When John Sexton wrote about New York City residents failing at social distancing, I don’t think he expected it to go this far. Stopping New Yorkers from keeping the party going in the city that never sleeps is proving even harder than expected. As John pointed out, the Mayor still hasn’t closed the parks, so people are out there jogging, congregating and taking in the spring weather together. But that doesn’t hold a candle to Big Apple resident Lucian Wintrich, who you may remember as a reporter for the Gateway Pundit.

Lucian decided to make the best of a bad situation and have some friends over for a party. The theme? It was a “corona potluck” party. Bring a dish and don’t wash your hands. (NY Post)

Lucian Wintrich, a former White House reporter and advertisement hand, is one of them. The 31-year-old contrarian recently hosted a “corona potluck” at his small but chic East Village apartment.

“They can’t diagnose us all,” reads the invite Wintrich sent to a select group for the March 14 gathering. “Don’t wash your hands. … Bring your fav dish!” The tongue-in-cheek advert also included an image of a boy covered in chicken pox and a fork digging into a coronavirus spore.

“The majority of folks I invited, if they got it, would recover fairly quickly and build up an immunity to the present form of COVID19,” he said unapologetically. “It was relatively inspired by the chickenpox parties that were all the rage in the 90s.”

Here’s the invitation that Wintrich sent out to his friends. It was clearly inspired by the Raid Area 51 madness.

It’s hard to even know where to begin with this one. It’s bad enough that we have people simply ignoring the guidelines and getting together in large groups without knowing if one or more of them are contagious but asymptomatic. But Wintrich was vocal about encouraging all of his friends to get infected with the coronavirus. He’s just assuming that his younger and generally healthy friends would quickly get over it and then be immune.

What the host possibly hasn’t heard yet is that the virus is killing young, healthy people now, though not in the same numbers as the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. I wonder if he would have any words of comfort to offer at the funeral for one of his friends after pulling this stunt?

Interestingly, an epidemiologist from Rockefeller University Hospital, Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, agreed with Wintrich.

“All respiratory epidemics end when 80 percent of all people have become immune,” he said “Then if a new person gets infected, the person doesn’t find anybody else to infect. The best strategy you can do is isolate the old and fragile people — make sure that nobody visits the nursing homes — then let the children go to school and let people go to work. … They have a mild disease. Then they become immune, and after two or three weeks the epidemic is over.”

I keep hearing that opinion from some doctors and it makes sense to me. And then I hear another set of doctors saying it won’t work that way in this case. There’s so much conflicting information out there it can make your head spin.

The other thing the doctor told the Post was that there are other illicit gatherings taking place in Gotham. He’s been a regular visitor to a couple of “speakeasy” operations, unlicensed restaurants and bars that have opened up in people’s private apartments in the city. He said the last one he went to was fairly crowded. Considering that Dr. Wittkowski is of retirement age, he must be awfully confident of his medical opinions to be living such a devil-may-care lifestyle right now.

Ah, well. New York, New York. So nice they say it twice. Best of luck, Doc.