The level of hate mail Alex Berenson is getting must be mammoth. I've gotten a few nasty notes of late for daring to say that maybe we shouldn't let the United States become a totalitarian regime over fears of what is turning out to be a rather pathetic illness. But Alex is saying it a little more loudly, though sure, he's not quite reducing the rona to a cough. I'm doing that to poke a few overly sensitives who probably pride themselves on their ability to reason. But enough about me. Alex Berenson is a former reporter for The New York Times, and he's watching these COVID-19 models and finding a real problem with how we're reacting to them. Especially considering how wrong they're turning out to be.

Before getting to a few of his remarks and his tweets, I want to lead with his takeaway. It matters:

“Now we’re in a bad spot because there’s clearly a dangerous political dynamic right now -- the economy is in freefall, a lot of people are hurting. If we acknowledge what is clearly happening ... the people who made these decisions, I think there’s going to be a lot of anger at them, so they don't want to acknowledge it, so they say 'oh it's the lockdown that saved us,'” he says.

That's a message to be blasted far and wide by all who think 16 million unemployed people is a problem, even if they love their nans and pop-pops. The ruin people are going through is unprecedented. And much of this ballyhooing over a cough (you know where to send the hate mail!) was over wildly inaccurate models. So now we're approaching the age of Cover Your Ass, battling egos and people who've cleansed their pores with eggs.

Anecdotal evidence: my mom was recently in the ER for a thing. She's fine. She reported the hospital was a ghost town. As in nobody was there. Hospitals are not being overrun. Sure, they are being overrun in New York City, but where else? Seriously, where else? Related: James O'Keefe Visits COVID-19 Testing Center, Talks to People on Frontlines.

Despite what New York may think of itself, the rest of the country isn't New York. COVID-19 isn't ravaging the nation like the media hoped it would. And no, sorry, the social distancing isn't a factor. A lot of these models which predicted DEATH and DOOM accounted for plenty of social distancing and Instagram stay-at-home heart logos.

This matters for the big picture, because politicians and media who encouraged we all lock ourselves at home and pray for the passage of the Dark Corona insisted we distance ourselves, not go out, hole up, and wait it out. But the models were still high with all of that accounted for.

And yet the death toll isn't near what the "experts" predicted.

Recently [Berenson] has been focusing on discrepancies within the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model. That model has come under renewed scrutiny as it has revised its metrics multiple times. It once predicted more than 90,000 deaths by August but recently issued a new estimate that has the figure closer to 60,000. Government officials say it's a model that's moving with what the country is doing.

But those models took social distancing into account. I know I've said that already. Saying it again.

Here's what scares me more than running out of Mucinex DM: Experts will try to take credit for lessening the impact of this virus because we all did what we were told. That shouldn't just scare me, it should scare the caca out of you, too.

“Aside from New York, nationally there’s been no health system crisis. In fact, to be truly correct there has been a health system crisis, but the crisis is that the hospitals are empty,” he said. “This is true in Florida where the lockdown was late, this is true in southern California where the lockdown was early, it's true in Oklahoma where there is no statewide lockdown. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the lockdown and whether or not the epidemic has spread wide and fast.”

As I said in the opening, this disease has made emotional nuts out of many. I will get more hate mail after this, for sure.

But this story, from here on out, shouldn't be about masks, ventilators, coughs, or what Netflix show you've watched during the great Quarantine of 2020. What we should all be asking is how has the nationwide reaction to this pandemic changed our political policies and republic? If we, as a nation, were quick to surrender our freedoms over fear of spreading a virus, a virus that is proving to be less deadly by the day, how will the government use this new knowledge for other "emergencies" like global warming?

Have people died from COVID-19? Yes. But 7,700 Americans die every single day (go Google it and go down the mortality rabbit hole all by yourself). Heart disease, cancer, complications from any number of illnesses and ailments kill Americans daily. Influenza takes thousands of lives every single year (from 25,000-60,000). This one happens to have a lot of media attention during an election year in what was the greatest economy in a long freaking time. So I'm sorry for people who've lost family members and friends to the rona, but people lose family members and friends to influenza every year, but without a running death ticker on a chyron graphic in big scary red letters.

We can't let the United States become a communist state just because there's a virus that makes people sick and some people die. Because, as I've said, that happens every single year. It happens every single day.

Life has to go on. What kind of life do you want it to be?