HERD MENTALITY

It would appear Donald Trump can't keep track of the implications of his various positions.

Last week, on a virtual Town Hall meeting featuring questions from typical voters (not reporters, and certainly not Fox News sycophants), Trump played up—as he often does—the importance of his very decisive action in closing the US border to China.

He maintains he saved two million lives by doing that.

The statement is in dispute (as are the majority of his utterances). By the time he took this heroic action, community spread had already begun in this country. It's likely very few lives were actually saved.

Also, closing borders is not always the best idea. Having potential disease vectors report through customs makes them a lot easier to track. Not to mention, people escaping from China might be more cooperative with authorities than locals who don't know they're infected and may even doubt the reality of the disease.
 
But Trump is obsessed with this number: two million lives. He takes full credit for having saved these folks. You might even say he thinks the country owes him a couple of million lives, to do with as he pleases.

We know now what he has in store for them: They will be sacrificed on the altar of the Covid god.

During that same Town Hall meeting, Trump again put forward his theory that the virus would disappear on its own. No vaccine necessary.

This notion is leftover from the early days of the pandemic, but has undergone a series of makeovers.

At first, when there were only fifteen cases in the US, Trump said those cases would, in a few days, go to zero. I presume he meant the sick folks would get better very soon, thus absolutely ending this threat to his reelection.

Later, he suggested "some people" thought the virus would die out as the weather got warmer in April. You know, just like seasonal flu seems to evaporate as time marches on.

Trump seems to think the virus literally dies as the temperature warms. What really happens is that when the weather improves, folks get the hell out of that heated room where everybody shares whatever viral load they happen to possess.

Viruses don't so much die as lose their hosts. Individual particles of virus are protected from outside weather (hot or cold) by the internal "weather" of the human bodies they're lounging around in.

And the insides of humans are typically warmer than April all year round.

Trump also used to say the virus would sweep across the country like a wave—and vanish. What he failed to mention was that the wave in question would also wash a vast number of dead bodies out to sea.

"Sweeping across" a country is a benign way of saying a population has reached herd immunity. If a virus can't find new meat, it fails to move forward. When the last guy with the disease recovers—or succumbs—the virus gets dumped into the sewers, one way or another.

Numbers vary, but herd immunity is thought to kick in when something like 65-70% of the population has endured the disease—and therefore can't be reinfected.

There are two problems with using this model for a solution to the current pandemic:

Not enough is known about the virus to say for sure if herd immunity is even possible. There is some evidence that simple immunity—protection from reinfection—is not as predictable for covid as it is for seasonal flu. Folks may be getting sick with Covid-19 weeks or months after their initial recovery from the disease.

(The immunity provided by vaccines might also have a limited lifespan. It's too early to know.)

Herd immunity may not be possible, but trying to achieve it is very expensive, in terms of the lives of the country making that attempt.

Death rates vary from place to place. Some health systems are better than others. Plus there are varieties of the virus in circulation.

But figuring an overall death rate of one percent, the number of Americans that need to die for the country to reach herd immunity is well over two million.

Subtracting the number already killed, call it two million even.

Exactly the number of dead this country owes Donald Trump!

The notion of herd immunity (or "herd mentality," as Trump referred to it at the Town Meeting) is likely to have come from Dr. Scott Atlas, a new medical advisor brought into the White House by Trump in mid August.

Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist, but he was a frequent contributor to Fox News, where he played up herd immunity as a worthy goal.

The man is clearly catnip to the president. Not only does his proposed solution require Trump to do nothing, but the guy comes fully vetted by Fox News, the only variety of news supported by the president.

One might even say Fox News rules the country, via their faithful puppet Donald Trump: the puppet that never became a boy. And as a result never had to grow up.

I wonder if Donald Trump is old enough to be president.