A powerful reminder that “science” and “scientists” don’t say anything.
There are organizations & researchers. They don’t speak with one voice, or have the same threat assessment, and they respond to different incentives.
It would be a gift to humanity to move beyond the antiquated idea that there are “FACTS” - static statements of truth that require no context or qualification.
Not only does context matter, it matters that we can have exploratory conversations in ambiguous contexts.
I would go with a negative number - by definition every scientific discovery is replacing the null hypothesis or as you say - "popular narrative" (wtf does that mean anyway? is this like 'main stream media' or some other made up dog whistle?).
You seem confused. Popular narrative is not driven by scientist, it's driven by saber rattling morons who will crucify anyone that speaks against them.
For example, what the scientific community understood about efficacy of masks, and how utterly useless cloth masks are, disappeared overnight with covid. Perhaps your memory is failing you but I can recall people being chastised for even suggesting they might be useless. And don't even bother trying to spin some bullshit about it's better than nothing. Attaching a cloth to your face and exposing it to warm/wet air all day is a great way to start a personal mold culture you can breathe in later. And before you try to say "well you should wash them after each use", how many people do you think actually do that?
And if you wanna get real spicy, let's talk about the "science" behind transgenderism. Discovered by your favorite tumblr user, and beaten into pop culture by the woke mob.
If they have the data that supports their claims, papers who counter the popular narrative are about the most valuable thing a scientist can publish to further their career. Nobody cites papers that just reproduce existing results.
No, there are facts. Better to state “please stop politicizing uncomfortable facts”. Some facts are essentially absolute such as the speed of light in a medium. Some are statistical in nature and so can change as additional information appears (population response). And some are only inferences. The problem appears when people fail to differentiate these categories through ignorance or point of view.
Remember that “news” is at best entertainment and at worst performance art. If somebody says “the current situation is bad, assuming our model is correct”, it’s reported as “the current situation is bad” so any change is seems as nefarious. It’s just the lizard brains overpowering the neocortexes.
Facts are carefully constructed human artifacts, not ideal platonic forms. Since they are usually formed by a consensus, or at least the appearance of a consensus, they are inherently political. The scientific method will tend to produce facts which are "eventually consistent" with reality, but since humans are involved, it's not a guarantee, especially in the short term.
No, facts are true statements. We don't know which statements about this collectively observed reality are facts. Coming up with new statements about reality and figuring out how likely it is that they are facts is the point of science.
Absolute skepticism works well in philosophy lectures, but it's not a good heuristic in real life. Most facts we find by scientific short term consensus are quite close to reality.
I’m not a skeptic but recognize Hume has a point, and if one doesn’t take epistemology seriously then one is merely a dogmatist. Dogmatism has become an acute problem in our institutions as the OP indicates, and surely you’ve heard of the replication crisis as well.
I’ll take the opportunity to expand. Say you observe an event directly, with your own eyes. We’ll exclude optical illusions, hallucinations, or the possibility of a demon manipulating your brain in a vat. Is your direct observation a fact?
It’s an important observation, so you must communicate it to others. You perform a speech act to tell a few colleagues, with utterances and gesticulations to describe your observation as closely as possible. Is your oral exposition a fact?
You must communicate the observation widely for the good of society. You write a Tweet thread, and publish a scientific paper to the journals. Are these written productions also facts?
It’s retweeted, and a summary of the preprint is published to nature.com. Facts?
Colloquially, most people would refer to all of these things as facts. And each one is a carefully constructed human artifact, whether it’s sensory data imported and stored in your brain, a speech utterance, a Tweet, or a scientific article.
tenuousemphasis says>"Is that a fact, or opinion?"
I'll muddy the waters here: neither, it is a belief.
I prefer to avoid the term "fact" b/c it leads to too many arguments, just as is happening here. Rather than "facts" we have beliefs and some things we believe more than others.
--------------------------
"...in this analysis we shall approximate the horse by a sphere of radius r..."
- physicist's monologue in joke about racehorses, engineers, chemists and physicists.
If you lose the perspective that “a single reality exists and we all share it- regardless of the degree to which we actually understand it” then you’re lost to science. What your doing is no longer science and is in fact just politics.
Personally, I do believe in a universal reality. Tangentially, I also believe that cannot be justified by an autonomous epistemology. But to the point, humans make mistakes, have biases and incentives, and do not always tell the truth. Science is a human affair. Because of this, politics is present in science and even intrudes upon the processes of conducting the scientific method. Ignoring this "heresy" will only compound the issue, and further erode trust in our institutions. The remedy is more honesty, not less.
I try to address the definition in another comment below (to tenuousemphasis), and would be curious to hear your response there. I would add that I think the dictionary definition raises the same issues as the colloquial ones.
Also facts alone cannot determine a course of action. What actions we do are a combination of facts and social values. You cannot “follow the science” to a course of action, especially a myopic focus on a small subset of science to the exclusion of literally everything else.
Our myopic focus on Covid to the almost literal exclusion of everything else had a disastrous outcome. Government refused to balance Covid against other problems in society. And the result is the mess we will be cleaning up for quite some time.
It's impressive how quickly people can go from "the WHO was wrong about a thing" to "massive conspiracy headed by a secret cabal that rules the world from the shadows"
It what happens when people see the media and their government lying.
They start asking, what else have they been hiding and lying about. After that it's hard to keep it grounded in reality. It's the proverbial "and see how deep the rabbit hole goes".
The WHO was not wrong. They lied, as did Fauci, the CDC, et al. The peer reviewed research, prior to COVID, was clear that masking was not effective against respiratory viruses. When the media starts “canceling” people like Ioannidis and numerous others for questioning the effectiveness of government mitigations, all of which reduced individual freedoms, it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s blatant and unequivocal. Conspiracies are hidden. Look at who made money, e.g. Gates, Fauci. The list of obvious authoritarian actions is endless. None were warranted.
The article claims it was a “mistake” to knowingly make a false statement. I stopped reading immediately at that. This propaganda is disgusting, I used to respect Nature.
Saying it was a mistake elides responsibility and glosses over alternatives. How would you have articulated it, and would you have responded differently?
> For example, even in the middle of the fast-moving epidemic, the WHO dismissed field epidemiology reports as proof of airborne transmission because the evidence was not definitive, something that is difficult to achieve quickly during an outbreak.
It seems the responsible thing to do in this situation, rather than tweeting definitively that the virus was "NOT" spread via airborne transition, would've been too withhold judgement...at minimum. The ideal thing to do would've been to at least acknowledge the countless scenarios that gained media attention which seemed to heavily indicate airborne transmission, while prefacing it that these scenarios aren't themselves sufficient to confirm that.
The problem with this, is that people want action items. No one wants to go to the WHO and find out nothing about the virus. If you wanted to do that, you could go anywhere. So they're encouraged to put something down. That something was wrong.
It happens, it's a group run by humans. It would be great if they got everything correct, but unfortunately they don't, and to make matters worse, it sounds like they're an organization driven by consensus so changing minds means changing a bunch of individual doctors minds. Take it from me that changing doctors' minds on things is a sisyphean task. We're lucky we got a correction in 2 years.
Hopefully they learned something for any further pandemics. But the other factor of this is that communicating to people is difficult, and if you change your mind publicly and loudly too many times people lose faith in you. And unfortunately faith/belief is what people need to have in the WHO for it to be effective at giving advice.
We should have included far more “experts” than just doctors and epidemiologists. We should have had “experts” from business, arts, education, you name it at the table. The myopic fixation on Covid was the result of only giving a voice to exactly one form of expert: the doomsday epidemiologist.
Exactly. They act like they are the "authority" when most of their initial statements were wrong. It's understandable to be wrong because no one knew much about this virus at first, and everyone, including the ones that were proven right, was making guesses. But labelling the opposite side as "misinformation" only to agree with them afterwards is disgusting.
Labelling is one thing (putting a warning underneath posts with the current understanding of a given topic), but the step too far (in my opinion) was the silencing and deplatforming by way of removing posts and banning users.
No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.
Then the "town square" would become completely overrun with hateful people yelling falsehoods through microphones. Normal people would avoid the "town square" like the plague.
I agree. But wait until you have rational thoughts that get you banned and deplatformed for “misinformation”. I didn’t think it would ever happen to me until it did… there is definitely a balance between keeping toxic crap off a forum and labeling everything the admins happen to disagree with as “misinformation”
It's fine because you didn't intend to harm anyone, but now that you know it's dangerous, if you kept spreading that public data, we would know you intended harm and your behaviour would be rightly considered malinformation. That would be double plus bad.
People of the past would consider our crowded city town spaces completely overrun. I can't speak for your specific locality, but when I go to mine, I always see that there are several people with a microphone proselytising or screaming about the end of the world.
Perspective changes over time, and I have no doubt that the "town squares" will adapt into forms unrecognizable to those of us alive now, but to simply throw our hands up in the air a cede all control of public discourse to unaccountable entities is an abhorent thought.
Except instead of there being only seven, Sauron mass-produced them and now everyone has one, maybe two. Hardly nobody even meets at the Prancing Pony anymore, at least without a palantíri call first.
>But labelling the opposite side as "misinformation" only to agree with them afterwards is disgusting.
Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?
Framing the dissenting opinion as equivalent to "aliens did it" is exactly the problem. When the opinion turns out correct are you going to continue making those categorization errors? What lead to that mistake in the first place?
> Framing the dissenting opinion as equivalent to "aliens did it" is exactly the problem.
You made a category error by somehow replacing "opinions which are obvious nonsense" with "any dissenting opinion whatsoever".
Nobody but you suggested that. The claim was that you cannot say anything at all about any "dissenting opinion" unless you are 100% sure you are correct. That is nonsense. You can obviously say something about some of them, while not being confident enough to rule out some others.
What do you do with opinions that you think are wrong? Do you place them all in an "obviously nonsense" category and slap a misinformation sticker on it so others are not tempted to look at it? Because that is what happened here. What do you do when it turns out some of those things were true? Do you continue to curate the world with willful blindness?
I don't see where you said "no, you don't" so it's unclear what you mean here. Did you mean that labelling something as misinformation is unwise? Because then I agree with you.
> Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?
That's perfectly right, if you yourself aren't making guesses.
Debate, free speech, a judicious tongue, and an open mind.
What we got? People without a full understanding of the subject matter themselves acting as if they were the ultimate authority on SARS-CoV-2, and a cadre of sympathetic globalist-oriented corporations uncritically deferring to them in the extreme. It’s like some of the supposedly smartest people in the world just have their brains leak out their ears simply because a three-letter agency with such apparently big words such as “world” and “health” in the full name make some pronouncements and broker no argument.
WHO had made an unfounded guess and stated it as fact, and called a position with as much basis as they did (arguably even more, but still inconclusive) as misinformation because it disagreed with it.
The appropriate approach would be to state "given current arguments, we are not sure whether it is airborne or not" instead of doubling down on their assumption/guess.
I don't think it's fair to call it "misinformation" since that implies an intention to spread false or unchecked information.
To the best of their knowledge , at the time, that was what the evidence pointed to. Then, as more evidence surfaced they realized that those assumptions didn't hold (and that could change again in the future with new research).
I understand the frustration with mandates and wish we didn’t have them, but also think the vaccines are sound from a medical and public health standpoint.
> the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission
The vaccine does actually prevent infection, very well against the initial virus and moderately well against recent variants.
> It was claimed for a good year that the vaccines "protect you and the ones you love and therefore everyone needs to take it in order to meet other people."
That’s because the vaccines did a great job of preventing infection for a good year or so until newer variants came in. Protection against infection with two doses of the mRNA vaccine has dropped from something like >90% in the original trials to <50% with the newest variants.
> Traditional vaccines contain dead pathogens that do not reproduce, while the new ones contains a mechanism that produces new pathogen.
This statement is a bit off in terms of how traditional vaccines and newer mRNA vaccines work. First, the spike protein produced from mRNA vaccines is not a pathogen. Second, mRNA vaccines do not reproduce or replicate. Third, some traditional vaccines are attenuated vaccines [1] that can actually replicate, a fact that is taken into account when they are used.
I don't attack the vaccines as a useful tool in many cases, but the way in that they are/were marketed and mandated and the way in that sceptics are/were treated, as well as the way in that concerns about adverse reactions are treated.
> That’s because the vaccines did a great job of preventing infection for a good year or so until newer variants came in. Protection against infection with two doses of the mRNA vaccine has dropped from something like >90% in the original trials to <50% with the newest variants.
But wasn't that to be expected, because viruses mutate? It was surely mentioned by many when it started, but that did not stop the discrimination.
> First, the spike protein produced from mRNA vaccines is not a pathogen.
If it is not the spike protein, then what is most likely causing post-mRNA myocarditis?
> Second, mRNA vaccines do not reproduce or replicate.
That's not what I claimed, but that even after 8 weeks new spike protein can be produced. If spike protein is likely to cause myocarditis and potentially other adverse reactions and spike protein is still produced 8 weeks after injection, then delayed reactions seem reasonable. Public claims were that spike protein only gets produced for a very short amount of time, while there were never actual numbers. Because nobody knew, I guess.
Super interesting how /r/coronavirus and 4chan were more accurate in their conclusions about Covid.
Also it seem that institutions are deemed to feel, just how I used to hear "religions are good but religious institutions are bad", it seem to start to apply to science now.
It was disgusting how rabid were liberals about the whole Covid thing.
Liberalism is about liberty. Those people haven't been acting as liberals. They've been acting as militant technocrats.
That said, I'm willing to forgive anyone who's been living that way and realizes it's not gonna make for a particularly joyous human life. We're human, we get scared, we make mistakes.
Only in the rest of the world. In the US that word was redefined to mean "people I do not like" and they use "libertarian" instead for the original meaning.
I thought about this a little more. The relationship of these "people I do not like" (though some of them are not so bad) to freedom exists - it's not liberal, it's libertine. You are free to play almost any way you want. You want to play all day with little children's toys well into your 40s? Go right ahead, you do you. Watch a show aimed at the opposite sex, while stuffing your face full of custom made toothpaste-flavoured corn chips? Nothing wrong with that. Got an absolutely bonkers kink, like uh, transforming people into cakes and sitting on them? Any judgment or concern about it is met with harsh reproach.
