RUSH: I want to go back to the archives, because something has been gnawing away at me. Why isn’t California teeming with cases of coronavirus? You look at the homeless populations in San Francisco and Los Angeles alone where all kinds of sordid disease would be percolating out there and effervescing. Then you have the amount of travel from Asia, specifically from China, into California cities.

So, I went back. January 10th of this year, CNN Travel: “Three Billion Journeys: World’s Biggest Human Migration Begins in China.” It’s a fascinating piece here. “China is already bracing itself for an annual homecoming of epic proportions. Considered the largest human migration on the planet, Chunyun — the 40-day period when Chinese people head home to celebrate the Lunar New Year Spring Festival with their families — officially began on January 10 and will end on February 18. Some three billion trips are expected to be made during the 2020 Chunyun period, a slight increase from last year’s figure. .. These figures are indeed staggering. But fret not,” CNN reported, because the ChiComs had “already planned ahead.”

Now, one of the factors that I have not seen mentioned in any recent attempts to explain the worldwide spread of this virus is the Chinese new year. It’s the largest human migration on the planet, people coming and going from China. It’s a 40-day period. The Chinese people from all over the world head home to celebrate the lunar new year spring festival, and then they go back. It’s January 10th to February 18th, right at the height of the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan.

Now, this article notes that some three billion trips are expected to be made during this Chinese lunar new year period, and the CNN Travel article doesn’t even mention coronavirus once, and it existed. The coronavirus was a thing on January 10th.

Now we move forward 10 days, January 20th, 2020, the Washington Post, of all places. Headline: “China virus: Expert says it can be spread by human-to-human contact, sparking concerns about the massive holiday travel underway.” This is one of the very few mentions that I could find of any connection between the 40-day Chinese lunar new year and the coronavirus.

Now, the article in the Washington Post notes that the Chinese finally admitted that coronavirus can transmit between humans more than a month after the first case. Even so, the ChiComs did nothing to seal their internal or external borders, even though they were being flooded with three billion travelers. Now, remember, many of those leave. These are people that return to China from all over the world, including United States, for the lunar new year holiday, and then after the 10 day, 40-day period, whatever, they return to wherever they arrived to China from. And so the Washington Post story says, “Expert says it can be spread by human-to-human contact, sparking concerns about the massive holiday travel underway.”

So I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece by Victor Davis Hanson today at National Review Online. “Coronavirus: The California Herd.” Mr. Hanson today is writing about — the California population is 40 million. Do you know how many coronavirus cases there are reported in California? Deaths, I should say, 150 deaths out of 40 million people.

With all of that travel from China that was occurring even independent of the Chinese new year, there’s daily travel to and from China, business and pleasure, in and out of San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, LAX, I mean, you name it, thousands and thousands a day to and from China, 150 deaths. That is a percent per million death rate less than half of Germany’s. So what explains that? How is it that California is not the epicenter?
California, as many models have been predicting, should be ground zero of infection, and yet it appears not to be.

“California governor Gavin Newsom has assured his state that over half of the population — or, in his words, 56 percent — will soon be infected. That is, more than 25 million coronavirus cases are on the horizon, which, at the virus’s current fatality rate of 1-2 percent (the ratio of deaths to known positive cases), would mean that the state should anticipate 250,000-500,000 dead Californians in the near future. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti predicted that this week Los Angeles would be short of all sorts of medical supplies as the epidemic killed many hundreds, as is the case in New York City.

“It’s been well over two months since the first certified coronavirus case in the United States, so one might expect to see early symptoms of the apocalypse recently forecast by Governor Newsom. Yet a number of California’s top doctors, epidemiologists, statisticians, and biophysicists … have expressed some skepticism about the bleak models predicting that we are on the verge of a statewide or even national lethal pandemic of biblical proportions.”

