13 ms·

The Gaslighting of Science

128 points by jbegley 6y ago

graeme 6y ago
It was a maddening year. I lived in Quebec until October 2020, and there the public health director was an active source of disinformation. I believe he still argues against aerosols. To have all the correct info available right from the getgo, and to have public health authorities actively spread wrong information. Maddening. One of the things that has agonized people is not knowing what is safe. There’s been basically no documented outdoor transmission. You can see friends and family outside fairly safely. Just keep a little distance. If you hug, hold your breathe. Knowing the mechanisms you can gauge what is likely to spread and what isn’t. I still know of people washing groceries and avoiding hugs but not so worried about removing masks to eat in a group indoor setting.
- chipotle69 6y ago
  I am yet to understand why Quebec is doing curfew. How does not going outside after 8pm till 6am somehow make the situation better? Their own health officials said curfew won’t help.
  - analyst74 6y ago
    My understanding is that it's a round about way to reduce partying.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      It's really not. People definitely can and do have parties without the curfew. They just do it during the weekend or overnight. Besides, data shows that Quebecers already followed the measures pretty well, and only a small fraction of overall infections came from unknown causes or illegal gatherings, much dominated by schools and work (healthcare before vaccination). Data from the public health agencies suggested it would not and had not had any impact.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Ah, this requires a bit of knowledge of Quebec politics. The quebec premier is a pro-business populist. So, his leadership method can be accurately summarized as, doing what's best for business, and covering up for the issue this causes using populist issues (law 21, for example) or aesthetics. Well, as cases started increasing in Montréal, he wanted to act though. But he didn't want to implement an actual lockdown, as that would hurt the economy (much like fumbled the first lockdown where cases almost went to zero, but instead of continuing slightly longer and implementing mass tests and tracing, he lifted it right before tracing was up to capacity and cases went to zero, but I digress). For the same reason, he didn't want to close down schools, which are a large driver of infection here according to public health data. So, he implemented somthing he knew would look though to his base outside of Montreal, without actually impacting the economy, which is an 8pm curfew. Obviously, everyone with a bit of knowledge knew this would be useless, but there goes. As the curfew went on, vaccination of the health sector picked up, and the healthcare system went from a large driver of cases to non-existent, allowing Montreal to bring R under 1 and cases to go down. He obviously acted as if the curfew contributed, and pushed the curfew to 9:30. Then, he had the brilliant idea of : putting back schools to full-time learning instead of one-day-on, one-day-off, even as the schoolboards and teachers didn't want to - supercharching a large infection driver, but also, outside of Montreal, opening back up indoors dining for restaurants and indoors gyms (without masks!). Unsurprisingly, this led to an explosion of cases outside of Montreal, while Montreal kept stable amounts of infections despite a delayed curfew and full classrooms. So, he rolled back those measures, and to look though again, he put an 8pm curfew in the high infection periods. Despite the fact that cases weren't increasing much in Montréal, afraid that the lack of increase despite a delayed curfew would show plainly that his curfew, flagship measure, was useless, he put it back to 8pm in Montréal. Nicely, this means that people now only have two hours or so to do their groceries, supercharging the mass of people there, indoors. So there it is, it's really just aesthetics. If it helps or not doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't annoy his base too much and looks flashy, it's good for Mr. Legeault. Also, he added a mandate to wear masks in outdoor parks, while almost no infections at all were recorded outdoors.
