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On September 14, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of an unverified sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The story cited three people who had read a letter sent by the accuser—Christine Blasey Ford—to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.). Ford was not interviewed for the story; indeed, she wasn’t named.

Unconfirmed reports of a teenaged Kavanaugh assaulting a teenaged Ford evidently merited coverage from The Times. This prompts an obvious question: Why is the paper of record now declining to publicize a very troubling allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden?

The Times is hardly alone in this regard. The mainstream media have remained baffling silent about Tara Reade, a former member of then-Senator Biden’s staff who claims that he sexually assaulted her in 1993. Reade’s name has only appeared twice in The Washington Post, and both were quick asides: A news roundup from April of last year briefly acknowledged an earlier, milder version of Reade’s accusation, and a recent rapid-fire Q&A asked a Post political reporter to weigh-in on the political ramifications “of the Tara Reade bombshell.” (The nature of the bombshell is not described.)

And while the coronavirus pandemic is obviously dominating news coverage, CNN has made plenty of time for Biden. Chris Cillizza is still ranking Biden’s potential veep choices, and the network conducted a virtual townhall event with the candidate last Friday. Reade’s name didn’t come up, and it has never appeared at CNN.com. At NBC, it’s the same story: Chuck Todd interviewed Biden but didn’t ask about the allegation.

Reade’s story has garnered some coverage elsewhere, most noticeably from The Hill and The Intercept. Some left-leaning news sites—The Huffington Post, Vox—have written about it, and of course conservative media are all over the story. But the biggest mainstream print and TV outlets are, at present, silent.

I am not the only one to notice this. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that “media outlets on both the left and the right have covered Reade’s claim, yet mainstream news organizations have mostly avoided it.” That article links to a piece in The Guardian—part of a recurring feature called “The Week in Patriarchy”—that suggests the media may be ignoring the story because Reade’s accusations will be “difficult to prove.” To its credit, the Guardian piece acknowledges that if this would be inconsistent with how the Kavanaugh accusation was handled.

That’s what’s most frustrating about this lack of mainstream coverage. Ideally, all media outlets—mainstream or otherwise—would tread carefully with respect to decades-old accusations. They would not rush to publish unverified rumors, instead carefully vetting them to the best of their ability. They would consider whether every salacious or scandalous detail of an important person’s past is worth revisiting.

Perhaps that’s what reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other outlets are doing. (I have heard it third-hand that various stories might be in the works, but nobody at those publications would confirm anything to me.) But Reade has already come forward. She has already identified herself and told her story. At this stage in the process of the Kavanaugh accusation’s public reveal, the mainstream press was already actively covering it.

As I wrote last week, there’s a case for taking Reade’s accusation more seriously than Ford’s, since the behavior described by Reade (penetrative sexual assault during Biden’s Senate years) is even worse than what was described by Ford.

And while it’s certainly true that there’s currently a global pandemic unfolding, that isn’t a good excuse to avoid discussing Reade. In fact, there’s some reason to proceed quickly: The Democratic Party will soon nominate Joe Biden to be its presidential candidate, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is technically still in the race, and he is still making the case that he should be the one to face President Donald Trump in November. Whether or not Biden is credibly accused of sexual assault is extremely relevant to this rapidly approaching decision point. This seems only slightly less urgent than covering Kavanaugh’s alleged misbehavior during the period immediately before his confirmation to the Supreme Court.

If the media’s rule is this—We’re going to proceed extremely cautiously when revisiting unverified sexual misconduct allegations that are several decades years old—then fine. But that’s a new rule, isn’t it?

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The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires the government to pay just compensation when it takes private property for a public use. Does that apply when the government orders a business to close its doors indefinitely in order to help prevent the spread of COVID-19? Is the shuttered business entitled to compensation for its troubles?

These are not hypothetical questions. Schulmerich Bells, a small outfit that makes handcrafted handbells and chimes in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Gov. Thomas Wolf’s order indefinitely closing all “non-life-sustaining” businesses during the COVID-19 outbreak. “The Governor has placed the cost of these Orders—issued for the benefit of the public—squarely upon the shoulders of private individuals and their families, and has failed to justly compensate affected parties for these takings undertaken for their benefit to the public,” the suit states. “These uncompensated seizures violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.” The suit seeks the payment of just compensation by the state.

The U.S. Supreme Court has long said that the states may regulate—and even prohibit—certain property uses in the name of public health and safety without triggering the Takings Clause. In Mugler v. Kansas (1887), the Court ruled against a liquor manufacturer whose livelihood was destroyed when the state banned the sale and manufacture of “intoxicating beverages.” According to the Court, “a prohibition simply upon the use of property for purposes that are declared, by valid legislation, to be injurious to the health, morals, or safety of the community, cannot, in any just sense, be deemed a taking or an appropriation of property for the public benefit.” Such government action “does not disturb the owner in the control or use of his property for lawful purposes, nor restrict his right to dispose of it, but is only a declaration by the State that its use by any one, for certain forbidden purposes, is prejudicial to the public interests.”