One hundred and fifty deaths so far, with all these trips. Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m gonna make sure that I am just speaking as a layman here, but it could well be that so many Californians have been exposed to this virus — you know, 5,000 to 7,000 Chinese arrive at California airports every day. You go back and count that up, add it up from December, January, February, what if the people of California have somehow been made immune to it because they’ve been exposed to the virus and don’t have it or found a way to fight it off. It’s a gigantic question. California ought to be the epicenter. It ought to be ground zero of infection, and it isn’t.

Now, the governor clearly says it’s coming. Governor Newsom and the mayor of Los Angeles both say it’s coming, so it may be premature to be commenting on this. But the disparity here in the number of cases and the number of deaths and the number of hospitalizations in California versus, say, New York and some states on the East Coast is striking.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Some headlines on Fox, just to share with you some headlines on Fox: “Hospitals Reach Breaking Point Amid Surge of Coronavirus Cases.” Well, not here in South Florida. Hospitals are not near a breaking point. Next headline (and it’s a quote attributable to Dr. Keith Armitage): “Rate of New Cases Decreasing in New York. Similar Trends Being Reported in California and Washington.”

Wait. What? Rate of new cases decreasing in New York? Governor Cuomo just said today that they’re still going up, that you can chart the graph, and they’re still going up — thereby comforting the media that the news is still bad. But Dr. Keith Armitage says the rate of new cases is decreasing in New York.

Folks, West Virginia has had one death. What explains this? I’m just asking questions any layman would ask. Why the hell is California not the epicenter here? Could it well be, with all of those travelers, 5,000 to 7,000 a day coming in and out of California from China from December on — could it be — that Californians have already faced down the virus and beat it?

By being exposed to it and creating mutations, could it be? I’m just asking. I need to have some medical professional tell me if this is indeed possible. Because it doesn’t make sense that California is not ground zero for this. And let’s see. Another headline here on Fox: “U.S. Death Toll from Coronavirus Eclipses China’s Official Count.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’ve got Barbara in Orange County, California, and she has somewhat of a similar theory about California since I’m expressing interest in it. Hi, Barbara. I’m glad you waited. How are you?

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m great. Mega prayers to you.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I’m excited to talk to you. I love you. I love your show, I love your optimism. It’s contagious.

RUSH: Well, it is genuine. I just don’t want it to mislead anybody.

CALLER: No, you don’t mislead. I was listening to your show this morning, and you were touching on California —

RUSH: Yes, ma’am.

CALLER: — and you were surprised by the numbers and that you would think that it would be going a lot crazier than it actually is or seems to be. But I have my family, my neighbors, my neighborhood, a lot of people in my community, we all sort of have the sense that we’ve already kind of experienced the coronavirus. We’ve had, like flus, what we thought were flus, went to the doctor and they were negative, and my husband couldn’t get out of bed. He was having a hard time breathing. He took like an asthma spray. We recovered. My neighbors recovered. But we think that it’s been around since like January, like early January.

RUSH: Well, so what you’re essentially saying is that you people in California have already dealt with it. You’ve had people get it, not get it, be infected, some severely, some not, 150 people are dead, but it happened while you didn’t know it was happening because it happened before any of these warnings and alerts happened. So you basically have already been through it and you’ve already dealt with the impact of it, and —

CALLER: Yes. In a sense we didn’t know when it was going on —

RUSH: Right. You had it, you didn’t know it, some people never have symptoms, some people thought they had the flu. You didn’t know coronavirus from Sharonnavirus, so you didn’t know what you had, or people that had it —

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: — and so it just ran its course. This is your theory?

CALLER: This is my theory. And now that we’re all on lockdown we walk in the neighborhood more often than we did before, more people are walking than they did before, and even people in the community that we’ll see in passing, they all say that they all had something similar, that they would get flu tests and they’d be negative, and there’s not just a small group, it’s a big group of people that say that.

RUSH: All right. Well, look, I appreciate that, and I’m glad you called. Again, folks, I have to always point out here: Do not associate what I’m saying with anything official, and do not associate anything I’m saying with expertise in medicine or health, ’cause I have neither. I’m no different than anybody else.

