First Things and More COVID-19 Denialism

R.R. Reno and First Things has led the way in skepticism about the seriousness of COVID-19 and the need to social distance. I first looked at Reno’s historical revisionism last month in response to his objections to churches closing.

Today, Reno comes forward with an article titled, Coronavirus Reality Check. Well, I agree it is about the Coronavirus.

First paragraphs are supposed to get the reader’s attention and this one does its job.

The coronavirus pandemic is not and never was a threat to society. COVID-19 poses a danger to the elderly and the medically compromised. Otherwise, for most who present symptoms, it can be nasty and persistent, but is not life-threatening. A majority of those infected do not notice that they have the disease. Coronavirus presents us with a medical challenge, not a crisis. The crisis has been of our own making.

In what most public health experts believe is the beginning of the COVID-19 ordeal, Reno pronounces the pandemic no threat to society. However, for Reno, society is something and someone other than the elderly and the medically compromised. This exclusion is reason enough to question what comes next.

Reno’s dismissal of COVID-19 as a threat is based on a sunny reading of selected findings about mortality rates. He gets his first comparison between the flu and COVID-19 very wrong when he writes:

The next day, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis sifted through the data and predicted less widespread infection and a fatality rate of between 0.05 and 1.0 percent—not that different from the common flu. The coronavirus is not the common flu. It has different characteristics, afflicting the old more than the young, men more than women. Nevertheless, all data trends since mid-March show that Ferguson was fantastically wrong and Ioannidis was largely right about its mortal threat.

Reno here compares Ioannidis’ speculations about COVID-19’s death rate (.05-1%) to that of the common flu. This is an irresponsible and misleading comparison. According to the CDC website, there were 2 flu deaths per 100,000 people in 2017. Most recent estimates I have seen for the flu are at about .1% (not 1.0%). Much of Reno’s argument is based on this spurious comparison. He really wants COVID-19 to be comparable to the flu so we can just blame the frantic infectious disease crazies and get back to normal.

Since Reno insists Ioannidis has had the better model, let’s see how his predictions have worked out. In his March Stat article, Ioannidis wrote:

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.

As I write this, according to Worldometer.info, the death toll in the U.S. is 56,173.

Reno is correct that the fatality rate is likely to be much lower than the 2-5% that is showing up in the states. Due to the puzzling cases of asymptomatic carriers of the virus, many people have it and don’t know it. However, even if it is .3%, that is three times higher than the flu. If it is .3% (which it appears to be in Chelsea, MA — a place cited by Reno but without stats), that would be a huge increase in deaths as the virus spreads. The fact is we don’t know what is going to happen and Reno’s appeal to science is tendentious. He picks what he likes.

Let me say that I am not unsympathetic to the impulse to get back to normal. As a psychology professor, I realize that poverty, isolation, and joblessness make existing bad conditions worse for many. A complete shutdown over many months would require a coordination and distribution of resources to the masses which the current administration is incapable of performing.

Due to the bungling of testing and crisis management by the federal administration there was no way to know where the disease was prevalent. It is highly likely that the stay at home orders (based on experience in previous pandemics) prevented outbreaks of the disease. Americans responded well to the guidelines and lives have been saved as a result. It is a mystery to me why skeptics don’t appear to entertain the notion that prevention worked.

However, Reno wants the whole thing to have been a waste of time and money. He writes:

We need to be told the truth about COVID-19’s effect. It is not a uniquely perilous disease; for people under 35, it may be less dangerous than the flu.

I agree we need to be told the truth, but we don’t know all the truth yet.  There is much scientists are still learning about it. An article in Science summarizing research on the virus to date concluded:

Despite the more than 1000 papers now spilling into journals and onto preprint servers every week, a clear picture is elusive, as the virus acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen.

Reno wants us to believe his expert. However, his expert was wrong too. Ioannidis was close on the mortality rate but his assumption of 1% infection rate was way off. There is a lot that is still not known and caution in the face of the unknown still seems like a wise policy to me.

