Dr. Phil McGraw warned that psychological side effects from state lockdowns amid the coronavirus could produce more “destruction” than COVID-19.
While appearing on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, the self-help television host argued that prolonged social distancing measures designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus could themselves be deadly.
“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, who holds a doctorate in psychology but is not a licensed psychologist, compared the death toll of the virus to smoking, automobile accidents, and swimming pool accidents, but stated that “we don’t shut the country down for that.”
“Two hundred and fifty 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. I get that. But look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying. Forty-five thousand 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,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 480,000 people die each year from smoking in the United States, but the other statistics shared by McGraw were widely inflated.
The National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization, estimated there were 38,800 deaths from automobile accidents in 2019. According to the CDC, approximately 3,500 people have died from unintentional pool drownings from 2005 to 2014.
“But yet, we are doing it for this, and the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed,” McGraw said.
Of those tested for the coronavirus, over 2.1 million people have proven positive across every continent except Antarctica. At least 147,000 deaths have been associated with the virus, and more than 554,000 patients have recovered. In the U.S., there have been at least 671,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, and approximately 3,423,034 people have been tested, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