I’ve just been a patient, and I just have a natural curiosity about things. So I’m merely speculating. So I don’t want to anybody to think that I am telling you with ontological certitude what has happened in California. It is my wild guess. Now, some of you are saying, “Well, why don’t you find out? Look, you could get anybody on your program you want.

“You could get Fauci if you wanted. You could get anybody. Why don’t you get experts instead of sitting there and speculating?” It’s ’cause they’re everywhere else, and they’re not gonna say anything different here than they’re saying anywhere else. Snerdley’s saying, “Yes, they would because you’re gonna ask ’em different questions than they’re being asked.”

Well, maybe so. I don’t know. But… (interruption) Well, I know. That’s another thing. The information is so contradictory. (sigh) But… (interruption) Mmm-hmm. Yeah, I have too. I’ve read that there are eight strains of it, and there may be and we don’t have a vaccine. The reason this is different than the flu — and I’m gonna try to say this as accurately as possible.

The reason this is different than the flu is they have we have vaccines. We have flu shots. We have cataloged and have ability to free throw the various mutations of the flu virus. There’s the swine flu, there’s the bird flu, there’s the “Wi-Fi flu,” whatever the flu is. We have a vaccine for it at some point, and because we have a vaccine, we have accepted the number of deaths, anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 deaths a year from the flu.

We’ve accepted it because we have a vaccine to protect most of the people. This, we’ve got nothing. We don’t have a vaccine. We don’t have a treatment. We’ve got nothing. This thing is the equivalent of an airplane crash every day, and you know what that does to society. And so a it’s got people scared out of their gourd because there’s no way to fight it right now, other than sequester and socially distance and so forth.

And this is why people are willing to do it because they’re seeing all the stories of people dying who get this thing. But there are thousands of recoveries. Not everybody dies who gets this. It’s like any other disease. Not everybody who gets it dies, which is true even of cancer. But, I mean, the degree of — I don’t know want you want to call it — paranoia or fear that has been created here is real, and it therefore has to be dealt with.

And until there is a vaccine or an acknowledged medical treatment — and you know, this business with chloroquine and azithromycin? It seems to be working everywhere it’s tried in the vast majority of cases, and yet it’s not being trumpeted. That makes me curious as well.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Governor Cuomo today said, “No, no, no, no. The cases are still going up,” assuring the media.

Here is Alisyn Camerota this morning on CNN…

CAMEROTA: We’ve just gotten a headline, information here into CNN that says that the rate of, uh, growth of COVID-19 in New York appears to be slowing a bit? Do you know anything about the daily increase in the rate?

GUPTA: Yeah, uh, Alisyn. We — we’ve been following that, uh, fairly closely. And it does, uh, appear to have slowed now a couple of days in a row. That could be good news.

RUSH: Whoa. What are we to believe? The governor of New York says cases are still going up; the media gets hyped. On CNN this morning and a guy on Fox: “No, no, number of cases in New York is going down.” Hospitalizations? They want you to believe hospitals are overflowing, but they’re not all over the country, maybe in certain places.

Let’s go to the Dr. Fauci, audio sound bite number 6. This is this morning also on CNN. The question to Dr. Fauci: “Tell us where you’re seeing early signs of improvement. I know that New York has seen a decline in the rate of growth in new infections. What else are you seeing that gives you some hope that the curve is being flattened somewhat?”

FAUCI: What we’re starting to see right now is just the inklings — and I don’t want to put too much stock on it because you don’t want to get overconfident. Just want to keep pushing on what you’re doing. You’re starting to see that the daily increases are not in that steep incline. They’re starting to be able to possibly flatten out. I mean, again, you look at it carefully, hope it’s going in the right direction. But that’s what we really are trying to attain, that multiphase component where it ultimately starts to come down.

RUSH: “We have inklings the curve may be flattening.” So everybody today except Governor Cuomo is talking about the number of cases going down. Governor Cuomo in his presser at noon assured the media cases are still going up. “We’ve beginning to see some sort of flattening.” Okay, that’s wonderful. That’s absolutely wonderful.

