RUSH: All right, this cannot go on, folks. It cannot go on. Even Barry Diller now is calling this cataclysmic, and it is cataclysmic, and we’ve done it to ourselves, and it’s time we stop. We’re at a point now where, no matter how many people die from coronavirus, it’s not gonna equate to the damage done to the U.S. economy.

Twenty-two million people have lost their jobs. Stop and think of this. This is not some academic number. This is a number that’s affecting everybody. The 22 million who are without work, the rest of us who are without what they do, we are without the job, the production, the service, whatever those 22 million people do, we don’t have.

It is hurting all of us. And it’s scary that there are still people who want to maintain this and have it get even worse. Literally scary. But as I have been saying — I’ve been overusing the word — this isn’t sustainable. It hasn’t been sustainable for a month. It has to change. We have to get serious about some things and we have to admit some things to ourselves. And we have to adapt, which is what we human beings are great at doing. We adapt to whatever we find.

This is why the apocalyptic nature of climate change is ridiculous. We’ll adapt, whatever happens. The climate is always changing, the argument over whether man’s doing it, we adapt. Human beings always have. Others in the life chain, other animals adapt or they don’t make it. Some people call adaptation evolution. I want to stay away from the word. The point is we’re gonna have to adapt. And by that I mean we’re gonna have to adapt and accept that people will continue to die after we reopen the economy.

We have to remember that people died every day in America before the coronavirus came along. I love the flu comparison that I gave yesterday. This is stunning. And, by the way, the modeler who hasn’t yet been right, was on TV again today saying breathlessly he’s going to have new data this afternoon. And the new data is gonna project even fewer deaths than the current 61,000 deaths that his model is projecting by August.

In 2018, in that year’s flu season, 810,000 people were hospitalized, and it did not put any pressure on the American hospital system. You don’t even remember it. Nobody was even complaining about it because we’ve accepted the number of flu deaths. Because we’ve got a vaccine people think there’s something we can do about it. The number of hospitalizations from COVID-19 doesn’t even approach 100,000. We have not stressed the hospital system.

We’ve had one area of the country which has received the bulk of this. It’s New York, and the media has tried to portray New York as a forerunner to what was gonna happen to the rest of the country, just as they did in the eighties when they tried to tell everybody that AIDS was going to jump the chain and become a heterosexually spread disease and we were all dead. That never happened. The same thing here, projecting what’s happening in New York. New York’s the forerunner. New York’s the cutting edge. Get ready. New York is coming to your neighborhood.

It isn’t. New York’s hospitalizations are way down, according to Governor Cuomo today, and they are now giving ventilators away. The original demand, Governor Cuomo originally demanded 30,000 ventilators, and the president said, “What are you talking about? We don’t need 30,000 ventilators.” And the media jumped all over Trump. “What do you mean? You’re being really, really mean. The governor knows what he needs.”

Ultimately they needed 5,000 ventilators in New York. I’m not trying to start an argument with those of you in New York. I’m not trying to say it wasn’t bad. I’m saying that we have to get this economy going. It doesn’t matter what happens. We will adapt. I have far more faith in the American people’s ability to adapt than I do in a bunch of bureaucrats trying to tell all of us how to live, which is what we’re up against.

I mean, that’s the basic, if you want to call it a competition, that’s the competition that’s been set up today. A group of the best and brightest, the elites, whoever they are, wherever they are, believing that you and I can’t deal with the hardships of life without being sheltered, protected, covered, advised, what have you. And, course, we can because we do every day. We probably deal with hardship better than they do. If anybody’s shielded and protected from it, it is them. That’s one of the reasons why they want to be elites and be in the club.

But now with 22 million weekly jobless claims, the new number is 5.245 million. So if you add that to previous weeks’ claims, 22 million people. This data proves that the number of deaths from the severe economic downturn will dwarf the deaths from the virus. And there won’t be any need for padding. This economy, if we don’t get it back up and running, is going to kill its own subset of people. There will be people who will die from it for any host of reasons. It simply isn’t a matter of debate any longer. It’s not a matter of discussion.

I saw Senator Kennedy from Louisiana on the tube last night, and I was so happy to see it because he was essentially saying what I’m saying now. We have to get the economy going. We don’t have any choice, folks. We can’t wait any longer. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The number of deaths are coming in way below the projections. And, yes, I’m gonna admit, people are gonna continue to get this virus after we reopen the economy, and yes, Donald Trump is gonna get blamed for it, and yes, Donald Trump knows.

We all know what’s gonna happen. We all know what’s gonna happen in the news. We all know what’s gonna happen politically. It doesn’t matter. We have to be up and running. We cannot allow this to continue. It has gone on way, way too long. No matter what, this is not sustainable.

So much news. Bret Baier of Fox News broke the news yesterday that indeed the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, accidentally. It was not weaponized, it was not a bioweapon. The point is it didn’t come from the wet markets. And we knew this. We knew the virus didn’t come from the wet markets when the ChiComs reopened the wet markets last week. They wouldn’t have reopened the wet markets if that was the source. We know where this came from.

The question is, what did the ChiCom leadership do when they found out about it? We discussed it yesterday and I subscribe to the theory that the ChiComs decided to shut up about it, pretend it wasn’t happening, lie about it, pretend that it wasn’t contagious. They knew it was going to cause big problems for them in Wuhan. They knew it was going to cause economic turmoil, and they didn’t want to be the only ones suffering the economic turmoil in their worldview of worldwide competition.

They weren’t gonna be the only ones hit even though the virus is owned and operated by them, even though it originated in their country. So what did they do? They stood down and didn’t do anything to stop its spread. They allowed travel. They encouraged it. They used puppeteers at the World Health Organization to assure everybody there was no danger, that it was not contagious, it was not transmissible, that you have nothing to worry about.

American leftists and Democrats believing in global institutions immediately picked up the World Health Organization chant. By the way, you know what you can’t find anymore, Mr. Snerdley? You can’t find the video of Nancy Pelosi urging people to come to Chinatown in San Francisco to have a party back in January. She’s taken it down. You know what she replaced it with? You talk about tone-deaf. Nancy Pelosi appeared on one of the late-night shows, so-called, comedy shows last night. And you know what she did?

She posed in front of two $5,000 Sub-Zero refrigerators to show everybody how the Pelosi family is dealing with this. And then she opened the freezer in one of the Sub-Zeros and it’s nothing but ice cream. Nancy Pelosi says she loves ice cream. She’s very fortunate to be able to get it. She bragged and talked about all the flavors that she had in there. She said that the ice cream gives her energy. And she did all this with an attitude that she honestly believes we all care and we hope that she’s bearing up.

You want to talk about how smart Donald Trump is. The United States Congress has fled Washington. He owns it. He is alone in Washington, D.C. He is alone appearing to be engaged. He is alone appearing to be working on it, and meanwhile Congress is acting afraid to come back, afraid to come back, afraid they might be infected, afraid of this, afraid of that. The irony is that Congress wants to change the rules so that it can actually change the rules from afar. Right now rules in Congress, rules changes have to occur by virtue of people being present in the chamber to vote on it.

So if they want to change the rules to allow rules votes while members are not in the chamber, they still have to come back to the chamber for that vote, and they’re not gonna do it — and Trump owns Washington.