 

41 thoughts on “First Things and More COVID-19 Denialism”

  1. The whole “but the economy” argument reminds me of an old quote by Don Henley:

    The last man on earth with his last gasping, dying breath will be bitching about the economy

    He was referring to environmental issues at the time. but the quote is sadly appropriate in this context as well.

  2. Just like Climate Change Denialism, COVID-19 Denialism breaks down almost exactly by political party affiliation, with intensity dependent on level of True Believer within the Party.

    And since political party affiliation breaks down almost exactly by church affiliation these days…

  3. The administration has defined its pandemic strategy upon denial. Denial of effects, denial of testing, denial of equipment, denial of seriousness of the pandemic. The result will be a suppression of statistics and a suppression of treatment and suppression of effort to fight or seek control of the pandemic.
    It’s all strategy- and the strategy is an acceptance of death. Will this matter to those who support the president* because of abortion, racism, or anti-LGBTQ issues? Latest polls show Trump is still viewed as trustworthy by 31% of voters.

    1. If you polled only Born-Again Bible-Believing Christians(TM), I’m sure the percentage would be a LOT higher than 31.

      1. Perhaps we are fortunate that the sort of “Christian” you refer to is a lot less than 31% of the population, or we might have president* Plump for li(f)e.

        1. “President for Life… We really need to try that here.”
          — Donald J Trump (on Twitter, regarding Chinese President Xi)

    2. There have been signs in the last few days that Trump’s sideshow act is finally beginning to wear thin with an increasing number of Republican voters. Still, his handling of this crisis is demonstrably worse than Bush’s deer in the headlights performance during the 2008 financial crisis, but I don’t expect Trump to be anywhere near as low in the polling, even in November.

      The fact that poison control call outs have spiked since Trump mused about the benefits of ingesting bleach on live TV is evidence enough that there will always be true believers, for some completely unfathomable reason.

      1. Anyone remember Tide Pods?

        We had to tell people NOT to eat laundry detergent because Social Media said to.

  4. I don’t EVER want to hear these guys talk about the evil of abortion, not when they’re quite willing to sacrifice the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised to reopen the country. I’d also point out two other things:

    1) The country is not completely shut down. Some of us have to get up and work every day. I’m lucky that I can work from home. But seven weeks ago, I was working in a big room with no social distancing to speak of (“open office plans” are garbage). You’d KNOW if the entire country was shut down. It’s not.

    2) Even if the country is opened up, there is no reason to believe everything is going to go back to normal, because it’s not about opening up the country. It’s about a dangerous virus which, while it does seem to attack the old and the immunocompromised more, also attacks the young and very healthy, sometimes killing them as well. People are not going to be willing to stuff themselves in tiny metal tubes to travel, go to crowded sporting events, eat in cramped restaurants or go to movie theatres where the air is recirculated constantly. I caught a cold on an airplane last year, it turned into bronchitis and I was sick for weeks. And that was for a cold/bronchitis that made me miserable but wasn’t a threat to my life.

    https://thebulwark.com/we-cannot-reopen-america/?fbclid=IwAR2M3-67jq4RswCg6qZ8YOor52kpzDMQU3eSepGI3XCj27M7Sq_N62l0Vhc

    1. I don’t EVER want to hear these guys talk about the evil of abortion,
      not when they’re quite willing to sacrifice the lives of the elderly and
      immunocompromised to reopen the country.

      Feel like this is a bit of a false equivalence. The crux of the pro-life group is position is anti-murder, not eliminating all risk to life. Most people, including those who are critical of calls to reopen, are fine with sacrificing some amount of human life in the service of personal convenience and economic activity. Otherwise we’d mandate that everyone use public transport or bike to work and we’d go into lock down every flu season.

      Otherwise I agree; even after “official” orders are lifted things aren’t going back to normal.

    2. I don’t EVER want to hear these guys talk about the evil of abortion,
      not when they’re quite willing to sacrifice the lives of the elderly and
      immunocompromised to reopen the country.

