The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration

by glhaynes • 6 years ago

34 7 6 years ago

madhadron2• 6 years ago

It's astonishing that a crackpot like this has a chair at NYU (the summary of his legal work seems pretty out to lunch, too). Though it looks like the chair was created by a billionaire for him, so it's probably because the billionaire needed the crackpot to have some legitimacy.

fortran77• 6 years ago

NYU is full of crackpots!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyu-dean-sends-dance-video-in-r...

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

I skimmed through the interview.

He's a lawyer, not an epidemiologist, but actually there's some interesting non-scientific points made based on his HIV epidemic experience that might spur somebody to creatively look at today's available stats, etc.

- another thread mentioned corona virus being temperature-sensitive. Can that be correlated with deaths by city?

- are there different strains of covid-19 with different strengths?

- what stats do we have that are reliable?

- H5N1 and H1N1 were also corona viruses. what can we learn from them?

- The reason we shut down the economy is because there's not enough ventilators, so it's worthwhile to look at the numbers, while making more ventilators.

- has anybody survived corona virus and being on a respirator? If not, the lockdown may not be helping since we aren't developing herd immunity to it.

madhadron2• 6 years ago

His HIV experience is nonsense.

- another thread mentioned corona virus being temperature-sensitive. Can that be correlated with deaths by city?

Nope.

- are there different strains of covid-19 with different strengths?

Nope.

- what stats do we have that are reliable?

Very few, but we've got lower bounds.

- H5N1 and H1N1 were also corona viruses. what can we learn from them?

Those are influenza strains, not corona viruses. Did he actually say that? If so I missed that bit of stupidity. We use the same epidemiological models for flu. I don't know where he got the idea that we don't.

- The reason we shut down the economy is because there's not enough ventilators, so it's worthwhile to look at the numbers, while making more ventilators.

Uh...no.

- has anybody survived corona virus and being on a respirator? If not, the lockdown may not be helping since we aren't developing herd immunity to it.

Yes. And herd immunity is not the goal here. Herd immunity involves a nontrivial percentage of the population dead and 20% of the population in intensive care for weeks. That will destroy the economy much more than any lockdown measure we could take.

temp20160423• 6 years ago

There is some evidence that humidity and temperature do influence the transmission rate: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767

tartoran• 6 years ago

What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case. And, if that’s wrong, somebody should tell me. But what happens is I just get these letters from people saying, “You’re not an expert. The H1 virus differs from this one in the following way.” What I don’t get from anybody is a systematic refutation which looks at the points parameter by parameter.

This guy is not very intelligent and worse, he is very stubborn and that costs human lives.

The way he talks about the virus weakning seems to me like he’s confusing cause and effect big time and nobody is going to be able to disproove his theory the way he wants. Cut his mike, take him offline. He is in no position to give his advice.

The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration

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