5 ms·

I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your h

by nlh 6y ago

I predict we’re going to look back at ourselves in a few years and find a few things particularly egregious, much as we look back at “smoking is good for your health!” ads from the 1950s: 1. Our early guidance that masks don’t help (because we needed to save the real masks for healthcare workers); and 2. Our collective obsession around Mar-Apr 2020 with surface disinfecting. The shortage on Clorox wipes, the obsessive cleaning of hands and packages and groceries. The wiping down of airplane seats. Hand sanitizer everywhere. In the end we’re going to realize it was all about close proximity airborne transmission.

staunch 6y ago
1. Was just a flat out lie by various public health officials that they justified for the greater good. It was probably the biggest and easiest-to-prevent mistake of the pandemic, and it certainly cost many lives. 2. It still makes sense to wash hands, use gloves, and wipe down anything coming into your house that was recently touched by strangers. There's no good reason to allow a known vector, even if it's lower risk than airborne.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  It should have been illegal for health officials to knowingly lie to the public.
  - minikites 6y ago
    Why only health officials?
    - geoduck14 6y ago
      The bar is higher for professionals speaking in their field of expertise
      - NtochkaNzvanova 6y ago
        Well, now we know that they are neither professionals, nor experts. Most of what comes from the public health establishment is more like "science theater" that is engineered to obey whatever political dictates need to be handed down with the air of authority. Recall the proclamations from last summer that massive street protests were either magically not going to spread COVID, or that it was somehow acceptable because "racism is a public health issue".
- davidw 6y ago
  It's especially frustrating, as places like the Czech Republic initially did pretty well by telling people to cover their faces with any old thing - cut up t-shirts, whatever. Maybe people in the US are too selfish and would have gone for the 'fancy' masks and ended up depriving doctors of them, but it seems like not even trying was pretty bad. Looks like subsequently things went off the rails there. Wonder what happened.
- adewinter 6y ago
  What part of 1. Was a lie? It's a fact many hospitals were extremely lacking in PPE, especially when it came to N95 masks, at the start of the pandemic. There was a shortage/crisis to the point where there were many local compaigns to manufacture basic PPE like cloth masks and face shields for hospitals. How could you forget about that so quickly?
  - CubsFan1060 6y ago
    Except they didn't say "They work, but don't buy them because the hospitals need them". Here's what they said: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-video-masks/fact-checkoutdated-video-of-fauci-saying-theres-no-reason-to-be-walking-around-with-a-mask-idUSKBN26T2TR https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-... At least to me, that was pretty dismissive about them. That set the tone for a very large set of people. Edit: This was US based. I do not know what other countries were saying.
- adonovan 6y ago
  Was #1 a flat-out lie? I though the CDC said that "masks work" was a statement with insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time, especially as they were cognizant that a run on masks could deny HCWs access to the tools of their trade. In other words, they were irresponsibly careful.
  - clarkevans 6y ago
    Tweet from Surgeon General, Feb 19th: "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus..."; in a March 2nd interview he went further: "You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a healthcare provider." (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-general-against-masks/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-general-against-ma...) Fauci in March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-needed/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-need...). Both continued with detail about saving masks for health professionals and added more context. However, both Adams and Fauci made statements in the early pandemic clearly stated that one shouldn't be wearing masks. https://apnews.com/article/26f0cb8ed836a76f0e019357cbea7f58 https://apnews.com/article/26f0cb8ed836a76f0e019357cbea7f58
  - serf 6y ago
    > insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time masks for viral protection isn't a new topic, and plenty of research is available[0] -- unless you're talking about only viral research pertaining to covid-19, which is fairly over-specific to legislate against/towards. in other words: it was understood in the general scientific and medical public that masks help to reduce or prevent spread of airborne virus, to claim that the government should have waited for specific research to a singular strain is both excusing a willfully in-active government and portraying that government as scientifically credible for doing the so. These actions, given the evidence that already existed that masks provide a net benefit against viral pathogens, were scientifically unsound. If I had the complete picture that was available to the U.S. government then maybe I could justify the actions by knowing that a call to use masks would cause a profound shortage of PPE for those that needed it -- and I think that's exactly what happened: the government saw that a call to use masks would cause a lack of goods, so instead of looking entirely ignorant to the problem it was decided to latch onto the logic that covid-19 was somehow totally unlike any virus and that novel research would need to be undertaken in order to justify the need for masks. It's my opinion that masks were already well-enough researched, and that the surrogate viruses that were used in this research prior to covid-19 were a 'good-enough' approximate to understand that masks would be a net social benefit, if available. It's my opinion that other co-factors that the government was privvy to influenced their decision to push against mask use temporarily in the beginning. [0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mask+efficacy+virus&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&as_ylo=1960&as_yhi=2018 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mask+efficacy+virus&hl=...
- chapium 6y ago
  The CDC and the WHO were staunchly conservative about masks early in the pandemic. Much of the studies we had at the time lacked rigor to show that masks were effective for coronavirus and various parameters. As more and more data came out, they shifted their position.
faitswulff 6y ago
It’s not even necessarily close proximity: “Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’ spread indoors” https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-minutes-from-20-feet-away-south-korean-study-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19 https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-m...
- f430 6y ago
  one word of caution is the current South Korean administration has been dangerously leaning towards pro-CCP. President Moon has repeatedly praised the communist party and President Xi and they have effectively weaponized the pandemic to suppress protests. Imagine if Trump handed plutonium yielding power plants to Iran on a usb device to win political concessions. That is what has happened in South Korea and there is a massive "USBgate" scandal that implicates the Korean president. So anything out of South Korea right now under the current admin, we should take a grain of salt. The new Biden administration labelled South Korea as an "illiberal democracy".
- airstrike 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I finally have unequivocal data to support my argument that we should not eat indoors at restaurants.
  - lamontcg 6y ago
    First published back in April, 2020: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
- loyukfai 6y ago
  - Indoor environment - No/limited air circulation - Mask-less All 3 combined, put a COVID-19 carrier there, trouble.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yes but you're missing the point is that the advice right now is that a 6ft distance (indoor and outdoor) is sufficient for people to take off their masks.
minikites 6y ago
>Our early guidance that masks don’t help (because we needed to save the real masks for healthcare workers) I see this mentioned a lot, is this really a big factor? Did a ton of people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? That just doesn't make sense to me. I mostly see this issue used as a bad faith cudgel to justify not wearing a mask now, but someone acting in bad faith would have picked another excuse if it wasn't this one.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Yes, it was a big factor. The WHO was discouraging mask use for months after the pandemic started, even though we knew that the original SARS was airborne and we knew that masks were effective against other coronaviruses. They were pushing the line that there was "no evidence", when what they really mean was "there isn't overwhelming and conclusive evidence, and I am not inclined towards Bayesian reasoning in public because it presents too much career risk and I'm a total coward".
