Sean Casten Profile picture
Sep 29, 2020 20 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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.

bmj.com/content/370/bm…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Sean Casten

Sean Casten Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @SeanCasten

Oct 26
It's been a while since I've done a non-political nerd thread. And I wish I could do them more often! So let's do a palette cleanse to talk about this article from WaPo that is technically true, but deeply misinformative about US electric markets. washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
1. Read the whole article, but the big problem is this paragraph. It's true that electricity isn't like other markets, but not because it has high fixed costs. It's because it is a regulated market that isn't subject to those forces you learn in Economics 101. Image
2. Econ 101 doesn't say that falling demand forces lower costs. It says that happens IF you have competitive markets. When demand falls, you cut costs to try and hold onto market share - not because your changing cost structure compels you to pass savings onto your customers.
Read 23 tweets
Oct 25
Mike Johnson refuses to open the House. Refuses to do oversight. Refuses to defend the Constitutional rights that only protect so long as they are enforced. Refuses to stand up to child predators. So we organized our own hearing in Chicago yesterday.
And if you’re objecting to this on the grounds that I accused Trump of being a child predator… well, you can choose to follow Mike Johnsons example and protect child predators too. Or you could insist on the release of the Epstein files that might clear his name.
Maybe that release will explain why this isn’t as disgusting and criminal as it sounds. courthousenews.com/wp-content/upl…Image
Read 8 tweets
Oct 21
If you care about the rule of law, you should furious that Rep. McIver is forced to defend herself against trumped-up, bogus charges today while so many legitimate criminals are being ignored or pardoned by Trump & his cronies. thehill.com/regulation/cou…
First, it is INSANE that Mike Johnson accused McIver of "inappropriate behavior" and sits silently in the face of this. abcnews.go.com/Politics/girlf…
And that the entire Republican party continues not only to sit in silent cowardice, but also to valorize a guy who pardoned people who attacked the US Capitol and were subsequently re-arrested for threatening to kill members of Congress. cbsnews.com/news/pardoned-…
Read 7 tweets
Oct 14
This is disgusting. And I can GUARANTEE you that lots of dumps are going to come out about lots of Republican electeds who are way too close to the people in these texts. politico.com/news/2025/10/1…
This is a good crowdsourcing project. Suggest you look through for names in your state, see who you can connect them to. For example, there’s this guy. Image
And there’s this guy. I’ll keep adding as I find more. Image
Read 7 tweets
Oct 4
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. Image
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.
Read 5 tweets
Sep 18
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.
Read 18 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(