    - jariel 6y ago
      I live in Quebec and would summarily disagree with this assessment. Your statement about the failure curfew policy and closures is definitely not true. Have a look at the data [1] (Select: Quebec and change the timeframe to include 'all time'. The original closures in January had a radically positive effect in reducing spread, and there were many more measures in place than merely curfew. You directly contradict yourself by indicating 'opening up restos schools was a bad decision' when in the preceding statement you literally said that the policies 'had no effect'. They clearly did. Schools have been opened in many places in the world, and are generally not considered to be superspreading locations - the difference 'now' is not COVID v1, rather, it's COVID v1.1 and v1.2 (i.e. other variants) which seem to be affecting young people at considerably higher rates. The policy here is not hugely different than most places in the world. [1] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/ https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jariel 6y ago
    It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life. I feel it's more powerful than the time we were seeing NYC hospitals blow up in COVID disaster. It's 'over there' when it's on TV ... but when you 'have to get home by 8' it a visceral effect. To the point wherein never before have I truly contemplated the authoritarian nature of the order - though I'm fully sympathetic to the Provincial Leaders trying to stop mass death, it's pretty scary that this can happen and the Supreme Court ruling on the case that was brought before them was really scant. Basically, the Judges said 'it's for the good of the people and proportional so it's ok' - but there's basically zero in the way of parameterized logic, precedence, or specific legality to all of it. As far as the Health Officers supposedly miscommunication information, I suggest that these are intelligent people, and that obviously there's still not as much consensus as the comment implies. 'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      >'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines. The Quebec governmnent's refusal to publish public health guidance on decisions that experts think are ineffective while insisting that they are based on evidence definitely qualifies as gaslighting science. >It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life. It was also a strong social signal to everyone I know that the handling of the crisis was aestheticized and politicized as there was no evidence of it's efficacy. Certainly for some it had a chilling effect, for many it led to a complete loss of trust in a government that was already playing fast and loose with rigor and trustworthiness.
    - mardifoufs 6y ago
      The government of Québec mismanaged the crisis to a phenomenonal level. Literally thousands of deaths were directly caused by that mismanagement (from the catastrophic handling of nursing homes) even with a population that was (and still is) one the most compliant to the restrictions.in the world . But we still are blamed and pusnished by the government for "slipping up" and not being responsible while we all know no one in the government will be held accountable for the CHSLDs collapsing and Quebec having some of the worst outcomes in the world. That's who's gas lighting here, not a very tiny group of fringe weirdos with almost 0 impact denying covid.
  - graeme 6y ago
    > Their own health officials said curfew won’t help. I’m no longer following quebec public health’s announcements closely, but did they seem credible? They’ve been wrong on most everything so I’d need their reasoning rather than their authority to believe them here. A curfew makes gatherings substantially harder. You have to buy food and drink in advance, and people have to be able to sleep over and be comfortable doing so. Contact tracing won’t detect many clusters at private gatherings if people don’t say they were violating rules. Public health’s data may not be accurate here. If I were in charge I wouldn’t use a curfew mind you. I would instead fix public health’s rules: emphasize ventilation, mandate open windows, require masks at work while seated, etc. But I suspect the curfew actually achieves its purpose. Quebec is doing better relative to other provinces than it did pre curfew, iirc.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      >inhibit parties and gatherings [citation needed] - anecdotally all of the people I heard of that partied before still party after, either on the weekends eariler or they stay over. >another major cause of spread. [citation needed] - The "activities and events", which includes legal events, is 285 out of 11 158 in the sum of outbreaks collected by Quebec public health. "Other environments", which is where they put clusters that they can't identify is even lower at 46 out of 11 158. All other categories are verified using hard data, and one couldn't lie to classify the cluster somewhere else. So no, this isn't a data issue : https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coronavirus/situation-coronavirus-in-quebec https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coron... By far the dominating sources of infection are work and school, and it's not even close. Followed then are places of commerce. What curfews actually do though, is force much higher concentrations of people indoors and in public transit, which strongly contributes to the infections in work, "other establishments", and legal "activities and events". Which has a big impact on infection, unlike the other factors. Politicians had many other tools they chose to relax or not to use right as they enforced the curfew. For example, restrictions on schools were relaxed, a major driver of infection - places like gyms and so on were opened, which already infected hundreds of people, rapid tests were not used in outbreak environments, schools were not outfited with basic ventilation (even just an air purifier would help!), contact tracing is in a horrible state, etc... Most of all, the politicians could actually release the data behind their decisions, going a long way to increase goodwill and compliance, but chose not to. They chose the curfew because it would placate those who asked for stricter restrictions and get people to disagree with them, because it would be flashy and hard to ignore, because once restricted to Montreal it wouldn't cause issues to their voterbase, and because it's very easy to implement and doesn't hurt businesses with which the current government is incredibly cozy.
- oezi 6y ago
  A lot of trouble originated in advice being adjusted to market availabilities rather than science (e.g. don't recommend masks so people wouldn't stockpike them). > If you hug, hold your breath Does this still hold with B117? If outsides are so safe why are curfews still a popular measure?
