Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford Medicine and a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. His March 24, 2020, commentary in the Wall Street Journal questions the premise that “coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines.” In the article he suggests that “there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.”

In this edition of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robinson asks Bhattacharya to defend that statement and describe to us how he arrived at this conclusion. We get into the details of his research, which used data collected from hotspots around the world and his background as a doctor, a medical researcher, and an economist.