(CNSNews.com) - Dr. Phil McGraw, host of the “Dr. Phil Show,” told Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle” on Thursday that the quarantine is doing more harm than good, because of the health risks of isolation, depression, and anxiety.
“This is invisible. I can't show you an x-ray of depression. I can't show you an x-ray of anxiety, but the fact of the matter is the longer this lockdown goes on, the more vulnerable people get and it's like there's a tipping point. There's a point at which people start having enough problems in lockdown that it will actually create more destruction and actually more death across time than the actual virus will itself,” he said.
McGraw said that “250 people a year die from poverty, and the poverty line is getting such that more and more people are going to fall below that because the economy is crashing around us, and they're doing that because people are dying from the coronavirus,” McGraw said.
“I get that, but look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying,” McGraw said, adding that “45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don't shut the country down for that, but yet we are doing it for this and the fallout is going to last for years because people's lives are being destroyed.”
He said that small business owners, and specifically restaurant owners, have been hard hit because they couldn’t keep their employees on and didn’t have enough time to give away the perishable foods that they ordered.
I've talked to them before, and of course this happened, and when it happened they got no warning. Some of them had just received huge orders of perishable foods. They didn't even have time to give it away, and they have these, these people that have worked for them for 20 or 30 years, and they can't afford to keep them on, and they can't do takeout at a lot of these restaurants.
They are not geared for that, and so people are just at home, and of course, it's a perfect storm, Laura, because here you've got people that are in isolation. That creates problems. Loneliness actually creates problems. People that suffer from loneliness, they become 29% more likely to have coronary artery disease, 32% more likely to have strokes or die, 40% more likely to have dementia if they're in that age group, so it's not just that it's psychological.
Their bodies actually start breaking down. So we think we are protecting people's lives by keeping them locked up. You keep them locked up long enough, there's a paradoxical effect. You actually destroy more lives than you do by letting them go out and protect themselves and opt into their lives for what -- to fight for what they believe in.