The theory goes like this: California has fewer COVID-19 cases than hard-hit places like New York because the coronavirus has spread throughout the state undetected since the fall and most Californians are now immune.
Turns out it’s too early to prove the unlikely notion started by a Stanford University military historian who published an article about it in a national magazine that conservative talk show hosts and California media outlets quickly picked up. In fact, public health experts say there’s a far more probable explanation for California’s comparatively smaller case load of 20,491 compared with New York’s 170,512: The state’s early shelter-in-place orders have so far prevented many Californians from being exposed to the coronavirus. But without social isolation, they say, many Californians could still get sick.
“We’ll still have a largely vulnerable population because people are not immune,” said UCSF’s Dr. Charles Chiu, one of the top infectious disease experts in the world. “The only way we’re able to control the virus is with a vaccine.”
The idea that many Californians are immune to COVID-19 started with Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow in military history at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Hanson wrote a March 31 think piece in the conservative National Review positing that the virus arrived in the U.S. from China in the fall and infected so many people that they developed immunity to the disease that would come to be called COVID-19. This massive level of protection from reinfection — a so-called “herd immunity” — could be responsible for California’s relatively low case rate, Hanson hypothesized. He concluded that “we won’t know the answers” until researchers conduct widespread testing to find out who had the disease.
Conservative talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh jumped on the theory.
