.”
“The damage to our medical, our health care system it seems to me is something we really have to take into account here,” said the Fox News correspondent. “It’s very serious.”
Hume cited the “economic damage” and “budgetary harm” as other examples: “We are saddling our country and future generations with debt on a scale that was already high and now it is far, far worse. Not to mention the toll on businesses with which won’t reopen and so on. The unemployment. The consequences for children being locked up at home and not being able to go to school with their friends and be outside, the mental health issues that arise from that, the domestic domestic violence … That’s part of it, the damage from it.”
The Fox News correspondent’s second reason centered around the fact that coronavirus “overwhelmingly affects elderly people and those with serious underlying medical conditions.”
“Everyone else is much less vulnerable, down to children who seem almost totally invulnerable to catching this disease,” he said, contending that it “can be addressed” by having the vulnerable quarantined.
“This is not in my view all about simply we are so good at the mitigation efforts,” Hume said after observing how the virus has failed to spread to places outside major metropolitan areas like New York City. “I think there’s reason to believe that this disease turned out, outside of certain populations, not to be not early as severe and dangerous as we thought and certainly the death rates I think will end up reflecting that.”
Later in the interview, Hume contended that dire early prediction models could have been used to keep people obedient to social distancing guidelines. (RELATED: ‘This Is Insanity’: Tucker Carlson Questions The ‘Science’ Behind The Shutdown)
“I think Doctor Fauci and Birx were content to sort of let that happen, because I think they were afraid that people wouldn’t socially distance and people wouldn’t engage in the mitigation efforts, and the result is we have a terrified population and we have people wearing masks while out jogging in Central Park.”