See, trying to prevent coronavirus from becoming an unrestrained epidemic costs money. Also time. There are all those cancelled conferences. Declining airline revenues. Deals that can’t be dealt.

During his bid to get slotted in between Dracula and The Creature in the pantheon of notable monsters, Santelli repeatedly compares the coronavirus to “the generic-type flu,” even as he concedes that it’s not the generic-type flu. But hey, if it were, we’d only be killing somewhere between 12,000 and 60,000 Americans to get those business wheels back to spinning at full speed. Barely a road bump.

Of course, no one has any immunity to the novel coronavirus, and there is no vaccine. So even if it has the same fatality rate as the flu, the number of deaths would be more like 320,000 … but still, have you seen Delta’s stock? Measures must be taken.

And then there’s the fact that so far the case fatality rate of coronavirus isn’t 0.1% like that of generic flu. It’s 3.4%. So … 10 million Americans? Is that still something Santelli would rush to embrace in order to get everyone back to work and boost that market up, up, up? Honestly, it’s best not to ask.