The only sort of play that is obviously not tolerated is culture-jamming against the libertines. It's stupid, immature, in poor taste, morally reprehensible, selfish, deplorable, hypocritical, bigoted, alarmist, disingenuous, and sinful against the only commandment: "Do as thou wilt". This is our dungeon, in our fort, in what used to be your country. Go play somewhere else, and make sure we can't hear you.
Did they actually have a consensus for their conclusions, or were there just some segment of the site saying one thing, some segment saying another thing, and we now remember only the segment that was saying the right thing?
It was disgusting how many people became totally close-minded, hateful authoritarian bullies regardless of who was "right" and even if there were no mistakes or blatant misrepresentation of risks and benefits of certain policies.
- A person's bodily autonomy is the most fundamental freedom there is. Of course there is a balance to be weighed when it affects others, but there is no absolute right or wrong answer.
- People absolutely are justified and right to question authority, politicians, self-proclaimed experts, pharmaceutical and medical corporations, as well as studies, data, and science.
- Even if "the science" around the risk of covid and benefit of lockdowns was correct, the response to it is not scientific. Policy can take science or evidence into account, that doesn't mean it is science. You are not anti-science if you don't believe mandatory lockdowns and economic shutdowns was a good policy.
Amazing that in reply to an article about Covid being classified as airborne and transmitted as an aerosol, with specific concern for indoor venues due to wide variation in ventilation, there are still comments like this this about bodily autonomy.
As if clothes weren’t already a requirement for visiting your public venue of choice.
>Super interesting how /r/coronavirus and 4chan were more accurate in their conclusions about Covid.
Yeah, I mean, who would have thought that the globohomo cabal was behind it all along... oh you mean that they were more accurate on the 10% non crazy stuff they say?
Non-experts have no credibility to lose, nobody remembers or cares when their predictions are wrong. So what's the risk in concluding before you have all the data?
Experts are pinning their credibility on the line - not even if they issue every guess under a giant glowing banner saying "THIS IS JUST A GUESS WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA TO BE DEFINITIVE YET". So: they're slower. I am not, incidentally, saying WHO's response is perfect.
>“We’re really talking here about two failures, not one,” says Sandman. “Being reluctant to change your mind, and being reluctant to tell people you changed your mind.” Like other public-health and scientific organizations, the WHO “are afraid of losing credibility by acknowledging that they got something wrong”, he says.
Quite a good summary for the entire clusterfuck that was the pandemic response. I still cant wrap my head about the utter spineless idiocy. You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better. You being wrong isnt dependent on you acknowledging it.
And the worst part, the more they kept lying the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong.
You also lose people when you change your mind. There's an entire group of news anchors who dedicate themselves to pointing out where people have flip-flopped. It's pretty common.
I agree the not changing your mind is worse, but they also describe this thing as being driven by consensus as doctors, so you're having to change a bunch of people's minds who think they're the very best at what they do. It's a serious failing of that setup. It's somewhat impressive that they ever changed their mind.
I feel like bending into that with increased dishonesty only makes that worse though. There's only a 'gotcha' if you change your mind while pretending you were never wrong, if you explain what evidence changed your mind then there's not that much power in pointing out 'flip-flopping'.
But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong...
The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...
People DID panic buy... every damned thing anyway. Particularly the toilet paper. I'm just glad my buying habits are to retain a stock of that anyway since I buy it at a warehouse store.
9/10 times if you flip-flop, the way it is communicated is not with that level of nuance. So you can absolutely change your mind the correct way with given data, and the way it's communicated is with a headline that says "CDC/WHO FLIP FLOPS ABOUT VIRUS".
You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time.
If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time.
Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.
It’s certainly strange when people suddenly appear to have changed their mind, without explaining or acknowledging it. A little humility and explanation would help. If a pundit is making a scene of it, go on his show.
> You also lose people when you change your mind. There's an entire group of news anchors who dedicate themselves to pointing out where people have flip-flopped. It's pretty common.
I think you are talking about Fauci's flip-flop here. The point is not about his flip-flop on mask mandate. The point was about his confidence. You do not go and say confidently, on National TV, that masks don't stop the virus and that people should stop buying masks from stores as it is needed for emergency workers. Then turn around half a year later, after the pandemic is in full swing and say that masks are important as it stops the virus. Both times he said it he said that it is based on credible scientific evidence. This is what ticks people off.
If you do not know something and have no facts to back up your claim, don't say it. If you want to still say it (as you don't want people to hoard masks), appeal to the people to not hoard masks out of fear as those masks are needed for the frontline workers. Better still, get the US Government to buy those masks or ban stores from selling masks to general public until you have equipped frontline workers. Then ease the ban. Do not lie by saying that masks don't prevent virus as it sends a negative message and reassurance that everything is fine. Then turn around half a year later and say it is dangerous! This sort of flip-flop is not acceptable to anyone. Especially when it comes to disaster response.
You are an expert for a reason. People trust your words. You are in a position of power when it comes to your own field. Don't degrade/misuse that position.
The reason WHO lost its credibility is because of it shutting down alternative takes, continuous flip-flops and ever changing directives/mandates.
It would have been better if WHO started by saying "We don't know. It is a novel virus. We are still learning as we go along. We will issue directives as and when we get more information. Please note that these directives are temporary and only based on evidence we have right in front of us. If things change, we will keep you informed. We still aren't sure what to make of it". This is all WHO needed to do. This would have instilled a bit of fear yes (which in hindsight was actually needed to make lockdowns effective and mask mandates effective). You took away the "fear" factor at the very beginning of the virus outbreak and then when people got the message, you try to tell them to now start fearing the virus. Why would people buy your argument? And how many of them will take you seriously after such a drastic flip-flop? Rather than confidently put out statements that the virus isn't airborne or doesn't spread through contact WHO should have been honest from the start. That it doesn't know anything and is learning as we go along. That the virus maybe dangerous and that we have to be cautious.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
There was no disclaimer to say that this investigation is ongoing. That this preliminary data collected will have a final investigation as well. That it can change as more data becomes available. Communication is key in disaster response. You do not say anything with 100% certainty if you do not know it to be true.
I don't know if this has been tested, but I'd venture a guess that this has something to do with how one flip flops.
Exhibit A:
"This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".
Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong. We will say that as institution C Org, we have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise is wrong"
VS
Exhibit B:
"We as A Org, have reason to believe that X is the most true thing we know given current knowledge. We acknowledge fact Y exists and are actively investigating it and its implications. For people searching for guidance, A Org recommends actions S,T, and U. We will continue to research and revise information where necessary"
---
I feel like Exhibit A, which is something I see a lot from government entities (confirmation bias makes me want to add "in the US") makes a changing of mind a thing of pride since you've staked a bet on it. A bet which usually is condescending and says "I'm right, you're wrong"
Exhibit B leaves the hatches open while still getting a firm message down based on today's knowledge.
Sadly there's no A/B testing we can turn to to know which approach would be better. But just out of sensibility, I wish more entities engaged in the latter approach
> Exhibit A: "This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".
I've noticed a pattern where people will take this as their default assumption, and even selectively read evidence to the contrary in order to maintain that assumption.
For example, a while ago on HN[1], someone posted this link[2] about a CDC announcement titled "CDC director says data 'suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus'". The claim was that the CDC director, Walensky, insisted that vaccinated people do not carry COVID and insisted that they were 90% protected against infection, and the CDC wouldn't walk back on those claims.
However, when reading the article, it shows that the assumption that the CDC was using Exhibit A's method in their announcement was wrong, and the CDC actually used the more reasonable method in your Exhibit B:
> Walensky was referring to a new CDC study of nearly 4,000 front-line workers, some vaccinated and some not, who tested themselves weekly for COVID-19 infections between December and March.
> But more data is still necessary to say so definitively, which is why researchers are recruiting thousands of college students across the country to find out more about the likelihood of asymptomatic spread of this virus among vaccinated people.
The article was a good and balanced piece looking from the all aspects. Only thing you see is people picking only quotes that help to propagate the nihilist condemnation of WHO as corrupt and incompetent.
The evidence for airborne transmission was really low quality at first. It's pretty normal, but very unfortunate, that people get primed to their early experience of new theory and can't see above it.
This is because science is being corroded by politics.
Politics is being paralyzed by binarism. Everything is Right OR Wrong, left OR right, on OR off. there is no grey areas anymore.. there is no acceptable position that is in between or overlaps.
> You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong
Disagree, plenty of organizations and people lost credibility in the eyes of some for doing just this as new research emerged over the course of the pandemic.
I agree with that. But I think there's a small gap in credibility loss between "being right in the first place" and "being wrong, but admitting it promptly". And a much larger gap between "being wrong, but admitting it promptly", and "being wrong, and refusing to admit it until everyone has known you were wrong for a long time".
There's also the interesting "being right, but essentially having guessed and tied various other crackpot theories to the reasoning" that muddies the water further. For example, that COVID was always airborne, but it is actually the vaccine that causes it because the microchips they put in it have little propellers on them and they use them to fly around the room.
Unfortunately, also in the “don't acknowledge” category are people who continue to trust out of momentum or loyalty, or who knows what else. Not acknowledging has some upside for the actor, while it remains harmful to the group.
There's an important difference between "The sky will be red tomorrow" and "Based on {data}, I think that the sky will be red tomorrow." even if the reasoning from {data} to "sky red tomorrow" is flawed.
If someone arrives at a conclusion via a process that I can analyse, I expect that they'll arrive at a different conclusion if the data turns out different.
When someone says "{whatever} is true", it's on them, and should be, when {whatever} turns out to be false.
Here's another way to look at it.
Folks who arrive at conclusion in a openly disinterested way can switch conclusions without losing credibility.
People who seem to be interested in a given conclusion lose credibility, and should, when they're wrong. Same for folks who don't show their work.
If you make it about you, you can't complain when it's about you.
They only lose credibility when they state things as indisputable facts. They should have been saying "based on current research this is our new best guess."
>> You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better. You being wrong isnt dependent on you acknowledging it.
Unfortunately, in the public/political realm, I think this isn't true. Flip flopping suggests weak morals. When scientific "facts" change, a lot of people conclude that the scientists know nothing.
Just today and yesterday our widely respected health minister here in Germany lost a lot credibility by changing his opinion.
He said there would be no requirement for quarantine soon and changed it to "quarantine stays" a day later.
All he did by that was alienating his biggest support group: vaccinated people. While the covidiots are cheering because "they knew it all along". We came out of this with a better solution but still...unnecessary loss of credibility. Next time people will think: I can ignore that, "they" will probably turn it around tomorrow.
The art is to only talk if you're sure what you say.
> the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong.
There are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t yet only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their vivid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. INHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable if tending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
> the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong.
They’re are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t the only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out. Overall I think at least here in the UK the system worked very well, health services were severely tested but the lockdowns were effective, and now the vaccines and other proven therapies have returned life pretty much to normal.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their covid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency. The governments that hold power over it want to be able to kick it around and they do.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. IMHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable of fending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
I don’t think Britain was very successful in our public health mesures. We were far too slow to lock down and recommend masks and as a result we had twice as many deaths as comparable countries like Germany and France. Our health care system was very efficient at distributing the vaccine though and this was a great success.
UK deaths per million were 2,400, France was 2,000 which is comparable. Especialy in the early phases random events like super spreaders made a big difference to individual countries impact. Germany was 1,500 but that's an outlier, it helps do mass testing and targeted lockdowns early if your country is one of the global centres for the medical testing industry.
You're quite right we should have locked down a few weeks earlier in the first phases. What I'm saying is the lockdowns and mask mandates worked. You're saying we needed more aggressive lockdowns and more masks, and I won't argue with you, yes. We could have done with even more of these measures, but the measures clearly did what they were supposed to do.
That's just saying we needed more of the system not that the system failed in the way I think OP meant. If anything Germany's success was because they were even more tightly integrated into the system.
A lot of people who looked into COVID were saying this doesn't add up. They were were framed to be in the 'small vocal minorities that say all sorts of crap'.
"the system" was all pointing and looking at each other. Big tech censored content that was deemed misinformation by the standards du jour.
"the system" failed what it said it would do, follow the science.
And the WHO has been a major part of that system.
It depends what you mean by add up. There really were lots of small vocal groups saying all sorts of utter rubbish, and still are. Also of course in the early days there were lots of things nobody knew, and people were making the best guess or estimate they could based on limited data, and refining on that as more information became available.
"Quite a good summary for the entire clusterfuck that was the pandemic response. I still cant wrap my head about the utter spineless idiocy. You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better. You being wrong isnt dependent on you acknowledging it."
This statement applies to the WHO, and it applies equally to China, which will wear the shame of COVID for centuries. If China had been forthcoming from the start of the pandemic instead of obfuscating and frustrating every single attempt by the rest of the world to ascertain COVID's existence, its nature, and the risk it posed, China's role as COVID's origin would have been merely a footnote relegated to the introductory paragraph of all future histories written on the subject. Now, though, China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years. On top of that, the Chinese are so incompetent that the truth got out anyway. Great job, Xi.
I'm going out on a limb here and guess you're in the US because that's the only place I've seen hyperfixating on China during COVID discussions.
I don't think "China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years" because that's not even what anyone remembers them as today, outside the US. And even in the US I don't think that's going to matter or create any semblence of a legacy in any way that matters. China was very quick to rebound from the economic downturn and as far as I can tell came out ahead of everyone else.
Not to mention that every single other country fucked up their pandemic response so badly that getting angry at China requires several layers of indirection (though some US media has been better at making this detour).
Not in the US, nor am I a particular fan of the US or US foreign policies. I also think Trump's IQ is sub 90. This was still a massive Chinese fuckup IMO, with the local CCP in Wuhan implicated in particular.
I am Chinese and I was physically in China early 2020, I disagree strongly with with the narrative that China "was not forthcoming". What I saw there on the ground was totally different from Western reporting and narratives.
News about an "unknown decease" was right there on TV even as early as December 31[1]. On the same day, the news was already reported world-wide[2].
Later on, Western reporting said that China "lied about transmissibility" (i.e. that China said it was "not transmissible"), but what they actually said was that "evidence of transmissibility was not clear (at that moment)" — when knowledge of the virus was only a few weeks old and when Covid was nowhere near as transmissible as it is now.
Then later on, stories about "cover-ups" appeared, mostly referring to Li Wenliang, but these are complete misrepresentations.
- Li Wenliang was not a "whistleblower", his social media posts merely leaked through his contacts. And Li Wenliang's post was posted on Deccember 30, but literally the next day the case was already escalated to WHO[3].
