"Herd immunity" means seniors die.

COVID is a far greater risk to your life than is violent crime. 

Trump has an unsaid policy: Old people should take one for the team. Die and get out of the way.

American has 186,000 COVID deaths this year. That is ten times the number of homicides. Worry about the right things: COVID and herd immunity. 

Fox News and Trump are talking nonstop about violent crime. It's a distraction from the real risks to Americans. People are more afraid of snakes than they are of heart attacks or cancer, so we avoid snakes and eat cheeseburgers. Fires, looting, and murder get our attention. Two jumbo jet crashes a day would also get our attention, but a thousand people a day suffocating one by one in hospitals do not. It's the way humans think about risks.

We don't want to be murdered, and, statistically, we probably won't be, unless we are involved in some way in gangs, the illegal drug trade, or have a violent spouse. Murder is mostly an avoidable risk. There may be about 19,000 murders this year, about 5 people in 100,000.

COVID is annualizing to be 40 times as dangerous.

COVID has accelerated the deaths of 185,000 people beginning in March, and there are still four months to go this year. Were these really COVID deaths? Trump and conservative media have questioned the actual cause of death, since death certificates of people dying with COVID typically list multiple causes, for example, pneumonia. That isn't a surprise. COVID kills by giving people uncontrollable pneumonia. We have "excess deaths" of 200,000 over a base trend line this year of 2,900,000 annual expected deaths, all of which has been since March. This suggests that COVID deaths are slightly under-reported, not over-reported. Yes, COVID is killing people.

Even cautious people catch COVID. Your child or grandchild might have caught it from a playmate. You might have got it by attending a wedding, when you thought you were being careful, but not careful enough. There have been 6.1 million COVID cases in the US, and 3.3% of those getting it die. The more infections, the more deaths.

"Co-morbidities" is not a surprise. By the time people have lived 65 or 70 years most of us have something wrong we are living with. While we were worried about snakes, those cheeseburgers caught up with us. 

Heart Disease kills about 650,000 Americans every year. Cancer kills 600,000. Annualizing the COVID deaths from six months to a year would bring the annualized total to about 400,000, making COVID the third leading cause of death. If new federal policies increase virus spread on the assumption that herd immunity is the only practical strategy, then we will have more cases and more deaths. If 3% of cases continue to result in death, then the country may experience an additional two million deaths for a few years, as pretty much everyone gets it.  Even if we keep the current regimen of irregular and inconsistent mask and social distancing we could continue with a chronic 1,000 cases a day, and COVID would settle in at the third most common cause of death.

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For people age 60 and older, worry about COVID, not murder. 

Trump and his media allies have been settling in on a new policy and talking point: herd immunity. 

Dr. Scott Atlas is a new Trump advisor recommending it, and talk radio personalities and Fox opinion hosts are on board. They say virus avoidance is a Democratic hoax meant to destroy the economy and defeat Trump. Live free, get the virus, you will probably be ok,  and move on. Click

The country would survive; some people would not. There would be fewer old people. If people who get the disease get some years of immunity--not a certainty--or if an effective vaccine develops in a couple of years--again, not a certainty--then the economy might return to near pre-COVID status. It would be a younger country. A "herd immunity" strategy imbeds a reality that there would be a "thinning of the herd." The weak old and die. The young and healthy live.

This is a hard policy to confront directly and to verbalize and Trump is clever and strategic enough not to do it. He is dangling a distraction in front of us. Don't look at the COVID deaths. Look at looting! Look at the murders! Look at Chicago!   Illinois has had 8,300 COVID deaths so far since March, of which 5,073 are in Cook County. Cook County has a grave murder problem, no doubt: 440 people have been murdered. 

But murder is the snake that gets our attention.

Choice. The American public might actively and intentionally choose a policy of triage, deciding that old sick people have got to take one for the team and take their heightened risks and hope to shelter for years amid a widespread infected population. If a few million older, sicker folks die, then all the better for the solvency of Social Security and the public employee pension funds, inheritances will be passed along, and most important, we get America working again. Life must go on.

I suspect that, if we were faced directly with that choice, American voters would say "no." It is too cruel, people love their grandparents, and old people vote. Trump isn't giving us that choice. We are backing into that policy while looking at the murders.