A few days ago, David Frum offered this extraordinary conjecture:

I don’t think the President and people like Governor Kemp are consciously planning this, but they’re removing all the alternatives to the only policy that is going to remain this time six weeks from now or eight weeks from now. Which is they’re moving toward the policy of what’s — “let’s take the punch.” He’ll reopen and see what happens. Let’s accept that there may be hundreds of thousands, or some double hundreds of thousands, of Americans killed. They’re going to be mostly poor and minorities, mostly not going to be Trump voters. Let’s take that punch and push through and try to get to herd immunity as fast as possible.

I don’t think the President quite processes it quite that rationally, but maybe Governor Kemp does. I suspect Governor DeSantis probably does. But that’s where with they’re going.

There’s lots to say about this. In the short-term, the strategy Frum describes is self-defeating. If affluent people don’t emerge from isolation, “reopening” won’t do much to revive the (dollar-weighted) service economy. We’ll still be saddled with the same ugly economy, but with a higher prevalence of the disease, rendering it even harder to sustain the supply chains of essential goods even Trump’s base relies upon. If the red-state affluent do emerge, the “punch” will be taken in significant part by Republicans’ base after all, and they may not like it.

But also, there’s an error in this thinking that transcends the heavily memed frontier between red and blue. It afflicts affluent Americans broadly. It’s hidden in that phrase “herd immunity”.

We have all heard that “herd immunity” may set in once, say, 60-70% of the population have been exposed to the virus and so (hopefully) immunized. The logic is simple: If R₀ is 3, then once two-thirds of the public have been infected, two of the three people a new case would have infected will now be immune. So they’ll infect only one to take their place as they recover, stabilizing rather than increasing the infected population. Once more than two-thirds are immune, on average they’ll infect less than one person, causing the infected population to decrease over time rather than stabilize. Cool.

Affluent Americans of all stripes I think are quietly mulling something like this: It’s a terrible time, and tremendous death and suffering may be inevitable. For all kinds of reasons, we as a country may not be able to “crush the curve” and adopt South-Korea-style social distancing. Maybe it’s just impossible, given the extent the disease has spread and Americans’ general unruliness. Maybe it’s not worth the cost, in dollars and liberty, of living several years in a kind of quiet stage-managed by public health bureaucrats. So maybe acquiescing to “herd immunity” before a vaccine will have to be the way forward. We could get lucky! Maybe asymptomatic spread is much more than experts estimate, so the infection fatality rate is low. Maybe much of the population is immune already, genetically or due to cross-reactive antibodies from common-cold coronaviruses. But we have to be prepared for not getting lucky, in which case more than 200M Americans would become infected, and (under current estimates of an infection fatality rate of ~0.7%) more than 1.4M would die.

But even in that case, some significant fraction the country — say 25% to 33% — need never become exposed, need never risk this game of Russian Roulette where even “winning” may involve suffering and disability. If my family can isolate, comfortably and so diligently, if we can place in the top 25% of isolation diligence, then we can hold out until enough other people have risked and suffered and died that we can emerge safely. If, sadly, herd immunity before a vaccine is inevitable, then why delay acquiring it? Shouldn’t we race there as fast as we can, subject maybe to the constraint that ICU capacity should not be outstripped? The people who are going to be exposed will be exposed anyway, but at least they’ll not be unemployed as long. And the people capable of isolating most diligently would like to be (safely) free of their diligent isolation as soon as possible, thank you. So, as Frum describes it, let’s (let them) “take the punch”.

Segregation is affluent America’s go to coping mechanism. There are always horrible things going on “over there”, whether over there is a famine in Africa, a war we are prosecuting in the Middle East, or poverty and violence in West Baltimore. The first amenity Americans seek as they grow affluent is a “nice neighborhood”. As a nation, we describe ourselves as blessed by the protection of our two wide oceans. As families &mdash if we are affluent, especially if we are white — we understand that we are protected by more subtle boundaries. Maybe that’s a sad injustice, maybe it’s because we’ve earned it, choose your poison and your political party. But whatever it is, we are used to it. It’s not surprising, when we read that COVID-19 has hit poorer communities, black communities, immigrant communities disproportionately. It may not be right, but it’s the way of the world, and whatever our political or ethical attitude, affluent Americans tacitly rely upon it. Manhattan, denser but whiter and richer, has less than half the COVID infection rate as the Bronx.

But the segregation that so often protects affluent America this time cannot free it. Remember how herd immunity works? If R₀ is 3 and more two-thirds of the population is immune, then an infected infects less than one replacement and the virus dies out. But that assumes a uniform draw: the three people a new case would have infected are randomly chosen from the population, and at least two of them turn up immune (on average). But if the population is segmented, segregated, stratified, that won’t be true at all. Herd immunity might be achieved in the Bronx, but over in Manhattan, most of the privileged will remain immunologically naive. If you want to ride out the epidemic without exposure, it’s not enough to be in the top 25% to 33% of the most diligent isolators in the United States, or even in New York City. You have to be one of the top 25% to 33% of diligent isolators in your own community, among the people you interact with. If you are an affluent person who lives in a desirable neighborhood, who if liberated would work in a tony office, your implicit competitors in the coronavirus virginity game are not meatpackers or transit workers, but your neighbors and coworkers. And that’s a much tougher league. They have resources comparable to your own, or maybe better. The game of mortal attrition could last a long time. Months or years after the transit workers have taken their punch, your little world could still be ripe for an outbreak, if you all come out to play. So you won’t, not until there’s a vaccine or you are compelled by circumstance. Segregation will have helped to protect you, as it usually does. But this time, it will also imprison you.

So, if you are affluent, in a comfortable isolation but eager to escape it, don’t imagine that “hard men” like Governors Kemp or DeSantis are, however regrettably, accelerating your liberation with a herd-immunity strategy. They may think they are, but all they are in fact doing is risking the supply chains that your comfort and our political order depend upon. And, of course, putting lives of the less affluent, as precious and valuable as your own, needlessly at risk. But, though we fret, those lives seem to weigh little in our political system. Maybe if the affluent understand that “taking the punch” will not protect or liberate us, but may risk food shortages, outrage, and rebellion, maybe that will weigh more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2020 at 10:58 am PDT.
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