- Li Wenliang also wasn't the first doctor who discovered something was wrong: dr Zhang Jixian was, who discovered the case many days before Li's actions. It was dr Zhang who worked on the process of escalating to China's national CDC and to the WHO.[4]
- Li Wenliang was never arrested, jailed or punished. The police merely reprimanded him. He had to sign an NDA promising not to spread rumors (the rumor being that "it was SARS", when it wasn't SARS and nobody knew what it was). That's it. He wasn't detained, he could go on working right after.
- Later on, the judge judged in favor of Li Wenliang, ruling that the police's behavior was unacceptable. The police then apologized.[5]
There were also stories about how China "infected the world" by deliberately allowing international flights from Wuhan — except China didn't do that, all flights from Wuhan were cancelled with the exception of diplomatic expatriation flights.
When I arrived back in the Netherlands by February 1, Wuhan had already been locked down for a week. And what did the western world do? They pretended like the virus would stay in China. Nobody took any measures to prepare for COVID. Nobody on the airport asked for my contact details. I called the Dutch CDC but there was no way to get tested, not even if I pay for it myself.
Meanwhile the media was full of stories about how "lockdowns are human rights violations", that "it's just a flu" and that "free press would have prevented this strategy". There were no "China was not forthcoming" stories back then — only stories gleeing about how big of a disaster China was. Only after it was apparent that it wasn't just a flu did the "China didn't warn us" stories began.
After it was apparently that the western "free press" failed to prevent the epidemic from spreading to their own territories (even with China's super-obvious warning of locking down Wuhan), did they take responsibility for the fact that they blamed it on China's "lack of free press" (even though China's press did report)? Of course not, they just swept that narrative under a carpet.
Then a year later, Delta appeared in India. Did anybody criticize India for not having stopped Delta despite already knowing about COVID for a year? Of course not: only if it happened in China does it deserve criticism. That China actually did report? Not important, we'll just keep pretending they didn't.
The problem isn't that "China wasn't forthcoming", the problem is that the west does not treat China fairly and has a tendency to scapegoat China. "China wasn't forthcoming" is merely an excuse to cover up the west's own failures and to stick to old prejudices about how China ...
Interesting perspective from you, particularly as I'm at uni and my close friends circle is probably 75% Chinese. Two of those friends were back in China visiting in December 2019 and January 2020. One of them was in Shanghai and was there for only 2 days before he put the pieces together, realised something very bad was going on, and got the fuck out back to the country we're in.
Let me be clear: I don't think that China purposely infected anybody, or intentionally let the virus spread. As for the lab leak theory, it's plausible, but I don't think we'll ever know (thanks to the CCP), and the fact is it doesn't matter now.
What I do think is that the CCP, and the local Wuhan CCP officials in particular, tried to cover their own asses. That may have included literally keeping information from Poobear and the other top CCP brass, but the point is that I don't think it was intentionally bioterrorism so much as the CCP hierarchy utterly failing to look after its local population and that of wider China, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
Nor does one need to be a Trump fan (I'm certainly not and I don't even live in America) to think that this was wholly China's fault, or to think that China is still to this day lying and covering it up.
China isn't so much blamed for failing to 'stop COVID' as much as it is blamed for blatantly lying to the international community, misleading WHO officials (the very officials China planted there - look it up), continuing to mislead and deceive the international community and investigators, and just generally being abhorrent outside of COVID. See: China's pathetic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's failure to even condemn it in mild terms; China's posturing with its military in the South China Sea and in territorial waters off Australia's coast, neither of which are places where China has legitimate claims to territory; China's behaviour in Hong Kong, which represent more lies (this time, lies directed towards England back in the '90s).
In short, the rest of the world thinks China - and particularly the China of the CCP - is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, arrogant shithole that lies to its citizens, firewalls them off from the rest of the world, and generally does whatever China thinks is in China's best interest, with no regard to principles or moral underpinnings. This is the place where asbestos is still widely used in construction, after all. It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China. And before you say it, lots of places have/have had very high population densities without sprouting global diseases every few centuries, and of course the CCP knew this would be the reaction - which is why they covered it up. Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens? But I digress.
In short, China is a morally bankrupt country that lies to its citizens and to the rest of the world, and seems to be increasingly aggressive militarily. COVID just happened to be the confluence of all those factors into something that fucked the rest of the globe over. And let me be clear: one could just as easily call America a morally bankrupt shithole, too, and they'd be right - but the fact is, America's moral bankruptcy has resulted in local wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American incompetence has never fucked the entire world over like China just did.
And let's be clear: If a virus broke out in India and the Modi government sat on it, obfuscated it, gagged local doctors, refused to allow media to report on it etc., there'd be just as much condemnation towards India as there was/is towards China. The reason China gets so much hate is because it is a dishonest bully whose modern rise rests on how well it has stolen Western intellectual property over the past 30 years, and not because the rest of the world has ...
I agree with you that mistakes have been made, both on the local level and on the national level. I also agree that there were failures to protect the interests of citizen — a thing which happens time to time.
But I strongly disagree with the notions that:
1. They "covered it up".
2. COVID is "wholly China's fault".
3. China is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, morally bankrupt country.
4. China lies and will continue to lie and cannot be trusted on anything.
5. The entire system is wholly corrupt, beyond saving, and deserves to be condemn in full.
6. China is militaristically aggressive and that "the rest of the world" sees China that way.
These notions are not based on facts. In fact, I assert that they are based on misrepresentations (i.e. anti-China propaganda), prejudice (one already believed that China is bad, so one is inclined to believe stories/rumors that confirm this regardless of their truth), ignorance (the "rest of the world" is bigger than the west), and sinophobia (fear of the Other; applying a different and unrealistic standard on China).
By and large, the Chinese population does not think that way about China at all. A 14-year long study by Harvard has found that 93% of Chinese are satisfied with the central government.[1] A later study, this time by York University, has found that satisfaction has gone up to a staggering 98%.[2] Neither of them used Chinese government data. All my family, both in the Netherlands as well as in China, are pretty satisfied with China even if everybody acknowledges there are problems (and which place don't have problems?). How can this be possible in a "shithole" that suppresses and abuses its citizen? The answer: China isn't a "shithole", nor are its citizens "supressed and abused". My Chinese wife is puzzled: "why do foreigners think China is hell?" China is just a country that does things differently and that has its own strengths and problems. Tendencies to project that beyond what it is, and into a world-threatening hellhole, is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
To those wondering what I say what I say: I recognize that China has problems and shortcomings. It would be foolish to deny that (and indeed, those who deny that are ultranationalists, that I do not approve). But when you condemn China's system wholesale, that's where you lose my support, and that's where you push me to the other side.
Regarding sinophobia, let's just say that I find these excerpts from your posts... highly curious, if not dishonest.
> It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China.
Wait a minute, so this is not just about CCP?
Also: China has always had a huge population, so even based on simple probability there's a lot of things that come out of China.
> Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens?
Oh so this is again not just about the CCP?
And let me tell you that by and large Chinese don't eat "bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens". But with so many people there's always a village somewhere with such practice.
Also don't forget that hygiene is something that develops over time as a country becomes more developed. China was comparable to Africa just a few decades ago. This low level of development was caused by imperalism so I find it hig...
Just letting you know I (truly) appreciate your points here and also how much time they must have taken to write, and I will get back to you. If I don't reply immediately, give me some time. I'll try to reciprocate by putting some serious thought/time into replying.
This is a follow-up comment that addresses the 6 points I mentioned in my other comment.
---
Re point 1: you keep saying they "covered it up" but based on what evidence? The first doctor who discovered it, Zhang Jixian, diagnosed an unknown pneunomia on Dec 27. By Dec 31 the case had been escalated to WHO. Where is the room for "covering up"?
Yes Wuhan officials probably were incentivized to not raise a big fuss until more about the virus is known. They probably erred too much on the optimistic side. But being too optimistic in the face of an unknown virus is still a far cry from "covering up" which would mean intend to lie in the face of clear evidence. Where is your evidence that that's what happened?
Where is the "misleading WHO"? The only thing I could think of was that tweet from the WHO saying that they "found no clear evidence of transmission", but that's not at all the same as "it's not transmissible". Now one would be correct in saying that that's too vaguely worded. So literally the next day they clarified that "transmission is still possible"[1].
Thus, I conclude that continued assertions that "they covered it up" is based on prejudice and the tendency to blame China, not based on actual facts.
Re point 2: why is COVID "wholly China's fault" when western countries failed to take precautions even 1 month after the Wuhan lockdown? 1 month after Wuhan I remembered that Alglophone media still called it "a flu", and that the Dutch prime minister didn't take the issue seriously at all. Yeah just wash your hands and sneeze in your elbow, no need for further precautions. A week later he had to eat his own words. How is this China's fault? Is locking down a megacity not enough of a warning?
This also brings us back to point 1. We can now say that Wuhan officials were wrong to have been too optimistic. But by the time Wuhan locked down, it should have been safe to say that one must err on the side of caution instead. But western countries didn't do that: they were still too optimistic. Why is Wuhan officials — who had little knowledge of the virus — being optimistic, a sign of a wholly corrupt regime that's 100% to blame for COVID, while western countries who were too optimistic despite massive warning not wholly corrupt and blameable?
I assert that this double standard is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
---
Re point 4 and 5: where are the lies? What exactly did they lie about? You keep saying that they lie but where is the evidence? Why are you so convinced that they must lie even in the absence of such evidence? The Chinese public certainly doesn't think that the whole system and whole regime systematically lies (corruption here and there exist, as with anywhere else in the world).
In the absence of evidence about lying, I assert that the iron-clad belief that they must lie is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
---
Re point 6: "military aggression" is propaganda, not based on facts.
China hasn't shot a bullet over its borders in 40 years. China still has border disputes, but those disputes are neither recent, nor did they arise out of military aggressiveness, nor are they purely a China problem.
All desputes are a legacy of the colonial period when the British drew lines all over Asia that neighboring countries later didn't agree on. All disputes that the People's Republic has and had, were inherited in 1949 from its predecessor state — none of the disputes are recent.
All land border issues, with the exception of India, have been resolved. The Indian dispute hasn't been resolved not because China is ag...
You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better.
Yup, I had a chance to be involved in some high profile (for the company) PR issues and one of the worse things you can do is trying to cover something up. It's far better to just be transparent and admitting errors can actually build trust if done right.
But I also understand that without solid evidence, it can be impossible to give firm recommendations, which in the end can make people question the value of what you say.
> You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong
Maybe that's how you think, but lots of people don't think that way. To a large part of the masses, experts have to be right the first time around, otherwise people lose trust in them. Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting. Many treat science and expertise as authoritative, and when they fail, or even if they say "we don't know", many lost faith in the entire concept of science, jumping to... less science-y approaches that feel more emotionally gratifying.
Is this just a failure of education? I don't know.
It shouldn't matter how you think, or how a change of opinion is viewed.
The idea is that science should be continuous discovery process - scientists are meant to be acting in good faith, not hiding or 'managing' information. If we are genuinely seeking understanding (not attempting to sell people on a particular viewpoint), why shouldn't new information be widely disseminated?
Whatever has been going on, it is clear that from the start this has been a massively politicised process directing the world's governments. That it is so politicised means that I personally have very little faith in the scientific proclamations that are handed down.
> Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting.
This is the Fauci argument. It doesn't work.
Aside from being incredibly Condescending to assume the masses are too stupid to handle the truth...
All it does is open you up to criticism from people that understand basic logic.
Those criticisms then spread between these "many people".
On the other hand, if you told the truth up front, you might have "many people" misunderstand something, but you have the upside of the many other people being able to argue why they're wrong over the following months. Eventually truth and facts prevail.
You maintain credibility with people that do understand science, and you get eventual credibility from those who misunderstand.
Sure some will never change but you were going to instantly lose credibility to them either way.
> I am not American and I don't care about Fauci. I'm just reporting on what I observe in the Dutch discourse.
Neither here nor there. Fauci, along with most governments in the oecd lied about mask efficacy to protect mask stocks for health care workers.
This was done because they didn't trust the poor stupid people with the truth.
All they had to say, masks work but please leave these for health care workers as they are more at risk. Most people would have done the right thing if they just trusted them, and if not? Who cares, it's not your fucking job.
> This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
Except it is?
You need to trust humanity to make the right decisions when given the facts.
Hiding the facts, lying, or obscuring the truth in hopes of controlling the poor stupid people is how you get a nanny state.
Let idiots win the Darwin award and move on with your life.
The public health institutions in the USA have really failed us.
Covid was more of a public health blunder than a medical one. Not having a cohesive strategy, conflicting and often political messaging around gatherings, and worst of all lying to people repeatedly bc they couldn’t “handle” the truth is insane. On top of that there was and still are plenty of plans for locking down etc that have no actual metrics around them. They’re literally just feeling based.
At least the medical companies came up with a good enough vaccine to get us out of this mess.
It really feels like the public health officials and politicians to some extent view the public with contempt.
> And although the WHO has drawn strong criticism for the way in which it assessed SARS-CoV-2 transmission, some researchers don’t find the agency’s response surprising. The international community looks to the WHO for early warnings of disease outbreaks. But when it comes to science, the agency “sees its role as certifying the current expert consensus, not (usually) advancing new, tentative knowledge
Great I wonder if YouTube will now unban all the “disinformation” videos they banned while the WHO was wrong. There were so many people debating this long before the WHO changed its tune. This is why free speech must be protected. Fuck these overlords telling us what to think.
These 'overlords' also tell us to take the vaccines instead of Ivermectin. Blind disrespect for authority is no better than blind respect for authority.
> Well actually they first said “no way I’m taking Trump’s vaccine” and then flipped.
Who is "they"?
I've heard people, such as Biden and Harris, say they didn't trust Trump to give correct vaccine information and would make their decisions on when to take a vaccine based on what doctors say.
Wasn't the banned disinformation about how COVID is just the flu or started in a government lab? The article seems to indicate that the virus was actually more transmissible and dangerous than officially communicated. Do we really think things would have gone better if they said it was more dangerous? What am I missing?
I was the first in our office to go permanently WFH in February of 2020, three weeks before our offices closed, because I recognized that SARS-Cov-2 would be a huge problem, when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode. Here's the news that did not pass my bullshit detector:
1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast it spread. It didn't make sense to me that a virus that is dragged onto the ground by water droplets would spread with such speed.
