The people who are suffering the most are minorities. There’s no question about that. By the way, that’s in no small part because minorities tend to be living in major cities where they’re living close together. But they also are the people — I mean, look at the people in the soup lines and the people waiting for The Salvation Army trucks. I mean, they are minorities as well. They are the ones whose lives have been really shattered.

We can use really good public safety measures, social distancing the work force, disinfectants everywhere, masks. I was thinking this morning, and this is just kind of a thought experiment because I was thinking about this — why don’t we just put everybody in a space outfit or something like that? No. Seriously, I mean —

Well, we’d have to make the space outfits, right?

I know we don’t have space outfits [laughter]— I mean, just thinking out loud, and maybe this is a crazy idea, but instead of just locking down the economy, putting everybody in a kind of — you’re right. You have to make 200 million of these, but it wouldn’t have cost $3 trillion to do that. And you can have for months people just walking around in these kind of — I mean, I was looking online, and there are all these kinds of suits that they’re building now that you’re not exposed and you’re breath — kind of ventilator.

Speaking of lacking mass production, do you think the testing is there to reopen? There’s an argument that you can’t go back to work without more testing.

I have a strong feeling about that, which is I think that the people who are in favor of keeping the economy shut down, that testing has become an excuse to keep the economy locked down for more weeks.

That’s become the mantra, right? We have to have testing. Nobody argues that testing isn’t a good thing. But can we afford to wait three weeks or whatever it’s going to take so we have all the testing? No. We’ve got to start now. Look, the summer is going to be a catastrophe. It’s going to be really, really bad. We’re going to have long, long unemployment lines, and we’re going to see 15, 20 percent unemployment, just horrific. They talk about bending the curve of the disease, but we also have to bend the curve of unemployment, poverty.

Americans, I think, are just under this delusion that what’s going to happen is a month from now, it will all be — we’ll have hopefully conquered this disease, and we can all go outside again. It will be sort of back to what it was. No. It’s going to be like a nuclear bomb was dropped on the economy. People aren’t just going to go right back to their jobs and so on. It’s going to be really, really, really rough. We’re going to have effects that affect our society for a decade from this shutdown.