
The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory That Informed the Trump Administration - glhaynes
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration
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madhadron
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
NYU is full of crackpots!

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyu-dean-sends-dance-video-
in-r...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyu-dean-sends-dance-video-in-response-
to-students-petitioning-for-tuition-refund/)

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tartoran
_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.

------
redis_mlc
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.

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

~~~
chrisco255
Which is an argument for people getting outdoors as we head into summer and
not holding people in room temperature controlled buildings for months on end.
Not to mention the benefits of vitamin D for health.

