Laurence Tribe: It's time for us all to get infected and have lots of people die in order to achieve herd immunity

I can’t tell if he’s serious or if he’s making a rhetorical point about Trump’s failures.

Or if he’s just trying to get a Fox News gig.

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I mean, this is “recurring guest”-caliber material for Laura Ingraham’s show.

Whatever the answer, try to grasp that this dude used to be considered a respected public intellectual.

https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1251124028359741447

Lachlan Markay replied, “are you volunteering, or is this some chickenhawk punditry?”

As I say, it may be a critique of Trump. I.e. “We could limit deaths if we had treatments, but because our president is a lamebrain we won’t have those so we have no choice but to die en masse.”

I wish I shared his confidence that infection provides durable immunity to the disease. He seems to know more than epidemiologists do about that right now.

Anyway, if you read his daily Russiagate commentary on Twitter, you know Tribe’s always ready to one-up the competition in expressing his contempt for the president. “Your incompetence has left us no alternative but COVID Jonestown, Mr. President” would fit right in. That’s probably what this is about. The irony is, although there’s plenty to criticize in Trump’s handling of the crisis, there’s no reason to think he’s standing in the way of developing effective treatments. We’re not even 24 hours removed from news that a promising treatment may be coming, in fact.

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Hang in there until we have more data on remdesivir, Larry. If it’s a bust, then we can start planning a national pox party and decide where the mass graves are going to be dug.

In terms of what sort of body count we’d be looking at if we put the Tribe plan into practice, it’s hard to say. But Scott Gottlieb brought me up short last night with this point:

The infection fatality rate for the flu is around 0.1 percent. If ev-uh-ree-one in NYC was infected, which of course they aren’t, the fatality rate would be around .14 percent. That’s one of the best demonstrations yet that this illness is much worse than the flu. In fact, if we assume an infection rate in NYC of 15 percent — the same rate recently measured in pregnant women admitted to a New York hospital in late March — we’d have a fatality rate in the city of slightly less than one percent. Applied nationally, that would require somewhere around 1.8 million deaths before we reached Tribe’s 60 percent target for herd immunity.

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And all of this assumes that we’re counting deaths from COVID in New York City and beyond more or less accurately, without missing many. But that proposition is very much in doubt:

There are a lot of “excess deaths” in jurisdictions hit hard by the virus, not just in the U.S. but everywhere. Lost in the debate over how to distinguish people who died with the virus from people who died from the virus is a simple question: How do deaths in a given area in March 2020 compare to deaths in that area in March 2019? Absent some concurrent catastrophe happening locally alongside the coronavirus epidemic, it’s a safe bet that the increase in deaths this year from last year is due directly or indirectly (e.g., less hospital capacity) to COVID-19. Demographer Lyman Stone has taken to using total deaths instead of “official” coronavirus deaths to try to gauge the true death toll from the disease across different regions. His verdict: We shouldn’t be using the “official” toll as our metric of when it’s safe to reopen. Use the total regional death toll, which will be a truer measure of how many people are actually dying from the disease.

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Exit question: Why has New York been hit so much harder than every other U.S. city? Is the answer this obvious?

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