      Feel like this is a bit of a false equivalence. The crux of the pro-life group is position is anti-murder, not eliminating all risk to life. Most people, including those who are critical of calls to reopen, are fine with sacrificing some amount of human life in the service of personal convenience and economic activity. Otherwise we’d mandate that everyone use public transport or bike to work and we’d go into lock down every flu season.

      Otherwise I agree; even after “official” orders are lifted things aren’t going back to normal.

      1. I wouldn’t even go as far as that. Many pro-lifers are quite happy if the State kills people they think deserve it, or denying aid to people who they think don’t deserve it. They need a more accurate label than “pro-life” – “pro-lex talions” perhaps?

      2. This is not the flu. Not only is the lethality higher than the flu in preliminary studies, but there’s no vaccine AND it’s unclear whether the antibodies are protective. So not the same, and treating it like the flu diminishes its impact.

        I have no problem calling out anti-abortion people like my congressman, who, contrary to good sense, wants to “open ‘er up” while at the ssme time wanting to legislate fenale bodies. The hypocrisy is astounding and “First Things” is doing the same thing.

          1. That sign is deliberately intended to spark that reaction. Note that she is wearing a bandana/scarf around her neck and I suspect right before the pic was taken it was covering her mouth and nose.

            The best way to deal with it is to NOT let it upset you.

        1. I know it’s not the flu, but the principle is the same. You just draw the line in a different place than they do. Do you support population-based mitigation (like we’ve done for coronavirus) for seasonal flu? Why or why not?

          1. This is not even remotely like the flu. Without mitigation, hundred of thousands of people would be dying in the US during this epidemic. Extrapolate New York’s experience across the US, and it would be around 350,000 already (and that’s with plenty of mitigation going on in New York).

            Hospitals often struggle to cope during peak flu season in bad years. The entire system would have collapsed under the strain of four or five times as many patients, leading to far more fatalities, and knock on effects.

          2. Which is why I said “I know it’s not the flu; the principal is the same”.

          3. If you insist on comparing it to the flu, then you should be comparing it to the Spanish flu, not the seasonal one.

            Lets assume covid and the flu have the same infection rate (although, data indicates covid is much more infectious than the flu). Further assume that everyone who contracts either virus, will spread it to just 2 other people, and those people will each transmit it to 2 other people in turn. That is an exponential growth rate (2^n). However, if just one of those 2 other people has been vaccinated (as with the seasonal flu), then you go from an exponential growth rate, to a linear one. And that is a HUGE difference in the spread of a disease. Enough to distinguish between an outbreak and an epidemic or in the case of covid even worse, a pandemic.

            Further, aside from the infection rate, there are other concerns about the effects and treatment of the disease. Seasonal flu is a well-known illness with well-known treatment plans. Covid-19 is a new disease. While it has aspects similar to the flu, the full long-term effects of this disease are still unknown.

          4. Not sure that line drawing works here, mainly because the mitigation measures taken by the different states and counties have more loopholes than Trump’s tax returns. The same is true for the orders to open back up.

            When protestors arrived at state capitals in groups, mostly maskless and without physical distances observed, nobody was arrested, jailed or even threatened as far as know. I know of one pastor who was arrested after multiple warnings to keep his large church closed. Many of the mitigation efforts depended on voluntary cooperation from the public and considering how fast they were adopted, it’s a tough call to say the government legislated life priorities over the well being of the economy.

            Compare the actions of the government for mitigation to the types of laws that the anti-abortion crowd is looking to legislate and hard code into our justice system, starting with personal autonomy offenses against women that aren’t recommended by any scientific expert.

            We aren’t talking about the same line being drawn in a different place here.

          5. Not sure that line drawing works here, mainly because the mitigation measures taken by the different states and counties have more loopholes than Trump’s tax returns. The same is true for the orders to open back up.