2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
The only bullshit I wasn't able to capitalize on was SPX crashing. I calculated that it should have fallen to less than $1000/share (closer to $500), based on past panic sell patterns, which was obviously not a guarantee, but the government stepped in and I missed out on quite a bit of money. I still think bailing out rich people's money in the stock market was complete bullshit on behalf of the government (but what do I know?).
I know it's all in retrospect now, so it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, but at the time, it wasn't easy to be the guy who said "see ya guys, I'm going to hide from a virus that's going to turn into a global pandemic and you should all be doing the same because it's the logical thing to do based on the known facts". Even my manager (who approved my request to WFH) looked at me like I'm the token crazy guy from sci-fi movies holding "the end is nigh" sign.
I wish more people thought critically and had healthy skepticism towards all the information they receive, not just the part they disagree with. I was never a fan of blindly trusting anything. I trust, but I verify.
> when pretty much everyone was in the 'just a flu/cold' mode
By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold.
In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.
Feb 2020 is the timeframe mentioned by the above comment.
In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.
Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
China has not permitted any investigation into the origins of the virus. And given the ease with which it spreads, and the fact that everyone was heads up about it in January, you'd think we'd have heard about a proliferation of cases elsewhere if it had begun elsewhere. That didn't happen. What we saw was a spread of cases in Wuhan, then in nearby China, then major cities worldwide. And as soon as it spread worldwide, China reported exactly 50% more deaths in one day [1], then stopped reporting deaths altogether. [2] [3]
Thanks. I have my Chinese friends telling me that China let investigations happen at the labs in Wuhan but the US never let such a thing happen, and so on...
Puts against the spx e-mini march 2020 futures went from pennies to very much in the money in the space of a few days. With puts anywhere near the money - somewhere between 2500 and 3000 - you could have made pretty much arbitrarily large profits.
And yet for the vast majority of people it really was just a bad cold. I had a bunch of friends and family who got infected before vaccines were available, and that's literally how most of them described the experience.
What's your point? There's no way to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because there are multiple animal reservoirs and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection.
My point is the fact that the majority of infected individuals didn't suffer from it does not mean it is not a serious disease. Hardly anyone was paralyzed by polio, but we view it as an extremely serious disease.
According to Wikipedia on the initial polio pandemic: “On Saturday, June 17, 1916, an official announcement of the existence of an epidemic polio infection was made in Brooklyn, New York. That year, there were over 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, with over 2,000 deaths in New York City alone.[16] The names and addresses of individuals with confirmed polio cases were published daily in the press, their houses were identified with placards, and their families were quarantined.[17] Dr. Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. was one of the physicians in several cities who realized what they were dealing with, but the nature of the disease remained largely a mystery. The 1916 epidemic caused widespread panic and thousands fled the city to nearby mountain resorts; movie theaters were closed, meetings were canceled, public gatherings were almost nonexistent, and children were warned not to drink from water fountains, and told to avoid amusement parks, swimming pools, and beaches.”
We didn’t lock down society for 2 years because of Covid either.
You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.
We didn’t have anything like that.
The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.
Ignoring the details, COVID's death rate in the US is about 1.17% (20K deaths, 1.7M infections), and let's say that on average 10% of infections require hospitalizations. You could still say that for the vast majority of people (~90%) it's like a bad cold, so your comment makes sense, but my thinking was focused on the risk/reward aspects.
To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?
That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.
Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
Which countries exactly? EU kept it’s head firmly in the sand until Bergamo happened towards the end of February, and even then the prevailing philosophy was “Italians are idiots, this can’t happen to us”.
Well, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, of course China had Wuhan in full lockdown. By March Canada, a handful of the south americas, uk had all started some form of restrictions.
Yeah, whereas the reality seems to be more like Italians were idiots, and this could well be why it happened to us. There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives. The information coming out of Italy was obviously garbage. The only way for an outbreak to go from first detected community spread to hospital systems collapsing so fast was if they'd done an even worse job of testing patients with no ties to China who were hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than the US, which had a policy of not testing patients with no ties to China hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms (and still detected them much earlier in the outbreak). Obviously you weren't going to get any meaningful figures on infection rates out of that - was it a mild disease causing lots of deaths by infecting everyone, or something slower spreading but deadlier? Who knows. Their treatment guidance was bad and likely killed people too. And it's worth remembering that pretty much no other country had cases seeded from China turn into uncontrolled community spread in the way Italy did, before or after them, except perhaps South Korea - the whole rest of the pandemic seems to trace back to Italy's massive undetected and uncontrolled community outbreak. It was obvious that something different had happened in Italy, and there wasn't enough evidence to say exactly what or what the implications would be for the rest of the world.
>There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives.
Not in the UK, the situation in Italy was all over our news.
Probably the biggest criticism I have of the UK media was their overemphasis on young people succumbing. The stats said that young people were unlikely to die but we were presented with cases of that almost daily.
V. interesting take. I always assumed that the reason why the Italians got it so bad was because they are a nation of extremely social old people who kiss every time they meet.
Old people in most countries in europe are rather lonely, whereas in Italy they crowd the streets of every town in the evenings. I could imagine in such an enviroment, a low-deadliness-fast-spreading disease could cause a very rapid collapse in a hospital system.
Yeah, that was my thinking as well. China was late to react (like ages) and then you could see that China could not contain it. If China can’t, few others who can.
What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
I guess, but there were loads of things about this disease that made it stand out right from the start. The bad timing (before chinese new year), low lethality, high transmission rates, high asymptomatic rates, all made it pretty clear even to non-experts that this was going to be a really big deal.
Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
Except they don’t spread exponentially like some startup hockey stick growth chart. They might start exponentially but eventually it gets harder and harder to find the next host to the spread peaks and eventually declines. The chart of a virus spread is not really exponential at all.
Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
I had a look at your post history, and obviously, I don't agree with your ideas about COVID - but I'm curious, what got you so emotionally engaged?
I've had some relatives die, I've spent large portions of the pandemic cooped up inside with kids, I've missed funerals, etc - and I think earlier in the pandemic, I was probably about as emotionally engaged as you are, except, in the other direction. Now, I don't really have much of an opinion about it. Why do you continue to care?
We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019, at the end of Jan I flew to the UK and at the airport literally every single Asian person wore a mask, and myself. I didn't see any non-asian person wearing a mask. Wore mask the whole flight, on the way home I had 2 elderly people on the plane tell me I was scaring them for wearing a mask.
I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH.
I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.
> We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019
That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]
> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.
> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.
Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
> Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019.
That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports.
It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1],
> WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.
They received word about that "media statement" from Taiwan. The "media statement" was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and distributed on PTT, a Taiwanese social network.
> The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
China did not allow these statements to be made public until around January 20 when they finally stated human-to-human transmission was confirmed. At first they detained doctors who tried to speak out.
Taiwan was the first to publicly call it SARS. In early January they sent a team to visit Wuhan, then came back and said "this is SARS".
So what you're saying is that because Wuhan University sent samples to be tested on the 30th of december for 'sars like virus' sorry 'atypical pneumonia' (commonly used to refer to SARS) which was posted in a forum, which Taiwan picked up and forwarded to the WHO. That Taiwan did not make the WHO aware.
That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
> That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
There is no public record about this novel coronavirus, later called Covid-19, prior to Dec 31 2019. China kept it under wraps. Wuhan doctors knew but they were not allowed to speak out. When they tried, they were detained and threatened with arrest.
Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
From The facts regarding Taiwan’s email to alert WHO to possible danger of COVID-19, [1]
> To be prudent, in the email we took pains to refer to atypical pneumonia, and specifically noted that patients had been isolated for treatment. Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
The email text is in this Taipei Times article [2].
> Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
So you don't believe it's possible, at all, for rumours to have been running around prior to the 31st, that there was a possible sars outbreak, prior to Taiwan getting some sort of evidence to submit to the WHO to request information about what's going on.
Absolutely I think it's possible for rumors to have been running around given that Dr. Li Wenliang messaged his group about it as being confirmed to be a coronavirus on Dec. 30 [1]
We seem to have miscommunicated. When you wrote "We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019" I thought you meant you had heard about a confirmed outbreak reported by some reliable news source, not rumors.
What I meant to underscore was that this knowledge did not become public prior to Taiwan notifying the WHO.
I'm glad we sorted it out. And thanks for the lesson. I'll be more careful reading this kind of comment in the future. I didn't realize there were such rumors floating about and just assumed you were talking about actual news reports.
My partner (from Wuhan) had received wechat messages (a shared wechat 'moment') reporting of an outbreak, I believe this was on the 24th of December 2019, however it could have been a few days later. It indicated that there was some type of outbreak and hospitals were becoming full.
> Taxi drivers in Hong Kong were telling me about some bad flu in the Mainland around Christmas.
I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated.
Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back.
> It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew.
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020.
It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.”
> I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism
The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health.
I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
> I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.
The government and hospitals don’t source masks from the local store or amazon. They can also force companies in a crisis to sell only to them and ban exports.
If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.
I disagree. The appeal to solidarity w.r.t. masks would never have worked because a tiny minority of scalpers can ruin it all. But the white lie didn't work either, so it seems like the worse option regardless.
Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?
(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)
In both cases, they are guilty of speaking. If they were benevolent, but wrong in terms of science, then they should shut up.
“But it was impossible to predict!” that the mask was useful. Well, Pr Raoult did. Many doctors did. Government can’t claim innocence “by being wrongly advised” after implementing nationwide policies without knowing anything correct AND banning criticism on Facebook.
You can’t claim innocence when you perform wilful censorship.
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.
So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.
The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.
What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.
It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)
> to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small
It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better.
> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.
Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.
This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.
Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:
1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.
2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.
That blog post is complete nonsense. You can't look at graphs of when mask mandates were introduced and then lifted, because you can't isolate cause and effect. Mask mandates tend to get introduced when cases are going up, and removed when cases are going down.
This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
Kinda unsettling that we even required masks on the public with no evidence they worked going in, eh?
If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
> Kinda unsettling that we even required masks on the public with no evidence they worked going in, eh?
No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it.
The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed. The disturbing thing is that we did not initially err on the side of caution.
> I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics.
It doesn't have to have a massive impact to be useful.
> You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
"Same basic shape". What, you mean up then down, as new variants emerged, and seasonal effects were encountered? How are you assessing that they are the same shape? Have you done an analysis against all countries with reliable data or are you eyeballing the graphs from a few cherry-picked regions by a blogger?
> The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets.
You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:
1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.
2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.
> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed
If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.
But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.
Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.
The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”
There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.
Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.
> This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas
Nonsense. The virus spreads primarily through salivary droplets. Please don't peddle this rubbish.
There is some aerosol transmission, but most infections happen at short range. Masks aren't perfectly effective but they do help, and that has saved lives.
If you don't even understand the basic science then educate yourself before commenting.
That was the belief at the start of the pandemic. Oddly so because it was inconsistent with how things like SARS-1 spread. Very few people believe the droplet theory now, because it's inconsistent with the evidence. For example if it was really spreading this way, then masks would have an immediate and visible impact on case curves, but they don't.
SARS-1 spread through an apartment building by using drain pipes. No droplet transmission is capable of that. For SARS-CoV-2 the same thing happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty. This was very early evidence the spread-through-droplets theory couldn't be correct, but was ignored by public health.
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe."[0]
> People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty.
No one is disputing that the virus spreads through aerosol distribution. The majority of spread is through salivary droplets. Is your argument seriously that because there is some aerosol spread, that somehow disproves the model that spread is mainly through salivary droplets?
If you are unable to understand the argument I don't see how we can continue the conversation.
You keep trying to make this about how you (or the WHO) think masks should affect outcomes. I keep pointing how they actually affect outcomes. Because reality is more important than theory, that's all that needs to be done here. Masks do not work. The data is definitive and final. How you think COVID spreads or what the WHO says just doesn't matter at all, because they clearly have no idea how it spreads. If they did they'd be able to explain why masks had no observable impact, and they cannot.
I look forward to your peer-reviewed paper on this with some rigorous mathematical analysis rather than what you think you saw on some cherry-picked data in a blog post.
No, it's actually correct. You've got the logic here backwards, so please think about this a bit.
How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.
Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?
> 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work".
I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):
Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.
So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.
To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.
Everyone knew since the original sars outbreak that the only protection was a respirator. The N95 is the lowest level that provides meaningful protection.
Are there any good sources of evidence for that? I'd also like to understand how you are defining "meaningful" and whether you are considering reduced viral load.
In addition to your hunch “wow this spreads fast”, there was also highly suggestive evidence that came out bit by bit. The one that sticks in my head was the news report of the virus spreading at a choir rehearsal in March of 2020:
Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back.
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours.
Previously, in February 2020, when the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined in Japan with passengers locked down in their cabins and COVID continued to spread between the cabins, that was my "this is an airborne virus" moment.
I know what you mean. For me, it was the facts that the incubation period was 10 days and the virus was asymptomatic yet infectious during that time. Of course, now we have learned that it's infectious only about the last two days.
All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too.
Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
That turns out to be a fairly small number of people.
The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.
Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.
In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.
The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.
But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
Good points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.
Guilty of that. While I do remember being concerned about the virus becoming worldwide, I was more concerned about electronics supply chains collapsing at the source.
It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
The bunny suits where because of the unknown and because of hopes for full containment, not because they knew something others did not.
The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.
("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)
> 2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.
I think there’s still an amazing potential thriller miniseries or decisions-matter video game around really difficult public health strategy. The game theory is terrifying. It plays out locally when the water company issues boil water notices to deter usage. This is a ‘lie’ meant to prevent the need to issue a real boil water notice.
Perhaps our protagonist realizes that lying will save countless lives, but he must fall on his own sword when the deception is revealed. Then, according to plan, he is publicly shamed and fired in order for his agency to retain any credibility.
Sounds plentifully like frostpunk but the constraints are more based on disease and human cognition.
I posit that for the purposes of psychological/mental health, it is not worth it to live in a system run through deception. It is also civically dangerous because the habit of lying can be so easily transposed from a selfless telos to a selfish one - and, conveniently, lied about. If it is possible, I would rather die so that someone else is spared having to live in a deceptive system. Do I have the right to impose that decision on others, though? I say no. It's their responsibility to make that choice.