- war1025 6y ago
  > people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? (Anecdote) At the start of the pandemic, I took it all very seriously. We were in the fog of war and didn't know how serious it was, so we assumed it was very dangerous. We did our best to avoid people and do our part to "stop the spread" or "flatten the curve". At the beginning of June, I started to get more bold with things. Wife and kids still avoided stores, but I would go for more than just the weekly groceries. Sometime in July / August we started seeing some of our friends again. September / October we started going to stores as a family again. Also started going to church again. At this point, our habits are changed to the point that we just don't really go anywhere, but we don't avoid anything for "safety" reasons. We wear our masks in stores, etc. because most have signs on the doors asking us to and we try to be polite about it. At this point I think I can count 20+ people of all ages that I know personally who have had Coronavirus. I don't have a terribly big social circle. In the words of my best friend, whose family had it over Christmas, "I wouldn't recommend going out and catching it on purpose, but you get through it just fine" Which is to say, I think we know much more about the virus now than we did then, and the risk profile is very low for people without serious pre-existing health conditions or the very old. And hell, my grandma's nursing home had an outbreak. I think they had maybe 6 or 7 people die out of the 60 or so people who caught it. That's a tragedy, but the bigger tragedy is that they were prevented from seeing family for ten months now and had to suffer alone, many of them degrading significantly from the lack of interaction. Thankfully they are getting the vaccine and should be allowed to open up soon.
Exmoor 6y ago
I would add the 6ft rule, but it's unclear to me that people even now realize that's it's based on assumptions about transmission which were proven wrong pretty early on.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  The distance rule works and helps... When the area is well ventilated. On par with outdoors. It does next to nothing for typical indoors, as the aerosol won't be evacuated and will stay suspended in air, when the next person enters the area.
rkhassen9 6y ago
We were dealing with the unknown and with deadly consequences. The behavior was correct for the situation. And when we got better information, hopefully we adjusted.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Early on I tried to figure out what the correct precautions were and then decided that everything practical until further notice is the proper response. A point is what about next time? Who knows what works for Covid19 might be worthless for the next pandemic.
- divbzero 6y ago
  I agree the initial behavior was understandable given the uncertainty. What’s less understandable is how slowly we’ve adjusted to better information…
  - rkhassen9 6y ago
    Agreed! What is challenging is that, as a culture, we do not have a collective sense of what is solid “information”. Between filter bubbles and the previous administration contradicting its own messaging, topped off with a populace lacking the mental training to sort through it all and figure out what makes sense, the resulting confusion seems inevitable. It’s easy to point at the result(eg people making stupid decisions) and ignore the root causes (eg lack of critical thinking skills training, filter bubbles, and more), but to see real systemic changes, the root causes are what will need attention.
Anthony-G 6y ago
I’m living in Europe but a year after the spread of Covid-19 this Atlantic article¹ is still relevant. I live in a city so I can buy from local, brick-and-mortar retail almost exclusively and I prefer to support specialist stores over general, e.g., buy vegetables from the local fruit-and-veg shop rather than the supermarket. However, I’ve been very frustrated by the fact that pharmacies I’ve gone to don’t have any better a selection of masks than other shops. I’ve also yet to come across any masks that have some sort of quality mark or certified to some standard. I find it crazy that the majority of masks for sale to the public are “fashion masks” which offer no guarantees of effectiveness. 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent...

