There is a very dangerous conversation going on suggesting that the path to beating COVID is through herd immunity. This is massively dangerous, and will lead to the death of millions of Americans. Facts matter. Here are the ones you need (thread):
1/ First, if you're not already following @gregggonsalves you should. He is an epidemiologist, spend decades studying AIDS and knows this stuff. See his thread on herd immunity here:
2/ The idea that we can choose to kill people or grow our economy is also wrong. Sweden, famously has tried to pursue herd immunity and only managed to kill more Swedes and hurt their economy. medpagetoday.com/infectiousdise…
3/ This frankly isn't surprising. If lots of your neighbors are getting sick and dying from a contagious disease, you will be inclined to stay indoors, avoid restaurants, theaters and retail shops. You cannot grow the economy in the midst of a raging public health crisis.
4/ But let us suppose for a moment that you are completely amoral and you view economic growth as paramount, no matter how many people die. How many people would have to get infected in order to achieve herd immunity in that dystopian future?
5/ To know that, you have to know whether the virus will involve and how durable your immunity is once infected (assuming you are one of the lucky ones who doesn't die.) As former CDC director Tom Frieden points out here, we don't know those answers. drtomfrieden.net/blog/a-dozen-o…
6/ However, we do have a few recent studies that should scare the pants off you. After a surge in cases in Brazil, scientists concluded that "...up to 70%..." of the population may need to be exposed to achieve herd immunity. reuters.com/article/us-hea…
7/ This value is confirmed by a similar outbreak in Qatar where scientists concluded that "some communities" "have reached or nearly reached" herd immunity at infection rates of 65 - 70%. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
8/ So now let's do some math. As of this morning, according to Johns Hopkins there are just over 7 million confirmed COVID cases in the United States, or ~2.2% of the population. Over 200,000 Americans have died, or 2.9% of those infected. coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
9/ To be sure, there are more infections we don't know about. And the excess deaths above average suggest that our death rate from COVID is also substantially undercounted. But let's go with the data we have. cnbc.com/2020/07/01/off…
10/ If we are to get to the ~65% infection rate that seems to be required for herd immunity, we will need to infect 65% x 332M, or 216 million Americans. Put another way, that's 209 million Americans more than we have already.
11/ Today, almost 3% of Americans who get infected are dying. But remember back in March when we were talking about the need to flatten the curve and hospitals were getting overloaded? The death rate then was >6%.
12/ We've learned a lot about ventilator management and treatment, but there is simply no way that a 30x increase in COVID infection rates doesn't overload hospitals. To assume death rates will be <6% is naive at best, evil at worst.
13/ 6% x 209 million = 12.5 million dead Americans. That is the population of New York and Los Angeles combined. That is the price you have to be willing to bear if you embrace herd immunity as a disease management strategy. It. Is. Brutal.
14/ And here's the thing: we don't have to do that. We can simply follow the examples that New Zealand, South Korea and so many other countries of done that has gotten the virus under control, even without a vaccine.
15/ Namely: Test. Contact Trace. Wear a mask. Social distance. Provide quarantine housing for those who are infected. We don't need to do any science to know whether that works - those countries have already proven it works.
16/ They did that from the start and felt much less economic pain because it's way cheaper to control the spread of a virus before it spreads. We should have, and if Trump hadn't politicized science we would have too.
17/ Is it hard to do that now? Of course it is. We all want our kids back in school and our business re-open. But that pain pales beside killing 12 million Americans.
18/ ANYONE suggesting that we should put short-term personal inconvenience ahead of public health is implicitly advocating for massive American deaths. Please don't do this. And please don't elevate voices who treat your life with such disregard. /fin
Postscript just shared with me from a friend who saw this thread. As the UK thinks about this question they are asking "what can we learn from the US debacle?". We didn't have to be the poster child in how not to handle a pandemic.
Stephen Miller is trying to provoke people into responding to the government's unlawful use of force because he wants his own Reichstag Fire. This is an old, and very dangerous playbook. Take video. Resist peacefully. But don't give these fascists what they want.
Abraham Lincoln famously said that "in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail. Against it, nothing can succeed." The crimes they are committing are horrific but keep that public sentiment in mind: neither their agenda nor their M.O. is popular.
Miller aspires to be Goebbels. Ridicule him, mock him and RESIST in ways that are public, visible and don't give into a single one of his evil dreams. Turn him into Bull Connor.
If you were under the impression that Trump & Witkoff’s abuse of presidential power with CZ Zhao was the only situation where the Trump family was violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause with a crypto criminal, we need to now move onto Justin Sun. Buckle up:
1. Sun created the Tron blockchain which, according to some estimates has housed the majority of the illicit (read: money laundering) crypto activity. trmlabs.com/resources/blog…
2. I have no idea how you calculate that number (because if you know where all the crime is, shouldn’t you be able to stop it?) But regardless, crypto is almost perfectly designed to do crime and if your leaders aren’t ethical it will. Ethics and Sun seem not to mix.
Just updated my regular look at what power sources are driving the US electric sector on a % basis. Nice cause for optimism. Renewables still growing. Coal use slightly increasing recently but all at the expense of natural gas - which is just economic switching.
e.g, markets are still preferentially deploying and dispatching in least cost order. (In non econ speak: people prefer cheap energy). The push to export LNG has predictably pushed up domestic gas costs giving coal a slight preference on the margin but renewables still win.
Here's a simpler look, just comparing zero carbon to carbon-based generation. We aren't where we need to be yet but the trends are steady.
Here’s a brief story, with receipts about Trump administration corruption and crypto industry collusion that WILL be investigated once the majority of the House is filled with people who take ethics and the Constitution seriously:
1. First, in November 2023, Binance (a large crypto exchange) pled guilty to money laundering and agreed to pay a $4 BILLION fine. Also, their founder CZ Zhao was sentenced to 4 months in prison. justice.gov/archives/opa/p…
2. Read that again. They pled guilty. They acknowledged their guilt. And agreed to pay a lot of money. And their founder and CEO went to jail.
Lisa Cook is ALLEGED to have committed crimes by a man who was CONVICTED of 34 felonies. Due process matters. A country based on the rule of law that attracts foreign capital because of that promise should be steadfast in opposition to her termination.
When I said yesterday that this was only about racism it kicked up a nest of trolls. But the second part is the one that hurts us all - white, black, racist and tolerant alike. We will all be poorer if the world loses faith in the US economy.
@JustinWolfers noted yesterday that really bad things happen when you don't have an independent monetary policy committed to low inflation and/or don't have an executive committed to upholding the rule of law.
Van Drew is of course full of shit. He's a disposable sycophant who gets some TV time prior to his disposal. But just to humor him, let's pretend for a moment that you are Dr. Evil and are setting out to tamper with our democracy. How would you do it? (thread)
1. It's worth going through this exercise because if you want to catch a criminal, you have to think like a criminal. So assume you have nefarious intent but want to minimize your chances of getting caught and spend the fewest possible resources to flip the most possible votes.
2. Everything Van Drew describes is actually really hard on both fronts. States have voter registries. Your ballot may be slightly different from your neighbors ballot a few blocks away because you're in a different fire/school/library/judicial/etc district.