Trump wins!


I have good news for Trump fans: While your hero didn’t win the election, he has won the day in an even more significant way, with a lot of help from his medical adviser Dr. Scott Atlas. You see, Trump long ago gave up on actually trying to control the coronavirus. His reason, of course, was that he was bored with the whole pandemic thing, and he didn’t see any election upside in trying to do anything more about it. He was just going to wait for a vaccine to be widely distributed and effective, even though that will probably not be until the second half of next year.

But he needed a scientific rationale, no matter how specious, for this approach. Enter Dr. Atlas. Without saying the words “herd immunity”, he was sure that the only thing to do was to let the virus run unchecked, while supposedly taking steps to protect the “most vulnerable”, mainly the elderly; of course, the fly in that ointment is the elderly need younger people to take care of them, so if the virus is running wild in the general population, it will ultimately reach the elderly as well, as indeed it has. But since Dr. Atlas (and indeed, the entire administration) was under no mandate to think of any consequences beyond the election, he didn’t need to worry about that little detail.

So I’m very pleased to report that Dr. Atlas can claim victory: As the Times described today, the US has mostly given up even trying to contact trace all cases, so we’re now guaranteed to have huge increases in cases at least for the next could of months – and at a million new cases every week (with that rate itself rapidly increasing), we’re off to a great start on achieving the 50-70% population infection rate that will be required for herd immunity. True, we’ll have to have 15-25 times the current number of infections in order to actually achieve herd immunity, but with exponential growth, we’ll be there in no time! Perhaps even before vaccines are widely available.

Of course, deaths aren’t growing at nearly the same rate yet, and we still have at least a few weeks before we reach the peak levels of late March and early April: 3,000 deaths a day, equal to one 9/11 every day. But deaths are guaranteed to keep increasing, perhaps at an exponential rate, as more and more hospitals reach capacity. However, this isn’t a big concern, since there’s currently no looming shortage of morgue trucks.

Unfortunately for Trump, it seems the voters didn’t quite get the sheer beauty of what he and Atlas are trying to do. Just shows that life is unfair, to quote Jimmy Carter.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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