Should we go with herd immunity or stay with herd mentality?

Roger Kimball writes in part in American Greatness,

“Herd immunity” is a settled concept in epidemiology. It occurs when “a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune.”

“Herd mentality,” on the contrary, provides immunity from independent thought. It protects a population from thinking clearly by spreading a spirit of conformity. It increases a people’s docility, thus rendering them more susceptible to the blandishments of usurping authority.

...It would be interesting to know more about the demographic breakdown of the New York fatalities. How old were the victims? How many had been to China? In what state of health were they? How many actually died from the direct effects of the virus (mostly pneumonia), how many were sick from the virus but actually died from another illness or illnesses? The numbers we’ve seen do not carry their full meaning on their faces.

...Even in New York City, where hospitals have had to scramble to keep up with the cataract of patients, there is no crisis. Told that there would be, the president had Manhattan’s Javits Center converted into a 1,000-bed hospital and brought the Navy medical ship Comfort with its 500 beds to dock in Manhattan. As I write, Comfort has a total of 60-odd cases, while the Javits Center’s impromptu hospital has only 225 patients. Both are “mostly empty.” How long will it be before both follow the lead of the Army field hospital in Seattle? It was hastily erected to deal with the predicted surge in COVID-19 patients. But the surge never came. Over the course of nine days, it never saw a patient. Now it is leaving.

Elsewhere at American Greatness, Julie Kelly provides a useful timeline of the evolution of the chief COVID models and the advice dispensed by Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. They, along with Surgeon General Jerome Adams, have been the shiny expert faces of the president’s coronavirus task force. As Kelly notes, “Fauci, Birx, and Adams have sent too many mixed messages from the start. While at first diminishing the threat of COVID-19, they now are sowing fear and panic across the country.”

Indeed. And the fruits of that fear and panic, fed by a series of speculative models whose predictions have had consistently to be adjusted downwards, “led to the swiftest and most destructive economic decline in U.S. history with no relief in sight.”

Are you worried about human lives? Then focus your attention not on this year’s respiratory virus but on the wild, herd-like overreaction to the virus. That’s where the danger lies, as you can see by the sixteen million people who, over the course of just a few weeks, find themselves out of a job. Ponder the thousands upon thousands of businesses that have been shuttered by the draconian panic stirred by the president’s misguided counselors.

...It is not, as Surgeon General Adams suggested, like a nationwide series of Pearl Harbors or 9/11s. It is not, as the president has frequently said, “unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” It is a severe seasonal respiratory ailment that will, when all is said and done, probably claim fewer lives than the flu usually does, many fewer than bad years, when upwards of 80,000 die and hundreds of thousands are hospitalized.

Which brings me back to the idea of herd immunity. We early on in this panic lost sight of its benefits and strained every fiber of our strength to frustrate the development of herd immunity by closing schools and restaurants and ordering people to self-isolate and “shelter in place.” These actions have retarded the spread of the virus, and hence retarded the development of herd immunity, which in turn will make the occurrence of a second wave of sickness from the coronavirus more likely next fall.

This is the burden of a remarkable interview with Professor Knut Wittkowski, for 20 years head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University. Lockdown and “social distancing,” he says, are absolutely the worst way of dealing with an airborne respiratory virus like COVID-19.

Yes, we must take care to protect the old and fragile. But we should have been glad to have children go to school and infect one another. The disease is almost always mild, often totally asymptomatic, in children, and spreading the virus in this benign way is the best bet to build up herd immunity.

Our panic has destroyed trillions of dollars of wealth, impoverished millions, and handed much of society over to the machinations of socialistically inclined bureaucrats. It has also precipitated a huge and irresponsible disgorging of federal funds, the baneful effects of which will be felt for decades if not generations.

I am glad to see that President Trump is at last convening a commission charged with restarting the economy. That should be the signal to retire the task force on the coronavirus. We will all miss Dr. Birx’s nice scarves, but all good things come to an end.

Besides, the president’s new commission will have its work cut out for it. Lord d’Abernon once observed that “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” Let’s hope that’s true of an American’s, too.

Read more here.