The predominant social infection is "sanitization theater".
WHO and other health authorities sent the entire world into sanitization frenzy.
The new variants are now as infectious as measles. We can only hope that new variants remain mild and / or limited in danger by current and developing vaccines.
Wow, thi event has really been pivotal but I wonder why major news outlets brushed it off. I've been reading a lot of news articles about the virus ever since the pandemic started and I didn't even know about this.
Not an epidemiologist, but from what i understood in this article and others, yes, masks were and still are extremely useful. Social distancing less so, especially in closed locations ( because airborne means it can spread anywhere if the ventilation isn't good, unlike with droplets that had a limited range).
It is rather interesting to consider that many countries in Asia (China / Japan / Taiwan / Vietnam / Malaysia that I am aware of) happily ignored the WHO on masks and, with regards to Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on. I remember seeing specials on NHK visualising the spread from a sneezing person in a room in March 2020. There were also a lot of helpful PSAs like the 3C model [0] and comparing the potential aerosol spread of the virus to cigarette smoke (when you would smell the smoker - he could also infect you with the virus).
The west tried to rely on its supranational institution to establish top-down consensus and then couldn't react to its failure.
Ostensibly Asian countries are part of the WHO, so why was it that the decision-makers there weren't able to adapt? Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO? Why didn't they intervene?
But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong.
It is easy to focus on what scientists got wrong about the virus, but it's equally important to point out what was right. In retrospect, the early data about the nature of the virus itself was pretty spot on.
Modelling pandemics is really hard, even before this virus, and we've only gotten better. Coordinating a specific global response is even harder.
> But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong.
Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be really hard to correct later on, and needs to be corrected quickly and loudly.
There are many degrees of airborne. One of the theories for why the models break for COVID (and influenza) so badly is the possibility that these viruses can travel very long distances and remain viable. Like in the upper atmosphere, long distance.
This is hardly a radical notion. Ferguson's useless 2001 era foot-and-mouth models relied heavily on the idea that the virus would be spread by the wind between nearby farms, even if there was no close physical contact between animals. The field of "aerobiology" investigates this topic (whether our understanding of what can survive long distance travel might be flawed). If this is correct then it'd explain many otherwise unexplainable facts about COVID and influenza, like the way outbreaks start and stop more or less simultaneously over huge geographic areas.
A cursory Google early in the pandemic told me that virus particles are smaller than cigarette smoke particles, so paranoid me thought masks aren't bulletproof (it feels like a lot of people think - and I exaggerate - "I'm wearing a mask, I can stand at making-out distance to this other person and I'll be fine."), and why shouldn't the virus be as airborne-transmissible as cigarette smoke?
It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine! On the flip side, it was aggravating to see moronic restaurants building enclosed outdoor tents to meet the requirements of "outdoor dining". Sure, they meet the legal requirements, but for the health requirements?
Gavin Newsom getting on the tsunami alert speakers to bitch at beachgoers for spending time outside all while having closed room dinners with donors at the French Laundry successfully turned me 100% off from the CA democratic party, and in some ways the democratic party at large.
> It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine!
The problem with trips to the beach during the height of a pandemic isn't that a couple of people sitting far apart on a beach have anything to worry about. In theory it'd be fine, but people ruin everything.
They swing by multiple houses to pick up a bunch of friends for their day at the beach, drive in from out of town, stop at the store for food and drinks and sun screen, then stop to get gas, then get to the beach and see thousands of other people have decided to do the same thing (see https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-thousands-flock-to-be...) and now you have crowds of people who might as well be at a music festival or motorcycle rally.
Yeah, people (especially those who are making great sacrifices to prevent the spread of a virus and protect their community) are going to be upset at the massive beach parties going on. It's annoying to get left out of a party even when it isn't undermining your efforts to lower the number of infections and deaths in your neighborhood.
As far as I know: The virus dries out and becomes non-infective when it’s in too small droplets. The droplets are larger than the gas particles of smoke that you smell. Masks also filter some of the larger particles of smoke.
No, it does spread like cigarette smoke. It's just the earlier variants required enough virons to infect that few people beyond the distancing requirements would get enough exposure to be infected. Thus we saw a few cases where prevailing airflow could infect people well beyond the "safe" distance but in general distance was safety. It's not anymore.
> with regards to Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on. I remember seeing specials on NHK visualising the spread from a sneezing person in a room in March 2020.
Sneezing would be the droplets distribution theory, which is now "debunked". If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.
Very early 3C PSA (made by Ministry of Health and Prime Minister's Office) was really great work, but Japan's authoritative National Institute of Infectious Diseases finally admits aerosol infection in March this year. I don't know what happened.
> Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO?
This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.
"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.
The US has an outsized influece on the WHO. Dominating the whole institution from finance to its people.
At the time of the outbreak, the US administration was under a populist leader who saw the virus as an almost personal attack; emphasizing that mask wearing, and the implicit recognition that the virus spread by air, was a political symbol directed against him.
> There were also a lot of helpful PSAs like the 3C model [0] and comparing the potential aerosol spread of the virus to cigarette smoke (when you would smell the smoker - he could also infect you with the virus)
Early on when people were still often forgetting to stay farther away from strangers I seriously considered switching to doing my grocery shopping between my morning workout and my morning shower to discourage people from getting too close.
I did switch to doing my grocery shopping early in the morning and it turned out there were so few people shopping then that it was easy to avoid them, except sometimes at checkout when the person behind me in line might stand too close.
That was easy to deal with by simply standing in front of my shopping cart when in line instead of behind it. That way I could decide how close to stand to the person in front of me, and the person behind me had to at least stay a shopping cart's length back.
But who knows whether a Covid infectee or carrier used that same shopping cart before you!8-)
And how many times have you seen a shopper finger goods and put them back on the shelf for you or another to unsuspectingly pick up?!
Bwahahahaaaaaaah! Covid strikes again! You cannot get away!
> Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on
Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention.
I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things:
1) Widespread mask-wearing in public spaces
2) Japanese not turning up to work to cough and splutter all over their colleagues
Both the above never happened in the West. It was hard enough to get your average dumb Westerner to comply during COVID.
The Japanese mentality of taking into account the impact of your actions on others has served them well.
That is why Japan has seen less than 1/10th of the COVID cases that, for example, the UK had. Despite Japan being 2x UK population and living/working in SIGNIFICANTLY higher density.
I wouldn't widely blame workers for coming to work sick. Often they're either instructed to do so or have no paid sick leave and desperately need the money.
I'd say this is only a part of the story.
I remember when I was growing up I'd go to school if I'm having "just a cough/sneeze/running nose". I.e. if it's not impacting my functioning (like a fever or pain from a sore throat would), I'd be ready to dismiss it as "not serious enough". Now, this was in Russia, so my argument isn't about the culture in Europe, but rather about the presence of cultural differences.
Nowadays, working a remote job, I can work if it's just a cough, and it won't affect my co-workers. Never thought about this benefit of remote work!
Maybe, but working around tech people in the US it seems to be cultural. Pre COVID it was so common to see "Oh I'm not contagious", etc while hacking at their desk.
The reality is we still don't know why Japan had a relatively low death rate. The factors you mentioned aren't sufficient to account for the difference relative to similar countries. Lower obesity was surely a factor but there's something else going on.
Could also be artifacts if testing and labeling. Perhaps they weren’t testing everything with a pulse. Perhaps they weren’t (mis)labeling hospital patients who tested positive but were in the hospital for Covid as a “Covid hospitalization”
It will take decades and much cooler heads to determine the winners and losers. Trying to claim the winners and losers right now is a fools errand.
In almost every country the excess mortality is well above the official "Covid" death toll. They're undercounting, not overcounting.
Just because they ended up in the hospital for "other" reasons doesn't mean it wasn't Covid--someone we know recently lost her mother that way. Health issues that were under control--then they weren't. Coincidence that she tests positive after being admitted?? I don't think so!
There's also the reality that some people are clotting out in various fashions when they aren't nearly sick enough to warrant the hospital and thus likely aren't even tested. If the clot hits someplace quickly lethal (heart, brain, lungs) they end up in the morgue without ever being diagnosed.
Early 2020 the Dutch Maurice de Hond, who studies social geography, noticed a pattern in outbreaks. His conclusion at the time also was transmission via aerosols. But because he had no related degree in virology most people ignored him. Now two years later everybody agrees with him.
It's sad that people are too proud to cooperate with other people working in other domains (and sometimes even in the same domain).
I have worked in cybersecurity both as a product developer and a bounty hunter / pen tester. One of my sisters is a housewife and former kindergarten teacher.
She believes the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen”, partly by being hacked by China (the Mr. Pillow Guy CEO hypothesis). She knows nothing about the details of the domain, but she has a strong conviction opinion on the topic. I spent a lot of time investigating what evidence was publicly available and was thoroughly unconvinced.
Is it “sad” that I am “too proud” to adopt her logic/thinking/chain of facts?
Or is it simply that the domain experts are overwhelmed with noise (bad ideas from non-domain-experts)?
The default mentality of scientists should be skepticism of conclusions and creativity/curiosity for hypotheses. That’s a difficult mindset for one individual. There is a reason why red teams and blue teams are specialized.
The differece is that de Hond had convincing proof.
I agree you cannot go down the rabbit hole by checking what everyone is saying. But there are experts in other domains who can present proof in their domain. And then it's silly not to listen.
> Or is it simply that the domain experts are overwhelmed with noise
We have learned that while medical doctors are domain experts in treating diseases, they are not domain experts in how infectious diseases spread around. Some doctors follow the front lines of science, whereas other doctors refuse to update their knowledge, and stick to what their old textbooks say.
And we have learned that when it comes to airborne diseases, even epidemiologists are not domain experts. Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models. With statistics, they know how to observe epidemics. With mathematical models, that can make bad predictions on how the epidemic progresses, but these predictions turned out to be wrong more often than not. Now nobody makes these predictions anymore, they have lost credibility.
But they are not trained in physics to actually understand the physical mechanisms of how the virus can spread from one person to others.
And that public health is also a matter of economics and engineering, and again medical doctors are not good domain experts here. Medical doctors can advice you not to drink dirty water, but population scale water hygiene is a matter of civil engineering. If we want air hygiene, we have to turn to engineers.
> Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models.
And they are pretty bad at that too… their models have been horrifically bad. Most of them seemed designed to show the absolute worst case (see all the hockey stick charts these people published)…
It was pretty clear early on from contact tracing, if not absolutely conclusive. I just assumed it was yet another "N95 masks don't do anything"... a lie of convenience because someone was feeling paternalistic and the truth would be disruptive.
Every single event in the past decade has to be re-examined with the understanding that we have been under attack by Russia for the past decade. The WHO and the CDC were victims of their misinformation campaign, just like the rest of us.
Yes, there were issues with the pandemic rollout that need to be prevented from happening in the future, without doubt. But trying to find blame for either organization, which have been hammered by a massive, organized and relentless campaign of misinformation is a waste of time. They were being attacked daily by both Russian bots and, by extension their representatives here in the US, the Republicans. Of course they made mistakes.
If the U.S. hadn't been destabilized by Russia, there would have been a much more clear headed response. Placing any blame on the CDC or the WHO has no purpose. It was Russia.
(We need to pardon the Jan 6th insurrectionists and start a nationwide effort to educate the people about how badly they have been deceived and then we need to do whatever possible to ensure regime change in Russia.)
If the WHO and CDC are just going to listen to whatever Russia says and not look into things for themselves to confirm then they are incompetent and shouldn't exist.
Also, you seem to forgetting the WHO's interesting relationship with China. You seem so anti Russia you are missing the country who actually manipulated the WHO.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThere are organizations & researchers. They don’t speak with one voice, or have the same threat assessment, and they respond to different incentives.
It would be a gift to humanity to move beyond the antiquated idea that there are “FACTS” - static statements of truth that require no context or qualification.
Not only does context matter, it matters that we can have exploratory conversations in ambiguous contexts.
I'd say it's a significant number. Wouldn't want to lose the chance to ever get a research project funded again.
For example, what the scientific community understood about efficacy of masks, and how utterly useless cloth masks are, disappeared overnight with covid. Perhaps your memory is failing you but I can recall people being chastised for even suggesting they might be useless. And don't even bother trying to spin some bullshit about it's better than nothing. Attaching a cloth to your face and exposing it to warm/wet air all day is a great way to start a personal mold culture you can breathe in later. And before you try to say "well you should wash them after each use", how many people do you think actually do that?
And if you wanna get real spicy, let's talk about the "science" behind transgenderism. Discovered by your favorite tumblr user, and beaten into pop culture by the woke mob.
There's a ton of evidence supporting this, and it doesn't help your argument to deny it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510705/
https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
Litterally orders of magnitude.
Consider me crucified.
Remember that “news” is at best entertainment and at worst performance art. If somebody says “the current situation is bad, assuming our model is correct”, it’s reported as “the current situation is bad” so any change is seems as nefarious. It’s just the lizard brains overpowering the neocortexes.
Is that a fact, or opinion?
It’s an important observation, so you must communicate it to others. You perform a speech act to tell a few colleagues, with utterances and gesticulations to describe your observation as closely as possible. Is your oral exposition a fact?
You must communicate the observation widely for the good of society. You write a Tweet thread, and publish a scientific paper to the journals. Are these written productions also facts?
It’s retweeted, and a summary of the preprint is published to nature.com. Facts?
Colloquially, most people would refer to all of these things as facts. And each one is a carefully constructed human artifact, whether it’s sensory data imported and stored in your brain, a speech utterance, a Tweet, or a scientific article.
The emphasis on absoluteness of facts in (American) public discussion nowadays is sometimes quite hysterical.
I'll muddy the waters here: neither, it is a belief.
I prefer to avoid the term "fact" b/c it leads to too many arguments, just as is happening here. Rather than "facts" we have beliefs and some things we believe more than others.
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"...in this analysis we shall approximate the horse by a sphere of radius r..."
> I prefer to avoid the term "fact" b/c it leads to too many arguments
Arguments are not a bad thing. Avoiding them by muddying language is a bad thing.
Beliefs about questions of fact may be, facts are not. At least, by the usual definition of “fact”.
If we’re just redefining words, sure, whatever.
Our myopic focus on Covid to the almost literal exclusion of everything else had a disastrous outcome. Government refused to balance Covid against other problems in society. And the result is the mess we will be cleaning up for quite some time.