  - worker767424 6y ago
    > If outsides are so safe why are curfews still a popular measure? I think California's curfew in the fall was later seen as ineffective. Why are they popular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
  - graeme 6y ago
    Yeah, people believe B117 still transmits via aerosols, not fomites. If so, how could you possibly transmit it if you aren’t breathing while hugging? The curfew’s intention is to block people from having social gatherings. You can’t so easily go to dinner at a friend’s if you have to sleep over for the night, and all the stores are closed to buy stuff.
NoblePublius 6y ago
It’s fascinating to me that a scientist would look at the Diamond Princess and it’s 14 deaths of almost entirely 80+ year olds (no one under 65 died) and see evidence to justify mask mandates and school closures and firing half of the people of color from their jobs. Why not, say, quarantine for senior citizens or any sort of coordinated response to protect and provide for the elderly? When people talk about a covid hoax, it’s not denying the virus exists. It’s denying that the popular mitigation strategies don’t do anything but drive value for Amazon share holders.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  We unfortunately had (and in many places are still having) both an emotional and fear-driven reaction to the spread of the virus. A lot of people understand the risk is much lower than the measures used to contain it, such as full school closures and closing parks and playgrounds. In retrospect I hope we can admit at least those preventative measures were a mistake. My fear is that if another more serious virus lands on the scene, there will be no credibility to do it again.
  - amluto 6y ago
    The park closures made very little sense. The playground closures made sense when people were worried about fomites, and the early lab studies (that largely measured the wrong thing) suggested that fomites were an issue. A school is neither a park nor a playground. Schools are mostly indoors, mostly in inexpensive buildings with correspondingly poor ventilation and/or air filtering, and have a lot of people talking and breathing the same air. This is a totally different situation.
  - vaidhy 6y ago
    Is this science driven or emotion driven from the other side? If virus is airborne and can spread without symptoms, are you saying younger age group does not get the virus or does not show the symptoms? If they do get the virus, then they can spread it. The closures were to prevent the virus from spreading and I do not understand why the measures used to contain it are a mistake. From the OP, it seems clear that virus is airborne, spreads in clusters and people spread it before showing any symptoms. I am open to suggestions on what are the alternative ways of stopping the spread?
grawprog 6y ago
I've spent a lot of time reading the science over the last year and a half or so. These claims of gaslighting go both ways. I've seen numerous studies passed off as fact and that have been used to guide policy with unacceptably low sampling sizes or other sampling problems. I've seen very little 'good' science being conducted over the last year. You've got inadequately sampled studies throughout the duration of covid that have led to drastic policy decisions, I've seen biased studies coming from massive corporations being used to guide policy decisions and not one step along the way have I seen anyone who's gone... 'Hey wait a second, maybe we should check this data before we take drastic action' Be listened to or taken seriously.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Care to name some examples? I mean... the broad arc of the policy choices have been correct, right? Stay home. Wear a mask. That stuff works. We thought it worked last April and we were right. There's some genuine argument about the efficacy of specific facilities, like schools. But that's stuff at the margin. I guess I don't see any good candidates for the "drastic policy decisions" based on "biased studies from massive corporations"... Really most of what the world did was pretty textbook disease control stuff. What is it you mean?
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    The reliance on unusual concepts - like asymptomatic transmission and the effect of wearing masks which have become semi-religious in their belief even though there isn’t really any actual solid RCT evidence they do that much good out in the field rather than in the lab (much like hydroxychloroquine which is similarly effective in a lab but not in the field). There is no blow out in Texas et al and Sweden has just tracked the same path as everybody else suffering much less than Belgium for example, and today isn’t anywhere near the top of the charts. There’s an awful lot of curve fitting to beliefs going on - because it is so difficult to do solid experiments.
    - watwut 6y ago
      How is symptomatic transmission unusual concept?
barathr 6y ago
Her earlier two related posts on metaepistemology were amazing as well: https://zeynep.substack.com/p/lessons-from-a-pandemic-anniversary https://zeynep.substack.com/p/lessons-from-a-pandemic-annive... https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-...
- epistasis 6y ago
  Zeynep is one of the best possible writers out there for a HN crowd, IMHO. Super intelligent, dives deep into the relevant data, and thinks things through.
