It's not a choice between living recklessly vs living in fear. It's a choice to live responsibly, to balance sensible precautions with continuing to live our lives.
He is still, even now, trying to frame a false choice.
He wants you to believe we must choose between taking no risks or accepting all risks.
That's not the choice, that was never the choice.
The choice was and is incompetent outbreak response vs competent outbreak response.
We were never going to be South Korea, but we could have been Germany - early surge, followed by evidence-based and competent government response.
German businesses are open, German kids are back in school. Safely.
That outcome doesn't come from *fearing* the virus.
It comes from *understanding* it.
When you understand it, you can balance the first and second-order risks while controlling the spread.
We've done the opposite.
Because of a government that has ignored evidence-based strategy, and ignored risks rather than balancing and managing them, we have the worst of both worlds: a ineptly led response that both damages livelihoods *and* fails at controlling the virus.
Trump's whole ballgame here is to distract you from that incompetence.
To forget that there is an alternate timeline in which we could be, like Germany, living both safely and somewhat closer to normal. Instead of here, in the darkest timeline.
Don't fall for it.
If he emerges from his illness without enduring damage to his health, good for him. And good for the world-class doctors who treated him. But that doesn't make the virus any more or less deadly than it was.
And if his supporters take this tweet as license to ignore the risks - which is clearly his intent - it will lead to many more deaths.
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The three academics lay out their case here. It's pretty brief and easy to read.
Interestingly, it does not cite or reference a single piece of research to support their arguments, nor does the linked website containing their sign-on "declaration." unherd.com/2020/10/covid-…
The basic argument:
- COVID poses little risk of death beyond specific vulnerable groups
- Non-vulnerables face little risk so should just go ahead and get the disease
- Vulnerables should be sheltered while non-vulnerables get naturally infected
- Ta-da, natural herd immunity
Douthat's column and the powerful @AlecMacGillis piece it references both argue without much evidence that the resistance to school reopening is largely a reaction to Trump pushing schools to open.
Let's be explicitly clear: "learning to live with it" means needlessly accepting hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths and letting our hospitals get nuked yet again.
"Close the country" vs "learn to live with it" is a false choice, and one that exists only because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic.
Peer countries have had shorter closures than we have precisely because they chose not to live with it but to control it.
There is an option besides indefinite closure vs let-it-rip: evidence-driven reopening + aggressive public health interventions centered around mass testing and tracing.
Trump's whole game since back in April/May is to make you forget that option exists.
The West Wing and EEOB facilities are conducive to transmission - small, enclosed spaces with limited airflow (many/most suites in EEOB have secure doors and windows that are always closed).
So there's real risk of rolling spread throughout the staff.
But must balance keeping government running with stopping spread.
White House should immediately take several steps:
- First, quarantine anyone who was in direct contact with POTUS or other confirmed. Fact that McEnany was still working y'day suggests this hasn't happened.
Ebola and COVID are VERY different diseases that transmit and behave VERY differently.
Unlike, COVID, Ebola:
- Does not spread asymptomatically
- Is not very contagious at symptom onset, becomes more contagious as symptoms worsen
- Spreads thru direct contact with bodily fluids
This means the precautions for both diseases are very different.
Under Obama we developed a careful system for screening returning travelers from West Africa, based on the science (remember science?) of how the virus spreads. I wrote about it here: cgdev.org/publication/st…