“George Soros”
“Bill Gates”
Etc
Where's the bug tracker for humanity?
They start asking, what else have they been hiding and lying about. After that it's hard to keep it grounded in reality. It's the proverbial "and see how deep the rabbit hole goes".
Fault as in: someone should pay for it.
Definitely NOT a “honest mistake”
The WHO is doing damage control.
It seems the responsible thing to do in this situation, rather than tweeting definitively that the virus was "NOT" spread via airborne transition, would've been too withhold judgement...at minimum. The ideal thing to do would've been to at least acknowledge the countless scenarios that gained media attention which seemed to heavily indicate airborne transmission, while prefacing it that these scenarios aren't themselves sufficient to confirm that.
It happens, it's a group run by humans. It would be great if they got everything correct, but unfortunately they don't, and to make matters worse, it sounds like they're an organization driven by consensus so changing minds means changing a bunch of individual doctors minds. Take it from me that changing doctors' minds on things is a sisyphean task. We're lucky we got a correction in 2 years.
Hopefully they learned something for any further pandemics. But the other factor of this is that communicating to people is difficult, and if you change your mind publicly and loudly too many times people lose faith in you. And unfortunately faith/belief is what people need to have in the WHO for it to be effective at giving advice.
People want a lot of things. That does not automatically mean that appealing to it is the right thing to do.
They needed to be comfortable with saying : "We don't know that yet."
No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
It's fine because you didn't intend to harm anyone, but now that you know it's dangerous, if you kept spreading that public data, we would know you intended harm and your behaviour would be rightly considered malinformation. That would be double plus bad.
Perspective changes over time, and I have no doubt that the "town squares" will adapt into forms unrecognizable to those of us alive now, but to simply throw our hands up in the air a cede all control of public discourse to unaccountable entities is an abhorent thought.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri
Except instead of there being only seven, Sauron mass-produced them and now everyone has one, maybe two. Hardly nobody even meets at the Prancing Pony anymore, at least without a palantíri call first.
Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?
What would be your preferred approach?
You made a category error by somehow replacing "opinions which are obvious nonsense" with "any dissenting opinion whatsoever".
Nobody but you suggested that. The claim was that you cannot say anything at all about any "dissenting opinion" unless you are 100% sure you are correct. That is nonsense. You can obviously say something about some of them, while not being confident enough to rule out some others.
That's perfectly right, if you yourself aren't making guesses.
What we got? People without a full understanding of the subject matter themselves acting as if they were the ultimate authority on SARS-CoV-2, and a cadre of sympathetic globalist-oriented corporations uncritically deferring to them in the extreme. It’s like some of the supposedly smartest people in the world just have their brains leak out their ears simply because a three-letter agency with such apparently big words such as “world” and “health” in the full name make some pronouncements and broker no argument.
The appropriate approach would be to state "given current arguments, we are not sure whether it is airborne or not" instead of doubling down on their assumption/guess.
To the best of their knowledge , at the time, that was what the evidence pointed to. Then, as more evidence surfaced they realized that those assumptions didn't hold (and that could change again in the future with new research).
> the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission
The vaccine does actually prevent infection, very well against the initial virus and moderately well against recent variants.
> It was claimed for a good year that the vaccines "protect you and the ones you love and therefore everyone needs to take it in order to meet other people."
That’s because the vaccines did a great job of preventing infection for a good year or so until newer variants came in. Protection against infection with two doses of the mRNA vaccine has dropped from something like >90% in the original trials to <50% with the newest variants.
> Traditional vaccines contain dead pathogens that do not reproduce, while the new ones contains a mechanism that produces new pathogen.
This statement is a bit off in terms of how traditional vaccines and newer mRNA vaccines work. First, the spike protein produced from mRNA vaccines is not a pathogen. Second, mRNA vaccines do not reproduce or replicate. Third, some traditional vaccines are attenuated vaccines [1] that can actually replicate, a fact that is taken into account when they are used.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine
> That’s because the vaccines did a great job of preventing infection for a good year or so until newer variants came in. Protection against infection with two doses of the mRNA vaccine has dropped from something like >90% in the original trials to <50% with the newest variants.
But wasn't that to be expected, because viruses mutate? It was surely mentioned by many when it started, but that did not stop the discrimination.
> First, the spike protein produced from mRNA vaccines is not a pathogen.
If it is not the spike protein, then what is most likely causing post-mRNA myocarditis?
> Second, mRNA vaccines do not reproduce or replicate.
That's not what I claimed, but that even after 8 weeks new spike protein can be produced. If spike protein is likely to cause myocarditis and potentially other adverse reactions and spike protein is still produced 8 weeks after injection, then delayed reactions seem reasonable. Public claims were that spike protein only gets produced for a very short amount of time, while there were never actual numbers. Because nobody knew, I guess.
- A claim is made with apparently uncontested evidence like a video, picture, quote, article, or endorsement.
- Knowledgeable viewers see the story and realize something is wrong.
- Meanwhile, the original claim starts to get spread by the "credible" media such as newspapers, TV, and online publications.
- Critics then mock and complain on social media about the claim.
- The regular news eventually catches up and makes new stories over the corrected claim without a reference to their original claims.
Hold these people accountable and don't give them your attention. Journalism has lost much of it's integrity.
Also it seem that institutions are deemed to feel, just how I used to hear "religions are good but religious institutions are bad", it seem to start to apply to science now.
It was disgusting how rabid were liberals about the whole Covid thing.
That said, I'm willing to forgive anyone who's been living that way and realizes it's not gonna make for a particularly joyous human life. We're human, we get scared, we make mistakes.
Only in the rest of the world. In the US that word was redefined to mean "people I do not like" and they use "libertarian" instead for the original meaning.
The only sort of play that is obviously not tolerated is culture-jamming against the libertines. It's stupid, immature, in poor taste, morally reprehensible, selfish, deplorable, hypocritical, bigoted, alarmist, disingenuous, and sinful against the only commandment: "Do as thou wilt". This is our dungeon, in our fort, in what used to be your country. Go play somewhere else, and make sure we can't hear you.
Did they actually have a consensus for their conclusions, or were there just some segment of the site saying one thing, some segment saying another thing, and we now remember only the segment that was saying the right thing?
- A person's bodily autonomy is the most fundamental freedom there is. Of course there is a balance to be weighed when it affects others, but there is no absolute right or wrong answer.
- People absolutely are justified and right to question authority, politicians, self-proclaimed experts, pharmaceutical and medical corporations, as well as studies, data, and science.
- Even if "the science" around the risk of covid and benefit of lockdowns was correct, the response to it is not scientific. Policy can take science or evidence into account, that doesn't mean it is science. You are not anti-science if you don't believe mandatory lockdowns and economic shutdowns was a good policy.
As if clothes weren’t already a requirement for visiting your public venue of choice.
Go on then, tell us why you feel a mask is an infringement on your bodily autonomy but pants shirt shoes aren’t.
Turns out if you state virtually every possible conclusion, some of them will be accurate in the end
Yeah, I mean, who would have thought that the globohomo cabal was behind it all along... oh you mean that they were more accurate on the 10% non crazy stuff they say?
Experts are pinning their credibility on the line - not even if they issue every guess under a giant glowing banner saying "THIS IS JUST A GUESS WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA TO BE DEFINITIVE YET". So: they're slower. I am not, incidentally, saying WHO's response is perfect.
Quite a good summary for the entire clusterfuck that was the pandemic response. I still cant wrap my head about the utter spineless idiocy. You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong, you do so by lying to protect your image despite knowing better. You being wrong isnt dependent on you acknowledging it.
And the worst part, the more they kept lying the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong.
I agree the not changing your mind is worse, but they also describe this thing as being driven by consensus as doctors, so you're having to change a bunch of people's minds who think they're the very best at what they do. It's a serious failing of that setup. It's somewhat impressive that they ever changed their mind.
But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong...
The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...
You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time.
If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time.
Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.
I think you are talking about Fauci's flip-flop here. The point is not about his flip-flop on mask mandate. The point was about his confidence. You do not go and say confidently, on National TV, that masks don't stop the virus and that people should stop buying masks from stores as it is needed for emergency workers. Then turn around half a year later, after the pandemic is in full swing and say that masks are important as it stops the virus. Both times he said it he said that it is based on credible scientific evidence. This is what ticks people off.
If you do not know something and have no facts to back up your claim, don't say it. If you want to still say it (as you don't want people to hoard masks), appeal to the people to not hoard masks out of fear as those masks are needed for the frontline workers. Better still, get the US Government to buy those masks or ban stores from selling masks to general public until you have equipped frontline workers. Then ease the ban. Do not lie by saying that masks don't prevent virus as it sends a negative message and reassurance that everything is fine. Then turn around half a year later and say it is dangerous! This sort of flip-flop is not acceptable to anyone. Especially when it comes to disaster response.
You are an expert for a reason. People trust your words. You are in a position of power when it comes to your own field. Don't degrade/misuse that position.
The reason WHO lost its credibility is because of it shutting down alternative takes, continuous flip-flops and ever changing directives/mandates.
It would have been better if WHO started by saying "We don't know. It is a novel virus. We are still learning as we go along. We will issue directives as and when we get more information. Please note that these directives are temporary and only based on evidence we have right in front of us. If things change, we will keep you informed. We still aren't sure what to make of it". This is all WHO needed to do. This would have instilled a bit of fear yes (which in hindsight was actually needed to make lockdowns effective and mask mandates effective). You took away the "fear" factor at the very beginning of the virus outbreak and then when people got the message, you try to tell them to now start fearing the virus. Why would people buy your argument? And how many of them will take you seriously after such a drastic flip-flop? Rather than confidently put out statements that the virus isn't airborne or doesn't spread through contact WHO should have been honest from the start. That it doesn't know anything and is learning as we go along. That the virus maybe dangerous and that we have to be cautious.
Another big one is that WHO announced it is not human-to-human transmissible: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
There was no disclaimer to say that this investigation is ongoing. That this preliminary data collected will have a final investigation as well. That it can change as more data becomes available. Communication is key in disaster response. You do not say anything with 100% certainty if you do not know it to be true.
"not transmissible" and "haven't found clear evidence of transmissibility" are not at all the same.
Exhibit A:
"This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".
Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong. We will say that as institution C Org, we have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise is wrong"
VS
Exhibit B:
"We as A Org, have reason to believe that X is the most true thing we know given current knowledge. We acknowledge fact Y exists and are actively investigating it and its implications. For people searching for guidance, A Org recommends actions S,T, and U. We will continue to research and revise information where necessary"
---
I feel like Exhibit A, which is something I see a lot from government entities (confirmation bias makes me want to add "in the US") makes a changing of mind a thing of pride since you've staked a bet on it. A bet which usually is condescending and says "I'm right, you're wrong"
Exhibit B leaves the hatches open while still getting a firm message down based on today's knowledge.
Sadly there's no A/B testing we can turn to to know which approach would be better. But just out of sensibility, I wish more entities engaged in the latter approach
I've noticed a pattern where people will take this as their default assumption, and even selectively read evidence to the contrary in order to maintain that assumption.
For example, a while ago on HN[1], someone posted this link[2] about a CDC announcement titled "CDC director says data 'suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus'". The claim was that the CDC director, Walensky, insisted that vaccinated people do not carry COVID and insisted that they were 90% protected against infection, and the CDC wouldn't walk back on those claims.
However, when reading the article, it shows that the assumption that the CDC was using Exhibit A's method in their announcement was wrong, and the CDC actually used the more reasonable method in your Exhibit B:
> Walensky was referring to a new CDC study of nearly 4,000 front-line workers, some vaccinated and some not, who tested themselves weekly for COVID-19 infections between December and March.
> But more data is still necessary to say so definitively, which is why researchers are recruiting thousands of college students across the country to find out more about the likelihood of asymptomatic spread of this virus among vaccinated people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30649479
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated...
The evidence for airborne transmission was really low quality at first. It's pretty normal, but very unfortunate, that people get primed to their early experience of new theory and can't see above it.
So is it worth it to be less truthful? Is there good you can accomplish with that trust?
I see what they're playing and the bind they're in. It's a very social kind of game. I'm just too simple to be there or have dealt with it.
They decided to spend public trust to what end?
Politics is being paralyzed by binarism. Everything is Right OR Wrong, left OR right, on OR off. there is no grey areas anymore.. there is no acceptable position that is in between or overlaps.
Disagree, plenty of organizations and people lost credibility in the eyes of some for doing just this as new research emerged over the course of the pandemic.
Like saying: “X could be bad for you”, but offering no evidence, theories or studies. Then it turns out X does have some downsides.
I don’t think you get any credit for having randomly guessed a correct answer.
To me the paths look like:
- acknowledge your mistakes: some people will accept based on your attitude, others will resent you being wrong.
- don't acknowledge: people who would have otherwise accepted mistakes now resent your stubbornness. Others will still resent you for being wrong.
There's an important difference between "The sky will be red tomorrow" and "Based on {data}, I think that the sky will be red tomorrow." even if the reasoning from {data} to "sky red tomorrow" is flawed.
If someone arrives at a conclusion via a process that I can analyse, I expect that they'll arrive at a different conclusion if the data turns out different.
When someone says "{whatever} is true", it's on them, and should be, when {whatever} turns out to be false.
Here's another way to look at it.
Folks who arrive at conclusion in a openly disinterested way can switch conclusions without losing credibility.
People who seem to be interested in a given conclusion lose credibility, and should, when they're wrong. Same for folks who don't show their work.
If you make it about you, you can't complain when it's about you.
Unfortunately, in the public/political realm, I think this isn't true. Flip flopping suggests weak morals. When scientific "facts" change, a lot of people conclude that the scientists know nothing.
Flip flopping for all the right reasons makes all the difference as G-man would say.
He said there would be no requirement for quarantine soon and changed it to "quarantine stays" a day later.
All he did by that was alienating his biggest support group: vaccinated people. While the covidiots are cheering because "they knew it all along". We came out of this with a better solution but still...unnecessary loss of credibility. Next time people will think: I can ignore that, "they" will probably turn it around tomorrow.
The art is to only talk if you're sure what you say.
Unfortunately, you do. It is something that could change and should change. But as of now, changing mind is treated as "gotcha".
There are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t yet only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their vivid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. INHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable if tending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
They’re are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t the only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out. Overall I think at least here in the UK the system worked very well, health services were severely tested but the lockdowns were effective, and now the vaccines and other proven therapies have returned life pretty much to normal.