by nlh 6y ago

staunch 6y ago

1. Was just a flat out lie by various public health officials that they justified for the greater good. It was probably the biggest and easiest-to-prevent mistake of the pandemic, and it certainly cost many lives. 2. It still makes sense to wash hands, use gloves, and wipe down anything coming into your house that was recently touched by strangers. There's no good reason to allow a known vector, even if it's lower risk than airborne.

mywittyname 6y ago
It should have been illegal for health officials to knowingly lie to the public.
- minikites 6y ago
  Why only health officials?
  - geoduck14 6y ago
    The bar is higher for professionals speaking in their field of expertise
    - NtochkaNzvanova 6y ago
      Well, now we know that they are neither professionals, nor experts. Most of what comes from the public health establishment is more like "science theater" that is engineered to obey whatever political dictates need to be handed down with the air of authority. Recall the proclamations from last summer that massive street protests were either magically not going to spread COVID, or that it was somehow acceptable because "racism is a public health issue".
davidw 6y ago
It's especially frustrating, as places like the Czech Republic initially did pretty well by telling people to cover their faces with any old thing - cut up t-shirts, whatever. Maybe people in the US are too selfish and would have gone for the 'fancy' masks and ended up depriving doctors of them, but it seems like not even trying was pretty bad. Looks like subsequently things went off the rails there. Wonder what happened.
adewinter 6y ago
What part of 1. Was a lie? It's a fact many hospitals were extremely lacking in PPE, especially when it came to N95 masks, at the start of the pandemic. There was a shortage/crisis to the point where there were many local compaigns to manufacture basic PPE like cloth masks and face shields for hospitals. How could you forget about that so quickly?
- CubsFan1060 6y ago
  Except they didn't say "They work, but don't buy them because the hospitals need them". Here's what they said: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-video-masks/fact-checkoutdated-video-of-fauci-saying-theres-no-reason-to-be-walking-around-with-a-mask-idUSKBN26T2TR https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-... At least to me, that was pretty dismissive about them. That set the tone for a very large set of people. Edit: This was US based. I do not know what other countries were saying.
adonovan 6y ago
Was #1 a flat-out lie? I though the CDC said that "masks work" was a statement with insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time, especially as they were cognizant that a run on masks could deny HCWs access to the tools of their trade. In other words, they were irresponsibly careful.
- clarkevans 6y ago
  Tweet from Surgeon General, Feb 19th: "Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus..."; in a March 2nd interview he went further: "You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a healthcare provider." (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-general-against-masks/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/surgeon-general-against-ma...) Fauci in March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-needed/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fauci-masks-no-longer-need...). Both continued with detail about saving masks for health professionals and added more context. However, both Adams and Fauci made statements in the early pandemic clearly stated that one shouldn't be wearing masks. https://apnews.com/article/26f0cb8ed836a76f0e019357cbea7f58 https://apnews.com/article/26f0cb8ed836a76f0e019357cbea7f58
- serf 6y ago
  > insufficient peer-reviewed evidence for them to make it their official advice at the time masks for viral protection isn't a new topic, and plenty of research is available[0] -- unless you're talking about only viral research pertaining to covid-19, which is fairly over-specific to legislate against/towards. in other words: it was understood in the general scientific and medical public that masks help to reduce or prevent spread of airborne virus, to claim that the government should have waited for specific research to a singular strain is both excusing a willfully in-active government and portraying that government as scientifically credible for doing the so. These actions, given the evidence that already existed that masks provide a net benefit against viral pathogens, were scientifically unsound. If I had the complete picture that was available to the U.S. government then maybe I could justify the actions by knowing that a call to use masks would cause a profound shortage of PPE for those that needed it -- and I think that's exactly what happened: the government saw that a call to use masks would cause a lack of goods, so instead of looking entirely ignorant to the problem it was decided to latch onto the logic that covid-19 was somehow totally unlike any virus and that novel research would need to be undertaken in order to justify the need for masks. It's my opinion that masks were already well-enough researched, and that the surrogate viruses that were used in this research prior to covid-19 were a 'good-enough' approximate to understand that masks would be a net social benefit, if available. It's my opinion that other co-factors that the government was privvy to influenced their decision to push against mask use temporarily in the beginning. [0]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mask+efficacy+virus&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&as_ylo=1960&as_yhi=2018 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mask+efficacy+virus&hl=...
chapium 6y ago
The CDC and the WHO were staunchly conservative about masks early in the pandemic. Much of the studies we had at the time lacked rigor to show that masks were effective for coronavirus and various parameters. As more and more data came out, they shifted their position.

faitswulff 6y ago

It’s not even necessarily close proximity: “Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’ spread indoors” https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-minutes-from-20-feet-away-south-korean-study-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19 https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-09/five-m...

f430 6y ago
one word of caution is the current South Korean administration has been dangerously leaning towards pro-CCP. President Moon has repeatedly praised the communist party and President Xi and they have effectively weaponized the pandemic to suppress protests. Imagine if Trump handed plutonium yielding power plants to Iran on a usb device to win political concessions. That is what has happened in South Korea and there is a massive "USBgate" scandal that implicates the Korean president. So anything out of South Korea right now under the current admin, we should take a grain of salt. The new Biden administration labelled South Korea as an "illiberal democracy".
airstrike 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I finally have unequivocal data to support my argument that we should not eat indoors at restaurants.
- lamontcg 6y ago
  First published back in April, 2020: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
loyukfai 6y ago
- Indoor environment - No/limited air circulation - Mask-less All 3 combined, put a COVID-19 carrier there, trouble.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yes but you're missing the point is that the advice right now is that a 6ft distance (indoor and outdoor) is sufficient for people to take off their masks.

minikites 6y ago

>Our early guidance that masks don’t help (because we needed to save the real masks for healthcare workers) I see this mentioned a lot, is this really a big factor? Did a ton of people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? That just doesn't make sense to me. I mostly see this issue used as a bad faith cudgel to justify not wearing a mask now, but someone acting in bad faith would have picked another excuse if it wasn't this one.