Similarly, in Miller v. Schoene (1928), the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law requiring the destruction of red cedar trees infected with cedar rust if those trees stood within two miles of an apple orchard (cedar rust is highly detrimental to apple trees). “The state does not exceed its constitutional powers by deciding upon the destruction of one class of property in order to save another which, in the judgment of the legislature, is of greater value to the public,” the Court said. “It will not do to say that the case is merely one of a conflict of two private interests and that the misfortune of apple growers may not be shifted to cedar owners by ordering the destruction of their property; for it is obvious that there may be, and that here there is, a preponderant public concern in the preservation of the one interest over the other.”

In short, if this particular lawsuit is going to succeed, it will have to clear some steep precedential hurdles.

Related: “Police Powers During a Pandemic, Constitutional, but Not Unlimited.”

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So reports Newsweek (Christina Zhao); there was an earlier article from Radio Free Asia (a U.S.-government-funded nonprofit) that gave similar estimates. (Bloomberg likewise writes, “Report of Urns Stacked at Wuhan Funeral Homes Raises Questions About the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in China.”)

These are just estimates, and may well be incorrect, but I thought they were worth noting given that the government-released data may be incorrect as well.

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During his COVID-19 briefing yesterday, President Donald Trump suggested that the control measures implemented so far should keep the number of deaths from climbing above 100,000 in the United States. Although that is “a horrible number,” he said, the death toll otherwise could be “up to 2.2 million deaths and maybe even beyond that.”

Trump has pivoted from minimizing the severity of the epidemic to exaggerating the likely outcome in the absence of extreme measures such as mass business closures and stay-at-home orders. Appearing on CNN yesterday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, offered some words of caution about worst-case scenarios that assume nothing is done to contain, suppress, or mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Jake Tapper asked Fauci how many COVID-19 cases the United States can expect to see. “To be honest with you, we don’t really have any firm idea,” Fauci said. “There are things called models. And when someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions. And whenever the modelers come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario. Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I have never seen a model of the diseases that I have dealt where the worst-case scenario actually came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, a million-and-a-half, 2 million [deaths], that almost certainly is off the chart. Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

Those caveats are important because focusing on implausible worst-case projections creates a bias in favor of sweeping and prolonged interventions, which impose enormous costs that might not be justified based on more realistic expectations. In the world we live in, as opposed to the one imagined by modelers when they talk about millions of COVID-19 deaths in the United States, many steps already have been taken to curtail the spread of the virus. These include not just government policies, such as isolation and quarantine, air travel restrictions, and bans on large gatherings, but also voluntary precautions, such as limiting social interactions, working at home, and paying extra attention to hygiene.

When modelers at Imperial College projected 2.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States, they were assuming “the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.” Although that horrifying number got a lot of attention and has now been embraced by Trump, it was never plausible, even leaving aside the question of whether the case fatality rate (CFR) assumed by the model (0.9 percent) will prove to be correct.

The choice confronting policy makers right now is not between doing “nothing,” as that projection assumed, and maintaining lockdowns “for 5 months or more” (or perhaps for “18 months or more”), as the Imperial College report suggested. Rather, the choice involves what kinds of restrictions make sense, where, and for how long.

“Looking at what we’re seeing now,” Fauci said, “we’re going to have millions of cases” in the United States, and it is reasonable to expect “between 100,000 and 200,000” deaths. But he cautioned that “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection, when it’s such a moving target, that you can so easily be wrong and mislead people.” Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s COVID-19 task force, yesterday cited similar but somewhat less alarming estimates, saying “between 80,000 and 160,000, maybe even potentially 200,000 people,” could be killed by COVID-19 in the United States.

One unknown variable in these projections is how many Americans will ultimately be infected. Some projections “predicted half of the United States would get infected,” Birx said. Another crucial variable is the CFR, which federal public health officials say could be anywhere from 0.1 percent (about the same as the CFR for the seasonal flu) to 1 percent. If half the population were infected and 2.2 million people died, that would imply a CFR of about 1.3 percent, substantially higher than the upper limit of that range—another reason to be skeptical of the worst-case scenario.

Such a high CFR also suggests that the actual number of infections is only about two-fifths bigger than the current number of documented cases, which is highly implausible when testing is so sparse and cases typically involve mild to nonexistent symptoms. “Probably for every case,” Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir estimated earlier this month, “there are at least two or three cases that are not even in the denominator.”

Based on the available data, which are very limited in the absence of wide testing, it surely is not safe to assume that COVID-19 is only slightly more deadly than the seasonal flu. But neither is it reasonable to assume that the disease is 13 times as deadly. The truth, as Fauci says, is likely to be “somewhere in the middle.” In the face of such uncertainty, decisions with profound economic consequences should not be based on one extreme or the other. “Although people like to model it,” Fauci told Tapper, “let’s just look at the data of what we have, and not worry about these worst-case and best-case scenarios.”

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