If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya peaked really early. The first and perhaps wisest sentence he wrote this pandemic was this:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified.
That eminently reasonable sentiment, completely justifying shelter-in-place orders and quarantines for a virus that would cause mass death if left unchecked, comes from his article Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?, which was published on March 24, 2020.
However, Dr. Bhattacharya penned that robust defense of shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, a much stronger defense of these extraordinary measures than I ever made, to argue against them.
So why was Dr. Bhattacharya, who never treated a COVID patients himself, opposed to shelter-in-place orders and quarantines in March 2020? There can literally be only one reason- he didn’t think that millions were at risk from this “novel coronavirus”. Dr. Bhattacharya asked the question, is the coronavirus as deadly as they say? and answered it with a resounding “no.” Indeed, his article’s subtitle was “Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude.”
Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? Current Estimates About the Covid-19 Fatality Rate May be Too High by Orders of Magnitude
Though Dr. Bhattacharya now claims the words shelter-in-place orders and quarantines don’t mean shelter-in-place orders and quarantines and that those who quote his article are “lying about the article“, I am going to do something that often annoys Dr. Bhattacharya and accurately quote Dr. Bhattacharya. Here’s what he wrote:
If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.
Fear of COVID-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate — 2% to 4% of people with confirmed. COVID-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, 2 million to 4 million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed…
If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.
Dr. Bhattacharya noted that “a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.”
His article concluded:
If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible… A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.
A 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million…If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic…
Dr. Bhattacharya was not wrong when he said that a low death rate, one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%, would be “cause for optimism.” He was also not wrong when he said “a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.”
However, COVID turned out to be kind of a big deal.
Even though vaccines arrived in record time, the virus infected nearly all of us, many of us many times. It killed over 1.1 million Americans, and 95,000 Americans died in January 2021 alone. While death was the only bad outcome Dr. Bhattacharya considered, the virus seriously injured millions of people without killing them. While things are much better now, the virus is still hurting people every day. Its grim toll would have been much worse had we let it spread widely in spring 2020, as many doctors proposed at the time.
Four years after predicting the epidemic would have a “limited scale”, Dr. Bhattacharya speaks constantly about COVID and only COVID. He wouldn’t be doing this if he had been right about “the limited scale of the epidemic”. Given the extraordinary magnitude of the epidemic, Dr. Bhattacharya will speak about it constantly for the foreseeable future. Every time he does so, he proves he was totally wrong about its “limited scale”. And given that he was totally wrong about this, then the extraordinary measures- the shelter-in-place orders and quarantines- were surely justified, according to Dr. Bhattacharya.