hntrader 6y ago
Yes, it was a big factor. The WHO was discouraging mask use for months after the pandemic started, even though we knew that the original SARS was airborne and we knew that masks were effective against other coronaviruses. They were pushing the line that there was "no evidence", when what they really mean was "there isn't overwhelming and conclusive evidence, and I am not inclined towards Bayesian reasoning in public because it presents too much career risk and I'm a total coward".
war1025 6y ago
> people genuinely begin the pandemic by believing officials and then after a few weeks start to disbelieve officials? (Anecdote) At the start of the pandemic, I took it all very seriously. We were in the fog of war and didn't know how serious it was, so we assumed it was very dangerous. We did our best to avoid people and do our part to "stop the spread" or "flatten the curve". At the beginning of June, I started to get more bold with things. Wife and kids still avoided stores, but I would go for more than just the weekly groceries. Sometime in July / August we started seeing some of our friends again. September / October we started going to stores as a family again. Also started going to church again. At this point, our habits are changed to the point that we just don't really go anywhere, but we don't avoid anything for "safety" reasons. We wear our masks in stores, etc. because most have signs on the doors asking us to and we try to be polite about it. At this point I think I can count 20+ people of all ages that I know personally who have had Coronavirus. I don't have a terribly big social circle. In the words of my best friend, whose family had it over Christmas, "I wouldn't recommend going out and catching it on purpose, but you get through it just fine" Which is to say, I think we know much more about the virus now than we did then, and the risk profile is very low for people without serious pre-existing health conditions or the very old. And hell, my grandma's nursing home had an outbreak. I think they had maybe 6 or 7 people die out of the 60 or so people who caught it. That's a tragedy, but the bigger tragedy is that they were prevented from seeing family for ten months now and had to suffer alone, many of them degrading significantly from the lack of interaction. Thankfully they are getting the vaccine and should be allowed to open up soon.

Exmoor 6y ago

I would add the 6ft rule, but it's unclear to me that people even now realize that's it's based on assumptions about transmission which were proven wrong pretty early on.

AstralStorm 6y ago
The distance rule works and helps... When the area is well ventilated. On par with outdoors. It does next to nothing for typical indoors, as the aerosol won't be evacuated and will stay suspended in air, when the next person enters the area.

rkhassen9 6y ago

We were dealing with the unknown and with deadly consequences. The behavior was correct for the situation. And when we got better information, hopefully we adjusted.

Gibbon1 6y ago
Early on I tried to figure out what the correct precautions were and then decided that everything practical until further notice is the proper response. A point is what about next time? Who knows what works for Covid19 might be worthless for the next pandemic.
divbzero 6y ago
I agree the initial behavior was understandable given the uncertainty. What’s less understandable is how slowly we’ve adjusted to better information…
- rkhassen9 6y ago
  Agreed! What is challenging is that, as a culture, we do not have a collective sense of what is solid “information”. Between filter bubbles and the previous administration contradicting its own messaging, topped off with a populace lacking the mental training to sort through it all and figure out what makes sense, the resulting confusion seems inevitable. It’s easy to point at the result(eg people making stupid decisions) and ignore the root causes (eg lack of critical thinking skills training, filter bubbles, and more), but to see real systemic changes, the root causes are what will need attention.

Anthony-G 6y ago

I’m living in Europe but a year after the spread of Covid-19 this Atlantic article¹ is still relevant. I live in a city so I can buy from local, brick-and-mortar retail almost exclusively and I prefer to support specialist stores over general, e.g., buy vegetables from the local fruit-and-veg shop rather than the supermarket. However, I’ve been very frustrated by the fact that pharmacies I’ve gone to don’t have any better a selection of masks than other shops. I’ve also yet to come across any masks that have some sort of quality mark or certified to some standard. I find it crazy that the majority of masks for sale to the public are “fashion masks” which offer no guarantees of effectiveness. 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent-we-wearing-better-masks/617656/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/why-arent...