            When protestors arrived at state capitals in groups, mostly maskless and without physical distances observed, nobody was arrested, jailed or even threatened as far as know. I know of one pastor who was arrested after multiple warnings to keep his large church closed. Many of the mitigation efforts depended on voluntary cooperation from the public and considering how fast they were adopted, it’s a tough call to say the government legislated life priorities over the well being of the economy.

            Compare the actions of the government for mitigation to the types of laws that the anti-abortion crowd is looking to legislate and hard code into our justice system, starting with personal autonomy offenses against women that aren’t recommended by any scientific expert.

            We aren’t talking about the same line being drawn in a different place here.

  5. Here are the biggest factors:

    1) Every single model and projection accounted for extreme social distancing and mitigation efforts. They were 750-1250% over-estimated across the board. We were told that even with extreme mitigation efforts, our healthcare system would be near collapse by mid April. Instead, we’ve got hospitals risking shutting their doors permanently. Something in the models was patently incomplete or incorrect. It took until a week ago for the models to even start adjusting based on reality.

    2) Every single talking head and media outlet has been bashing us over the heads that America failed to properly respond, hasn’t taken it seriously, and has fumbled every step of the way, while ignoring every suggestion from the experts. It seems to me that those things can’t simultaneously be true at the same time as “we did so great at flattening the curve and mitigating this pandemic that we performed 900% better than the best case scenario predicted we would.” It seems that the media is going to have to pick one. Are we the poster-child for how to respond to a pandemic, or are we a failure? It can’t be both.

    1. I would like to see the estimates you are referring to. I don’t recall hearing that extreme mitigation would lead to a collapse of the healthcare system. Models have been adjusted over time but I am skeptical of your timeline. You are significantly overstating the case and using a level of hyperbole that you accuse the media of using without providing any links or support. You appear to have a grudge with the media but you are also overstating the case.

      1. One factor is that the timing of a stay-at-home lockdown is important. One day earlier or later in the curve can be significant. In my state and county, we were a bit earlier in the curve and our hospitals did NOT get overwhelmed. And the number of COVID admissions is starting to go down, though slower than when it went up.

        Another factor is those who DON’T have COVID are staying away from ER from fear of COVID.

        The result of the two is there’s actually a drop in the number of patients presenting at ER and open beds in the hospitals.

        And it’s not just here. Both British doctors I follow on YouTube (“Medlife Crisis” and “Dr Hope’s Sick Notes” channels) have described the same thing in their day-by-day vlogs from London (different hospitals). Medlife Crisis (a cardiologist) says fear of COVID is keeping people with other medical emergencies from calling 999 or going to ER to the point they don’t present until things are REALLY bad with complications.

    2. Even granting your facts it’s not too hard to reconcile these two. We can just imagine the virus was less deadly than predicted *and* we still flubbed our response. To your points, though:

      1. This is not true. The Imperial College paper didn’t make predictions for the U.S. based on varying levels of social distancing, but it did for the UK. Under the most hard-core distancing strategy and most optimistic estimations of the virus’s R0 it projected only 5,600 total deaths in the UK over a 2-year period. On the other hand, with no mitigation at all and the most pessimistic estimations of R0 it predicted 550,000. See Table 4 page 13:

      https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf

      2. America did fail to properly respond and did fail to take seriously, starting with Trump himself. Eventually, however, most states came around to the idea that population-wide mitigation was necessary and made it happen. Even in states where there was no legal requirement to social distance, people did a lot of it voluntarily. Hence the bent curve. The contention isn’t that we’re an abject failure, but that we’re definitely not among the best.

    3. Every single talking head and media outlet has been bashing us over the heads that America failed to properly respond, hasn’t taken it seriously, and has fumbled every step of the way, while ignoring every suggestion from the experts.

      Actually, I haven’t heard talking heads and media outlets bashing Americans. One American has been described as failing to respond, refusing to take the pandemic seriously, ignoring the experts, and fumbling every step – Donald Trump.

