I can’t tell if he’s serious or if he’s making a rhetorical point about Trump’s failures.

Or if he’s just trying to get a Fox News gig.

I mean, this is “recurring guest”-caliber material for Laura Ingraham’s show.

Whatever the answer, try to grasp that this dude used to be considered a respected public intellectual.

Because it’s too late to contain COVID-19, there’s only one possible ending to the story: We must collectively develop immunity to the disease. In lieu of a vaccine, that means most of us will need to be exposed to the virus. Some unknowably large number of us will therefore die. — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) April 17, 2020

Lachlan Markay replied, “are you volunteering, or is this some chickenhawk punditry?”

As I say, it may be a critique of Trump. I.e. “We could limit deaths if we had treatments, but because our president is a lamebrain we won’t have those so we have no choice but to die en masse.”

The expert consensus seems to be that this virus won’t begin to disappear until a far higher % of the population — at least 60% — develops immunity. If that doesn’t happen with a vaccine, it must happen through exposure. So creating an effective vaccine is JOB 2. Testing is JOB 1 — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) April 17, 2020

Developing an effective treatment regimen is also an option. But that’ll require national leadership akin to that of the Manhattan Project. Trump won’t provide that leadership. He can’t. It’s not in his DNA. https://t.co/ZcPuLznQlb — Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) April 17, 2020

I wish I shared his confidence that infection provides durable immunity to the disease. He seems to know more than epidemiologists do about that right now.

Anyway, if you read his daily Russiagate commentary on Twitter, you know Tribe’s always ready to one-up the competition in expressing his contempt for the president. “Your incompetence has left us no alternative but COVID Jonestown, Mr. President” would fit right in. That’s probably what this is about. The irony is, although there’s plenty to criticize in Trump’s handling of the crisis, there’s no reason to think he’s standing in the way of developing effective treatments. We’re not even 24 hours removed from news that a promising treatment may be coming, in fact.

Hang in there until we have more data on remdesivir, Larry. If it’s a bust, then we can start planning a national pox party and decide where the mass graves are going to be dug.

In terms of what sort of body count we’d be looking at if we put the Tribe plan into practice, it’s hard to say. But Scott Gottlieb brought me up short last night with this point:

1/2 New York City, with population of 8.4 million, has 11,477 confirmed and probable #COVID19 deaths. Even if everyone in the city had covid (8.4M people) which is improbable, then 11,477 deaths would put its case fatality rate higher than what's seen in seasonal flu. #NotTheFlu — Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 17, 2020

The infection fatality rate for the flu is around 0.1 percent. If ev-uh-ree-one in NYC was infected, which of course they aren’t, the fatality rate would be around .14 percent. That’s one of the best demonstrations yet that this illness is much worse than the flu. In fact, if we assume an infection rate in NYC of 15 percent — the same rate recently measured in pregnant women admitted to a New York hospital in late March — we’d have a fatality rate in the city of slightly less than one percent. Applied nationally, that would require somewhere around 1.8 million deaths before we reached Tribe’s 60 percent target for herd immunity.

And all of this assumes that we’re counting deaths from COVID in New York City and beyond more or less accurately, without missing many. But that proposition is very much in doubt:

From March 11 through April 13, there were 8184 deaths *in addition* to the 3778 probable and 6589 confirmed COVID-19 deaths. 2/https://t.co/3RuC3DRNIF pic.twitter.com/6sgL5MJx2q — Adrenochrome Harvester (@ClenchedFisk) April 15, 2020

There are a lot of “excess deaths” in jurisdictions hit hard by the virus, not just in the U.S. but everywhere. Lost in the debate over how to distinguish people who died with the virus from people who died from the virus is a simple question: How do deaths in a given area in March 2020 compare to deaths in that area in March 2019? Absent some concurrent catastrophe happening locally alongside the coronavirus epidemic, it’s a safe bet that the increase in deaths this year from last year is due directly or indirectly (e.g., less hospital capacity) to COVID-19. Demographer Lyman Stone has taken to using total deaths instead of “official” coronavirus deaths to try to gauge the true death toll from the disease across different regions. His verdict: We shouldn’t be using the “official” toll as our metric of when it’s safe to reopen. Use the total regional death toll, which will be a truer measure of how many people are actually dying from the disease.

I'm just saying we shouldn't reopen until we can at least finish counting the body bags. Like I get that we won't know cause of death perfectly. But let's at least make sure we're not totally misunderstanding the scale of the outbreak. — Lyman Expand the House Stone, AKA 石來民 (@lymanstoneky) April 17, 2020

Exit question: Why has New York been hit so much harder than every other U.S. city? Is the answer this obvious?