As for the WHO, they’re a weak politically compromised organisation that was all over the map in their covid response. Being a political football is by design though, as a UN agency. The governments that hold power over it want to be able to kick it around and they do.
Even so, they are also an incredibly important resource for dozens of developing countries that heavily rely on their technical expertise and resources. IMHO the answer is to strengthen them and make them more independent and capable of fending off political pressure, but unfortunately their (frankly deserved) credibility hit probably makes that impossible, so they’ll become even more bent out of shape by interference. We do need a credible, well resourced, at least somewhat independent global health organisation though.
You're quite right we should have locked down a few weeks earlier in the first phases. What I'm saying is the lockdowns and mask mandates worked. You're saying we needed more aggressive lockdowns and more masks, and I won't argue with you, yes. We could have done with even more of these measures, but the measures clearly did what they were supposed to do.
That's just saying we needed more of the system not that the system failed in the way I think OP meant. If anything Germany's success was because they were even more tightly integrated into the system.
A lot of people who looked into COVID were saying this doesn't add up. They were were framed to be in the 'small vocal minorities that say all sorts of crap'.
"the system" was all pointing and looking at each other. Big tech censored content that was deemed misinformation by the standards du jour.
"the system" failed what it said it would do, follow the science. And the WHO has been a major part of that system.
This statement applies to the WHO, and it applies equally to China, which will wear the shame of COVID for centuries. If China had been forthcoming from the start of the pandemic instead of obfuscating and frustrating every single attempt by the rest of the world to ascertain COVID's existence, its nature, and the risk it posed, China's role as COVID's origin would have been merely a footnote relegated to the introductory paragraph of all future histories written on the subject. Now, though, China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years. On top of that, the Chinese are so incompetent that the truth got out anyway. Great job, Xi.
I don't think "China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years" because that's not even what anyone remembers them as today, outside the US. And even in the US I don't think that's going to matter or create any semblence of a legacy in any way that matters. China was very quick to rebound from the economic downturn and as far as I can tell came out ahead of everyone else.
Not to mention that every single other country fucked up their pandemic response so badly that getting angry at China requires several layers of indirection (though some US media has been better at making this detour).
News about an "unknown decease" was right there on TV even as early as December 31[1]. On the same day, the news was already reported world-wide[2].
Later on, Western reporting said that China "lied about transmissibility" (i.e. that China said it was "not transmissible"), but what they actually said was that "evidence of transmissibility was not clear (at that moment)" — when knowledge of the virus was only a few weeks old and when Covid was nowhere near as transmissible as it is now.
Then later on, stories about "cover-ups" appeared, mostly referring to Li Wenliang, but these are complete misrepresentations.
- Li Wenliang was not a "whistleblower", his social media posts merely leaked through his contacts. And Li Wenliang's post was posted on Deccember 30, but literally the next day the case was already escalated to WHO[3].
- Li Wenliang also wasn't the first doctor who discovered something was wrong: dr Zhang Jixian was, who discovered the case many days before Li's actions. It was dr Zhang who worked on the process of escalating to China's national CDC and to the WHO.[4]
- Li Wenliang was never arrested, jailed or punished. The police merely reprimanded him. He had to sign an NDA promising not to spread rumors (the rumor being that "it was SARS", when it wasn't SARS and nobody knew what it was). That's it. He wasn't detained, he could go on working right after.
- Later on, the judge judged in favor of Li Wenliang, ruling that the police's behavior was unacceptable. The police then apologized.[5]
There were also stories about how China "infected the world" by deliberately allowing international flights from Wuhan — except China didn't do that, all flights from Wuhan were cancelled with the exception of diplomatic expatriation flights.
When I arrived back in the Netherlands by February 1, Wuhan had already been locked down for a week. And what did the western world do? They pretended like the virus would stay in China. Nobody took any measures to prepare for COVID. Nobody on the airport asked for my contact details. I called the Dutch CDC but there was no way to get tested, not even if I pay for it myself.
Meanwhile the media was full of stories about how "lockdowns are human rights violations", that "it's just a flu" and that "free press would have prevented this strategy". There were no "China was not forthcoming" stories back then — only stories gleeing about how big of a disaster China was. Only after it was apparent that it wasn't just a flu did the "China didn't warn us" stories began.
After it was apparently that the western "free press" failed to prevent the epidemic from spreading to their own territories (even with China's super-obvious warning of locking down Wuhan), did they take responsibility for the fact that they blamed it on China's "lack of free press" (even though China's press did report)? Of course not, they just swept that narrative under a carpet.
Then a year later, Delta appeared in India. Did anybody criticize India for not having stopped Delta despite already knowing about COVID for a year? Of course not: only if it happened in China does it deserve criticism. That China actually did report? Not important, we'll just keep pretending they didn't.
The problem isn't that "China wasn't forthcoming", the problem is that the west does not treat China fairly and has a tendency to scapegoat China. "China wasn't forthcoming" is merely an excuse to cover up the west's own failures and to stick to old prejudices about how China ...
Let me be clear: I don't think that China purposely infected anybody, or intentionally let the virus spread. As for the lab leak theory, it's plausible, but I don't think we'll ever know (thanks to the CCP), and the fact is it doesn't matter now.
What I do think is that the CCP, and the local Wuhan CCP officials in particular, tried to cover their own asses. That may have included literally keeping information from Poobear and the other top CCP brass, but the point is that I don't think it was intentionally bioterrorism so much as the CCP hierarchy utterly failing to look after its local population and that of wider China, to say nothing of the rest of the world.
Nor does one need to be a Trump fan (I'm certainly not and I don't even live in America) to think that this was wholly China's fault, or to think that China is still to this day lying and covering it up.
China isn't so much blamed for failing to 'stop COVID' as much as it is blamed for blatantly lying to the international community, misleading WHO officials (the very officials China planted there - look it up), continuing to mislead and deceive the international community and investigators, and just generally being abhorrent outside of COVID. See: China's pathetic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's failure to even condemn it in mild terms; China's posturing with its military in the South China Sea and in territorial waters off Australia's coast, neither of which are places where China has legitimate claims to territory; China's behaviour in Hong Kong, which represent more lies (this time, lies directed towards England back in the '90s).
In short, the rest of the world thinks China - and particularly the China of the CCP - is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, arrogant shithole that lies to its citizens, firewalls them off from the rest of the world, and generally does whatever China thinks is in China's best interest, with no regard to principles or moral underpinnings. This is the place where asbestos is still widely used in construction, after all. It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China. And before you say it, lots of places have/have had very high population densities without sprouting global diseases every few centuries, and of course the CCP knew this would be the reaction - which is why they covered it up. Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens? But I digress.
In short, China is a morally bankrupt country that lies to its citizens and to the rest of the world, and seems to be increasingly aggressive militarily. COVID just happened to be the confluence of all those factors into something that fucked the rest of the globe over. And let me be clear: one could just as easily call America a morally bankrupt shithole, too, and they'd be right - but the fact is, America's moral bankruptcy has resulted in local wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American incompetence has never fucked the entire world over like China just did.
And let's be clear: If a virus broke out in India and the Modi government sat on it, obfuscated it, gagged local doctors, refused to allow media to report on it etc., there'd be just as much condemnation towards India as there was/is towards China. The reason China gets so much hate is because it is a dishonest bully whose modern rise rests on how well it has stolen Western intellectual property over the past 30 years, and not because the rest of the world has ...
But I strongly disagree with the notions that:
1. They "covered it up".
2. COVID is "wholly China's fault".
3. China is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, morally bankrupt country.
4. China lies and will continue to lie and cannot be trusted on anything.
5. The entire system is wholly corrupt, beyond saving, and deserves to be condemn in full.
6. China is militaristically aggressive and that "the rest of the world" sees China that way.
These notions are not based on facts. In fact, I assert that they are based on misrepresentations (i.e. anti-China propaganda), prejudice (one already believed that China is bad, so one is inclined to believe stories/rumors that confirm this regardless of their truth), ignorance (the "rest of the world" is bigger than the west), and sinophobia (fear of the Other; applying a different and unrealistic standard on China).
By and large, the Chinese population does not think that way about China at all. A 14-year long study by Harvard has found that 93% of Chinese are satisfied with the central government.[1] A later study, this time by York University, has found that satisfaction has gone up to a staggering 98%.[2] Neither of them used Chinese government data. All my family, both in the Netherlands as well as in China, are pretty satisfied with China even if everybody acknowledges there are problems (and which place don't have problems?). How can this be possible in a "shithole" that suppresses and abuses its citizen? The answer: China isn't a "shithole", nor are its citizens "supressed and abused". My Chinese wife is puzzled: "why do foreigners think China is hell?" China is just a country that does things differently and that has its own strengths and problems. Tendencies to project that beyond what it is, and into a world-threatening hellhole, is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
To those wondering what I say what I say: I recognize that China has problems and shortcomings. It would be foolish to deny that (and indeed, those who deny that are ultranationalists, that I do not approve). But when you condemn China's system wholesale, that's where you lose my support, and that's where you push me to the other side.
[1] https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350140842_Chinese_C...
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Regarding sinophobia, let's just say that I find these excerpts from your posts... highly curious, if not dishonest.
> It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China.
Wait a minute, so this is not just about CCP?
Also: China has always had a huge population, so even based on simple probability there's a lot of things that come out of China.
> Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens?
Oh so this is again not just about the CCP?
And let me tell you that by and large Chinese don't eat "bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens". But with so many people there's always a village somewhere with such practice.
Also don't forget that hygiene is something that develops over time as a country becomes more developed. China was comparable to Africa just a few decades ago. This low level of development was caused by imperalism so I find it hig...
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Re point 1: you keep saying they "covered it up" but based on what evidence? The first doctor who discovered it, Zhang Jixian, diagnosed an unknown pneunomia on Dec 27. By Dec 31 the case had been escalated to WHO. Where is the room for "covering up"?
Yes Wuhan officials probably were incentivized to not raise a big fuss until more about the virus is known. They probably erred too much on the optimistic side. But being too optimistic in the face of an unknown virus is still a far cry from "covering up" which would mean intend to lie in the face of clear evidence. Where is your evidence that that's what happened?
Where is the "misleading WHO"? The only thing I could think of was that tweet from the WHO saying that they "found no clear evidence of transmission", but that's not at all the same as "it's not transmissible". Now one would be correct in saying that that's too vaguely worded. So literally the next day they clarified that "transmission is still possible"[1].
Thus, I conclude that continued assertions that "they covered it up" is based on prejudice and the tendency to blame China, not based on actual facts.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...
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Re point 2: why is COVID "wholly China's fault" when western countries failed to take precautions even 1 month after the Wuhan lockdown? 1 month after Wuhan I remembered that Alglophone media still called it "a flu", and that the Dutch prime minister didn't take the issue seriously at all. Yeah just wash your hands and sneeze in your elbow, no need for further precautions. A week later he had to eat his own words. How is this China's fault? Is locking down a megacity not enough of a warning?
This also brings us back to point 1. We can now say that Wuhan officials were wrong to have been too optimistic. But by the time Wuhan locked down, it should have been safe to say that one must err on the side of caution instead. But western countries didn't do that: they were still too optimistic. Why is Wuhan officials — who had little knowledge of the virus — being optimistic, a sign of a wholly corrupt regime that's 100% to blame for COVID, while western countries who were too optimistic despite massive warning not wholly corrupt and blameable?
I assert that this double standard is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
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Re point 4 and 5: where are the lies? What exactly did they lie about? You keep saying that they lie but where is the evidence? Why are you so convinced that they must lie even in the absence of such evidence? The Chinese public certainly doesn't think that the whole system and whole regime systematically lies (corruption here and there exist, as with anywhere else in the world).
In the absence of evidence about lying, I assert that the iron-clad belief that they must lie is based on prejudice and sinophobia.
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Re point 6: "military aggression" is propaganda, not based on facts.
China hasn't shot a bullet over its borders in 40 years. China still has border disputes, but those disputes are neither recent, nor did they arise out of military aggressiveness, nor are they purely a China problem.
All desputes are a legacy of the colonial period when the British drew lines all over Asia that neighboring countries later didn't agree on. All disputes that the People's Republic has and had, were inherited in 1949 from its predecessor state — none of the disputes are recent.
All land border issues, with the exception of India, have been resolved. The Indian dispute hasn't been resolved not because China is ag...
Yup, I had a chance to be involved in some high profile (for the company) PR issues and one of the worse things you can do is trying to cover something up. It's far better to just be transparent and admitting errors can actually build trust if done right.
But I also understand that without solid evidence, it can be impossible to give firm recommendations, which in the end can make people question the value of what you say.
Getting PR right is actually really hard.
Maybe that's how you think, but lots of people don't think that way. To a large part of the masses, experts have to be right the first time around, otherwise people lose trust in them. Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting. Many treat science and expertise as authoritative, and when they fail, or even if they say "we don't know", many lost faith in the entire concept of science, jumping to... less science-y approaches that feel more emotionally gratifying.
Is this just a failure of education? I don't know.
The idea is that science should be continuous discovery process - scientists are meant to be acting in good faith, not hiding or 'managing' information. If we are genuinely seeking understanding (not attempting to sell people on a particular viewpoint), why shouldn't new information be widely disseminated?
Whatever has been going on, it is clear that from the start this has been a massively politicised process directing the world's governments. That it is so politicised means that I personally have very little faith in the scientific proclamations that are handed down.
And that’s why things get politicised in the first place.
This is the Fauci argument. It doesn't work.
Aside from being incredibly Condescending to assume the masses are too stupid to handle the truth...
All it does is open you up to criticism from people that understand basic logic.
Those criticisms then spread between these "many people".
On the other hand, if you told the truth up front, you might have "many people" misunderstand something, but you have the upside of the many other people being able to argue why they're wrong over the following months. Eventually truth and facts prevail.
You maintain credibility with people that do understand science, and you get eventual credibility from those who misunderstand.
Sure some will never change but you were going to instantly lose credibility to them either way.
This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
Neither here nor there. Fauci, along with most governments in the oecd lied about mask efficacy to protect mask stocks for health care workers.
This was done because they didn't trust the poor stupid people with the truth.
All they had to say, masks work but please leave these for health care workers as they are more at risk. Most people would have done the right thing if they just trusted them, and if not? Who cares, it's not your fucking job.