      Trump’s total incompetence in his handling of the pandemic has been so awful that Republicans running for election or re-election have been advised that they shouldn’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban, and should just attack China instead. (p.6)

      1. and don’t forget while Trump denied there was a problem GOVERNORS, from both parties showed what leadership looks like and did the things that needed to be done.

      2. And to a lot of Christians, Trumpus Epiphanes IS the Second Coming of Christ.

      3. Republicans running for election or re-election have been
        that they shouldn’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban, and should just attack China instead. (p.6)

        Not “China”.

        COMMUNIST China”.

        “BLAME CHI-I-NA!
        BLAME CHI-I-NA!
        BEFORE ANYONE CAN THINK OF BLAMING US!”

        And did they even say to use the term “China Virus”?
        (Though I’ve heard worse — “ChiCom Cough”, “COMMIE Cough”, and others from that bastion of even-headedness, YouTube comment threads.

  6. A couple of points you missed about what is wrong with Reno’s arguments.

    1st, death is not the only serious consequence of this illness. There can be serious long-term effects of being on a ventilator for weeks. One report suggested covid-19 could cause stroke like symptom and other neurological impairment.

    2nd, even if the death rates for the flu and covid-19 were exactly the same, more people are likely to contract covid-19 than the flu. Because we have a flu vaccine. There is no vaccine as of yet for covid-19. so even if both the flu and covid-19 had a .1% mortality rate, the .1% of covid-19 is for a much larger population.

  7. I’ll repost what I wrote on Twitter:

    The Imperial College report and its 2M estimate was in the scenario where no effort whatsoever was made to mitigate. For the UK, the same scenario predicted 500k deaths. In the report, there is a table modeling alternate scenarios that involve mitigation and have much smaller corresponding death counts. We can’t know if the 2M number was “wrong” because we did not pursue that scenario.

    Contra Reno, the report did not assume a high fatality rate; rather, it predicted a very broad spread. Namely, that 80% of the U.S. population would become infected. With that rate of infection, 2.2M deaths is an IFR of 0.8%, well within range of what other researchers estimate the IFR will eventually settle at.

    And, remember, it’s generally agreed upon that SARS-CoV-2 is *more contagious* than the flu, so in the absence of mitigation efforts we’d expect a wider swath of the U.S. to become infected (and correspondingly more to die, even if the IFR was the same).

    He then asserts (based on what?) that lockdown does not stunt the spread of the disease. Really? How to explain the flattening of daily new deaths, changing the curve in total deaths from exponential to linear?

    Then he asserts (based on what?) that COVID may be less dangerous for those under 35 than the seasonal flu. Everything I’ve seen backs up the claim that it’s drastically less dangerous for young people, but that it’s still worse than flu even for those age groups. e.g.:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-seasonal-flu-in-the-us-death-rates-2020-3

    (Note: the age bands don’t match up exactly between COVID and flu).

    1. My nephew is 32 and caught it three weeks ago. It put him flat on his back for at least ten days, too weak to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. Worse than any flu I’ve experienced, that’s for sure. Thankfully he’s pretty much fully recovered, and nobody else in the household has been symptomatic. It will be interesting to see if any of them were infected. Seems likely.

    1. This video has been removed, but it was the Bakersfield doctors, right? Those guys, based on testing ~5,300 of ~9,000 people in Bakersfield (the other people were tested at other facilities), extrapolated that to say that California has five million infections. You just can’t do that. These two guys own urgent care facilities, which are seeing less business because of the pandemic. The American College of Emergency Physicians came out with a statement against what these guys were doing: https://www.acep.org/corona/COVID-19/covid-19-articles/acep-aaem-joint-statement-on-physician-misinformation/

      1. Ah, but The American College of Emergency Physicians are part of the LIbtard Media Fake News CONSPIRACY CONSPIRACY CONSPIRACY.

        “THE DWARFS ARE FOR THE DWARFS! WE WON’T BE TAKEN IN!’

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