On Tuesday, it became apparent what the independent mayor may have had in mind. She said she wants to reopen casinos, assuming 100 percent of the population are carriers of the novel coronavirus.

Let them, and visitors, gather and gamble, smoke in confined spaces, touch slot machines all day — and let the chips, and apparently the infections, fall where they may.

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“Assume everybody is a carrier,” the mayor said Tuesday on MSNBC. “And then you start from an even slate. And tell the people what to do. And let the businesses open and competition will destroy that business if, in fact, they become evident that they have disease, they’re closed down. It’s that simple.”

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The perspective left MSNBC host Katy Tur visibly dumbfounded. The next day, Goodman went on to shock another host, Anderson Cooper of CNN, telling him that she’s previously asked the city statistician if they could be a control group for the virus but the statistician told her people commute into the city and it wouldn’t work.

“We offered to be a control group,” she said. “It was offered, it was turned down.”

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Cooper displayed a graphic depicting how the virus could spread in a restaurant in China to ask Goodman about the risk of the virus among diners, but Goodman interjected.

“This isn’t China,” she said, “this is Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Wow, that’s really ignorant,” Cooper responded.

Goodman, who has criticized Nevada’s lockdown as “total insanity,” cited lesser outbreaks of infectious diseases to prove that Las Vegas, which faces a deficit of nearly $150 million in the next 18 months, had shown the kind of resiliency necessary for it to reopen.

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“We’ve survived the West Nile and SARS, bird flu, E. coli, swine flu, the Zika virus,” the mayor told MSNBC.

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She was cut off by Tur, who reminded the mayor that those viruses did not come close to the level of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 840,000 confirmed cases and more than 46,000 deaths in the United States as of early Thursday.

“Those were not as contagious,” Tur said of the diseases the mayor rattled off. “They were not as contagious and they did not spread as far as this disease has already done.”

“Well, we’ll find out the facts afterward,” Goodman replied. “Unfortunately, we all do better in hindsight.”

“But those are the facts,” Tur replied, looking baffled. “We have a death toll that proves it. We have cases around the country that prove that,” she said. “Those are the facts.”

As The Washington Post reported, several states, including Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, have announced limited easing of business and recreational closures, starting between this week and the end of the month. This has gone on while small groups of protesters throughout the United States, encouraged by President Trump, have gathered to demand their governors reopen the American economy.

Nevada ranks 22nd among the states, U.S. territories and the District of Columbia in cases per 100,000 people, with over 4,000 cases and 187 deaths from the virus as of Thursday morning. It has been under a mandatory state-imposed lockdown of all nonessential businesses. Goodman has voiced disdain for the lockdown order from Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D).

Although Trump noted over the weekend how Sisolak’s order resulted in “a big hotel” of his being shut down, he said he was “okay” with the governor’s lockdown. “But you could call that one either way,” Trump said at his Sunday coronavirus news briefing. Las Vegas is projected to receive as much as $160 million in stimulus funding, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Goodman’s perspective was not shared by Stephen Cloobeck, a former chairman and chief executive of Diamond Resorts International.

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“She has nothing to do with the strip, and we’re sick and tired of hearing this,” Cloobeck told MSNBC.

Goodman’s office did not return a request for comment late Tuesday.

Although Goodman is the mayor of Las Vegas, she doesn’t have jurisdiction over the iconic Las Vegas Strip, the four-mile stretch of mega-hotels and casinos that sits south of the city limits in unincorporated Clark County.

In the MSNBC interview, Goodman said that “assuming” Tur was correct about the severity of the coronavirus data, the city’s ability to handle large crowds was reason enough for it to reopen.

“We do deal in crowds and we have lived through all of these viruses, highly contagious diseases, and yet we have managed to continue to have wonderful conventions come up here,” she said.

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Again, Tur had to interject.

“Mayor Goodman, there is no assuming that I’m correct,” she said. “Those are the numbers that are released by the federal government.”

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When Goodman cited Nevada’s relatively moderate case and death numbers compared to those in some parts of the country, Tur asked whether that was a result of social distancing and no one being in the casinos and restaurants along the Las Vegas Strip. The mayor answered the question with another question.