> This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
Except it is?
You need to trust humanity to make the right decisions when given the facts.
Hiding the facts, lying, or obscuring the truth in hopes of controlling the poor stupid people is how you get a nanny state.
Let idiots win the Darwin award and move on with your life.
Covid was more of a public health blunder than a medical one. Not having a cohesive strategy, conflicting and often political messaging around gatherings, and worst of all lying to people repeatedly bc they couldn’t “handle” the truth is insane. On top of that there was and still are plenty of plans for locking down etc that have no actual metrics around them. They’re literally just feeling based.
At least the medical companies came up with a good enough vaccine to get us out of this mess.
It really feels like the public health officials and politicians to some extent view the public with contempt.
Fair enough, I'd say
So yeah blind disrespect for authorities has a much better track record.
Who is "they"?
I've heard people, such as Biden and Harris, say they didn't trust Trump to give correct vaccine information and would make their decisions on when to take a vaccine based on what doctors say.
1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast it spread. It didn't make sense to me that a virus that is dragged onto the ground by water droplets would spread with such speed.
2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
The only bullshit I wasn't able to capitalize on was SPX crashing. I calculated that it should have fallen to less than $1000/share (closer to $500), based on past panic sell patterns, which was obviously not a guarantee, but the government stepped in and I missed out on quite a bit of money. I still think bailing out rich people's money in the stock market was complete bullshit on behalf of the government (but what do I know?).
I know it's all in retrospect now, so it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, but at the time, it wasn't easy to be the guy who said "see ya guys, I'm going to hide from a virus that's going to turn into a global pandemic and you should all be doing the same because it's the logical thing to do based on the known facts". Even my manager (who approved my request to WFH) looked at me like I'm the token crazy guy from sci-fi movies holding "the end is nigh" sign.
I wish more people thought critically and had healthy skepticism towards all the information they receive, not just the part they disagree with. I was never a fan of blindly trusting anything. I trust, but I verify.
By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold.
In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.
In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.
Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/SnwqNsd.png
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/china
Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...
You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.
We didn’t have anything like that.
The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.
To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?
That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
Not in the UK, the situation in Italy was all over our news.
Probably the biggest criticism I have of the UK media was their overemphasis on young people succumbing. The stats said that young people were unlikely to die but we were presented with cases of that almost daily.
Old people in most countries in europe are rather lonely, whereas in Italy they crowd the streets of every town in the evenings. I could imagine in such an enviroment, a low-deadliness-fast-spreading disease could cause a very rapid collapse in a hospital system.
That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.
What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
I've had some relatives die, I've spent large portions of the pandemic cooped up inside with kids, I've missed funerals, etc - and I think earlier in the pandemic, I was probably about as emotionally engaged as you are, except, in the other direction. Now, I don't really have much of an opinion about it. Why do you continue to care?
I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH.
I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.
That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]
> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.
> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.
https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...
Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports.
It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1],
> WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.
They received word about that "media statement" from Taiwan. The "media statement" was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and distributed on PTT, a Taiwanese social network.
> The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
China did not allow these statements to be made public until around January 20 when they finally stated human-to-human transmission was confirmed. At first they detained doctors who tried to speak out.
Taiwan was the first to publicly call it SARS. In early January they sent a team to visit Wuhan, then came back and said "this is SARS".
[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline
That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
Huh? Taiwan did make the WHO aware.
> That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
There is no public record about this novel coronavirus, later called Covid-19, prior to Dec 31 2019. China kept it under wraps. Wuhan doctors knew but they were not allowed to speak out. When they tried, they were detained and threatened with arrest.
Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
From The facts regarding Taiwan’s email to alert WHO to possible danger of COVID-19, [1]
> To be prudent, in the email we took pains to refer to atypical pneumonia, and specifically noted that patients had been isolated for treatment. Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
The email text is in this Taipei Times article [2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...
[2] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/12/2...
> Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
So you don't believe it's possible, at all, for rumours to have been running around prior to the 31st, that there was a possible sars outbreak, prior to Taiwan getting some sort of evidence to submit to the WHO to request information about what's going on.
We seem to have miscommunicated. When you wrote "We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019" I thought you meant you had heard about a confirmed outbreak reported by some reliable news source, not rumors.
What I meant to underscore was that this knowledge did not become public prior to Taiwan notifying the WHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
By 'we' I meant my family and I. My wife is Taiwanese and her family said to be careful because people are saying there was a possible sars outbreak.
It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated.
Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back.
> It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020.
It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.”
> I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism
The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health.
I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.
If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.
Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?
(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
“But it was impossible to predict!” that the mask was useful. Well, Pr Raoult did. Many doctors did. Government can’t claim innocence “by being wrongly advised” after implementing nationwide policies without knowing anything correct AND banning criticism on Facebook.
You can’t claim innocence when you perform wilful censorship.
The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.
So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.
The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.
What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.
It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
[1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.
Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.
This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.
Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:
1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.
2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.
[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it.
The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed. The disturbing thing is that we did not initially err on the side of caution.
> I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics.
It doesn't have to have a massive impact to be useful.
> You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
"Same basic shape". What, you mean up then down, as new variants emerged, and seasonal effects were encountered? How are you assessing that they are the same shape? Have you done an analysis against all countries with reliable data or are you eyeballing the graphs from a few cherry-picked regions by a blogger?
You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:
1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.
2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.
> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed
If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.
But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.
Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1592670/covid-news-babies-...
The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”
There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.
Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.
Nonsense. The virus spreads primarily through salivary droplets. Please don't peddle this rubbish.
There is some aerosol transmission, but most infections happen at short range. Masks aren't perfectly effective but they do help, and that has saved lives.
If you don't even understand the basic science then educate yourself before commenting.
If you want more evidence, try:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/
SARS-1 spread through an apartment building by using drain pipes. No droplet transmission is capable of that. For SARS-CoV-2 the same thing happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty. This was very early evidence the spread-through-droplets theory couldn't be correct, but was ignored by public health.
Again, absolute nonsense.
World Health Organisation:
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe."[0]
> People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty.
No one is disputing that the virus spreads through aerosol distribution. The majority of spread is through salivary droplets. Is your argument seriously that because there is some aerosol spread, that somehow disproves the model that spread is mainly through salivary droplets?
If you are unable to understand the argument I don't see how we can continue the conversation.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cor...
How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.
Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?
I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):
Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.
So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.
To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...
Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back.
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.
Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.
In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.
The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.
But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.
("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)
I would wager that is something no one from the CDC ever said, wrote, or implied.
They told people they would not benefit from using N95 masks, which was damaging enough.
People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.
Perhaps our protagonist realizes that lying will save countless lives, but he must fall on his own sword when the deception is revealed. Then, according to plan, he is publicly shamed and fired in order for his agency to retain any credibility.
I posit that for the purposes of psychological/mental health, it is not worth it to live in a system run through deception. It is also civically dangerous because the habit of lying can be so easily transposed from a selfless telos to a selfish one - and, conveniently, lied about. If it is possible, I would rather die so that someone else is spared having to live in a deceptive system. Do I have the right to impose that decision on others, though? I say no. It's their responsibility to make that choice.
WHO and other health authorities sent the entire world into sanitization frenzy.
The new variants are now as infectious as measles. We can only hope that new variants remain mild and / or limited in danger by current and developing vaccines.
Does it mean that masks and social distancing were actually useful? Or the opposite?
Closed spaces: ventilation or HEPA filters are necessary.
Think of cigarette smoke: if you can smell it, you’d get the virus
The west tried to rely on its supranational institution to establish top-down consensus and then couldn't react to its failure.
Ostensibly Asian countries are part of the WHO, so why was it that the decision-makers there weren't able to adapt? Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO? Why didn't they intervene?
[0] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.ht...
It is easy to focus on what scientists got wrong about the virus, but it's equally important to point out what was right. In retrospect, the early data about the nature of the virus itself was pretty spot on.
Modelling pandemics is really hard, even before this virus, and we've only gotten better. Coordinating a specific global response is even harder.
Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be really hard to correct later on, and needs to be corrected quickly and loudly.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission
This is hardly a radical notion. Ferguson's useless 2001 era foot-and-mouth models relied heavily on the idea that the virus would be spread by the wind between nearby farms, even if there was no close physical contact between animals. The field of "aerobiology" investigates this topic (whether our understanding of what can survive long distance travel might be flawed). If this is correct then it'd explain many otherwise unexplainable facts about COVID and influenza, like the way outbreaks start and stop more or less simultaneously over huge geographic areas.
It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine! On the flip side, it was aggravating to see moronic restaurants building enclosed outdoor tents to meet the requirements of "outdoor dining". Sure, they meet the legal requirements, but for the health requirements?
Shame the recall didn't go through.
State of Jefferson FTW.
The problem with trips to the beach during the height of a pandemic isn't that a couple of people sitting far apart on a beach have anything to worry about. In theory it'd be fine, but people ruin everything.
They swing by multiple houses to pick up a bunch of friends for their day at the beach, drive in from out of town, stop at the store for food and drinks and sun screen, then stop to get gas, then get to the beach and see thousands of other people have decided to do the same thing (see https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-thousands-flock-to-be...) and now you have crowds of people who might as well be at a music festival or motorcycle rally.
Yeah, people (especially those who are making great sacrifices to prevent the spread of a virus and protect their community) are going to be upset at the massive beach parties going on. It's annoying to get left out of a party even when it isn't undermining your efforts to lower the number of infections and deaths in your neighborhood.
> with regards to Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on. I remember seeing specials on NHK visualising the spread from a sneezing person in a room in March 2020.
Sneezing would be the droplets distribution theory, which is now "debunked". If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.
Droplets only? Do you not find sneezing to be a highly effective method of spreading airborne pathogens?
> If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.
You’re essentially saying, “if the virus was airborne it could be spread through coughs too” to which the NHK study says, “yes, and sneezes.”
But they studied coughs too https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU
This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.
"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.
At the time of the outbreak, the US administration was under a populist leader who saw the virus as an almost personal attack; emphasizing that mask wearing, and the implicit recognition that the virus spread by air, was a political symbol directed against him.
Funny how people forget this.
Early on when people were still often forgetting to stay farther away from strangers I seriously considered switching to doing my grocery shopping between my morning workout and my morning shower to discourage people from getting too close.
I did switch to doing my grocery shopping early in the morning and it turned out there were so few people shopping then that it was easy to avoid them, except sometimes at checkout when the person behind me in line might stand too close.
That was easy to deal with by simply standing in front of my shopping cart when in line instead of behind it. That way I could decide how close to stand to the person in front of me, and the person behind me had to at least stay a shopping cart's length back.
Bwahahahaaaaaaah! Covid strikes again! You cannot get away!
Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention.
I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things:
Both the above never happened in the West. It was hard enough to get your average dumb Westerner to comply during COVID.The Japanese mentality of taking into account the impact of your actions on others has served them well.
That is why Japan has seen less than 1/10th of the COVID cases that, for example, the UK had. Despite Japan being 2x UK population and living/working in SIGNIFICANTLY higher density.
Nowadays, working a remote job, I can work if it's just a cough, and it won't affect my co-workers. Never thought about this benefit of remote work!
(data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...
It will take decades and much cooler heads to determine the winners and losers. Trying to claim the winners and losers right now is a fools errand.
Just because they ended up in the hospital for "other" reasons doesn't mean it wasn't Covid--someone we know recently lost her mother that way. Health issues that were under control--then they weren't. Coincidence that she tests positive after being admitted?? I don't think so!
There's also the reality that some people are clotting out in various fashions when they aren't nearly sick enough to warrant the hospital and thus likely aren't even tested. If the clot hits someplace quickly lethal (heart, brain, lungs) they end up in the morgue without ever being diagnosed.
It's sad that people are too proud to cooperate with other people working in other domains (and sometimes even in the same domain).
She believes the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen”, partly by being hacked by China (the Mr. Pillow Guy CEO hypothesis). She knows nothing about the details of the domain, but she has a strong conviction opinion on the topic. I spent a lot of time investigating what evidence was publicly available and was thoroughly unconvinced.
Is it “sad” that I am “too proud” to adopt her logic/thinking/chain of facts?
Or is it simply that the domain experts are overwhelmed with noise (bad ideas from non-domain-experts)?
The default mentality of scientists should be skepticism of conclusions and creativity/curiosity for hypotheses. That’s a difficult mindset for one individual. There is a reason why red teams and blue teams are specialized.
I agree you cannot go down the rabbit hole by checking what everyone is saying. But there are experts in other domains who can present proof in their domain. And then it's silly not to listen.
He really looked at a few superspread events and drilled down in how it could've spread.
We have learned that while medical doctors are domain experts in treating diseases, they are not domain experts in how infectious diseases spread around. Some doctors follow the front lines of science, whereas other doctors refuse to update their knowledge, and stick to what their old textbooks say.
And we have learned that when it comes to airborne diseases, even epidemiologists are not domain experts. Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models. With statistics, they know how to observe epidemics. With mathematical models, that can make bad predictions on how the epidemic progresses, but these predictions turned out to be wrong more often than not. Now nobody makes these predictions anymore, they have lost credibility.
But they are not trained in physics to actually understand the physical mechanisms of how the virus can spread from one person to others.
And that public health is also a matter of economics and engineering, and again medical doctors are not good domain experts here. Medical doctors can advice you not to drink dirty water, but population scale water hygiene is a matter of civil engineering. If we want air hygiene, we have to turn to engineers.
And they are pretty bad at that too… their models have been horrifically bad. Most of them seemed designed to show the absolute worst case (see all the hockey stick charts these people published)…
Yes, there were issues with the pandemic rollout that need to be prevented from happening in the future, without doubt. But trying to find blame for either organization, which have been hammered by a massive, organized and relentless campaign of misinformation is a waste of time. They were being attacked daily by both Russian bots and, by extension their representatives here in the US, the Republicans. Of course they made mistakes.
If the U.S. hadn't been destabilized by Russia, there would have been a much more clear headed response. Placing any blame on the CDC or the WHO has no purpose. It was Russia.
(We need to pardon the Jan 6th insurrectionists and start a nationwide effort to educate the people about how badly they have been deceived and then we need to do whatever possible to ensure regime change in Russia.)
Also, you seem to forgetting the WHO's interesting relationship with China. You seem so anti Russia you are missing the country who actually manipulated the WHO.