It proves that social distancing is working. But we can’t continue to create this flattening with social distancing alone. Now, Governor Cuomo also said something else today. He said that we’re all gonna be able to go back to work when we finally get a test, when we get a test that we can take quickly and show who’s got it and who doesn’t, that this is gonna mean we’re gonna be able to go back to work.

Now, that really perked my ears up because a test is not a vaccine.

I want to go to Carolyn in Virginia Beach who is a nurse and wants to weigh in on this. Great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Mega dittos and mega prayers from an old Dittohead here.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Real quickly — I mean, I’m just a dumb nurse, but — my thoughts are, you know, with this Abbott test that Trump is talking about yesterday that’s coming out to — originally they said — the hospitals, the doctor’s offices, and urgent cares. So, you know, people are… It’s gonna be a much better way of testing people. It’s like a 15-minute test and they’re saying that it can test like a hundred thousand people a day or something.

I don’t know if that’s an accurate number. But, anyhow, people are all gonna be tested to see if they’ve had it or not had it. Because like that person Barbara said there’s a lot of people out there that have had it that didn’t know. They’ll be positive, and that’s gonna also change the whole percentage of death rate and everything. But the other thing that I think they need to do is give the hydroxyquinolone to all health care workers, because it supposedly decreases the viral load.

RUSH: Is it useful as a prophylactic?

CALLER: They have said, yes. They think that it is, which is why, you know, it works an anti-malarial drug.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: Because it decreases the viral load. It may not prevent you from the getting it, but it will decrease your viral load and you may not have it as long or as severe.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: So I think a lot of the health care people are getting a huge viral load, the ones that are getting really sick. There’s a lot of physicians that are, you know, in critical care and whatnot, and I think their load has been so high. And I don’t know, but… You know, these are just my thoughts. So you get everybody…

So once you have patients getting it — you know, that they feel can get it — along with the Z-Pak, and then you get the health care workers getting it, then they can start sending it out to people in the country. You get it from your doctor. You go through a drive-through to get it, Dairy Queen or whatever.

So the people in the country are getting it, and then those people that have already tested positive, you can let them start going back to work again. Of course, there has to be a way of taking their temperature because they say they can still get it again, but if people are taking the hydroxyquinolone, then it’s not gonna be as severe. And I just feel like there’s a way of doing this whole thing without keeping us, you know —

RUSH: You seem to think — you seem to believe — that it is related to the testing; if the testing could get up and running —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: — we could get some —

CALLER: Totally.

RUSH: — definitive, quick answers, we could get people back to work based on testing —

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: — not a vaccine?

CALLER: Exactly. Well, I mean, the vaccine, they say, is not gonna come for a while.

RUSH: Right, 18 months.

CALLER: But the other thing they have been doing, though, is taking the plasma from people who have been positive. And I don’t know what the results of that are, but they can give that to people who are sick, and they can… That then gives them, you know, the ability to make antibodies too. So maybe they’ll have a decreased viral load.

I mean, there’s all kinds of studies out there with drugs other than just vaccines to prevent the whole thing — and, you know, you said something about the mutation of the virus. They say there’s not been a whole bunch mutation; so that might make it an easier way of getting a vaccine.

RUSH: Well, I had read that there are eight, and Snerdley had read the same thing, and this is why… There’s so much information out there, and we don’t know what is accurate and what isn’t. I’m just fascinated by the fact that you believe that once Abbott gets all these tests up and running, that we can start testing massive numbers of people, and that if you’ve had it — if the test shows that you’ve had it — then you’re good to go.

I mean, there’s some people… I saw Marty Makary, who was from John Hopkins. He was on TV being asked this question last night on Bret Baier’s Special Report on Fox News, and they don’t have any clinical information. They’ve got some anecdotal evidence that some people get it a second time, but they have nothing that’s definitive clinical that they can say:

“Yeah, a guaranteed percentage of people are gonna get it a second time.” You seem to believe the test is key, that if people can get tested and have had it and are okay, that they could be cleared to leave home and go ahead and go to work. I can see that. I can see where the testing would be a relevant factor there. I appreciate, Carolyn, the call. Thank you. Thanks very much.