  - timr 6y ago
    You have to be careful with her writing. She overgeneralizes quite a bit, and conveys anecdotes as if they're definitive evidence. There's a lot of 20-20 hindsight bias going on. For example, this article is basically -- when you reduce it to non-redundant claims -- the opinions of a few people, and two examples: the diamond princess, and the Washington choir. The diamond princess is presented as if it were a definitive example of aerosol spread. But even Japanese experts were debating it at the time, as -- despite the implication of "lockdown" as used in the piece -- the people on the ship were still mingling on a regular basis to eat. It's simply misleading to present this as an obvious-at-the-time counterfactual. In fact, NHK did a whole documentary discussing it (no longer available [1]), and did this re-enactment to show how it might have happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGQEuuv9R6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGQEuuv9R6E The debates about fomite transmission at the choir are simply dismissed as ridiculous by a single researcher -- an aerosol researcher who has been vocal since the beginning of the pandemic that aerosols are responsible. So you have to consider the source. He's entitled to his opinion, but others weren't gaslighting by having the temerity to disagree with him. There were actually legitimate scientific questions at play, and the opinion of a single person doesn't negate those questions, even if that person turns out to be right in retrospect. If I had to pick a broad "scientific" trend from the pandemic that disturbs me, it's the over-reliance on anecdote and canonizing of opinion. This seems very much like another example of that broader trend: taking opinions, cherry-picking the ones that look right in retrospect, and anointing those opinions as heroic, while all other opinions are somehow deliberately misleading. That isn't how science works. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20200509/4001358/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20200509/4...
CivBase 6y ago
Why do so many people think science is some neat and clean process adhered to by altruistic seekers of knowledge in lab coats? Science is chuck full of competition, posturing, and political shenanigans - especially for popular subjects where there is fame and fortune on the line. Scientists are human beings. They, just like the rest of us, want to be right and to be rewarded for it. We humans are often not graceful about being challenged or proven wrong. Worse yet, this messy process is filtered and spun by politicians and political media before being presented to the public. Really, it's remarkable that things have worked out as well as they have. We have at least three viable vaccines being widely distributed and only a tiny uptick in mortality in the mean time. Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse.
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  > Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse. The question now is what can we learn from how things were handled by the government in power at the time that half-a-million people died of Covid-19 in the US? As relates to the article of discussion the question is: Was there gas-lightning going on that made things worse? Of course everybody makes mistakes and we should and can learn from them. But, "gas-lightning" is not a mistake. It is intentional.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    The article wasn't talking about the government gaslighting scientists. It talked about scientists gaslighting each other. This is nothing new. Science isn't clean. Just like anything run by humans, it's full of politics and nonsense. We just don't normally pay so much attention to it.
- worker767424 6y ago
  Because they're treating it like a religion. I saw a news clip of a woman getting vaccinated saying she trusts the vaccine because she "likes science." The vaccines appear to be mostly safe, but because you "like science" isn't a reason to trust them. What she means is she likes Mythbusters and thinks that's science.
taurath 6y ago
That the CDC didn’t update guidelines that the virus was spread in the air until October seems near criminal - how much political pressure was on them to say “it’ll all go away soon”, as was stated by political leadership over and over?
- graeme 6y ago
  Unfortunately the CDC is doing better than most OECD health authorities that I know of. Canada still hasn’t updated its guidance to my knowledge. I haven’t checked Europe in a bit, maybe they updated. But judging from their poor showing presently, I doubt it. There were lots of problems in the US response, but it was far from uniquely bad. And aerosol resistance was ingrained across western health authorities, it didn’t come from the president.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    Saying "Europe" in this context is like saying "America" (the continent, not the US). You won't get a useable picture putting Norway, Italy and Russia[1] in the same basket just like you won't with the USA, Peru and Brazil. 1: Did you mean the EU? EU != Europe. Russia is 40% of Europe's area and 15% of its population. European Russians are 80% of Russia's population.
- Fomite 6y ago
  One note here is that "aerosol" =/= "spread through the air". The debate was not over whether or not the virus was spread through the air, but whether or not it was spread via droplets (relatively "large" particles that spread through the air, but will settle relatively quickly onto surfaces) or aerosols (relatively small particles that are likely to linger for longer). The evidence for aerosol transmission outside of specific medical procedures (the aptly named "aerosol generating procedures") wasn't nearly as overwhelming, and most epidemiologists I know were more than willing to characterize the transmission of COVID-19 as likely being on a continuum (documents I wrote were discussing this in early May).
  - taurath 6y ago
centimeter 6y ago
The biggest gaslighting of this whole affair has been the political adherence to clearly insane propositions like forcing everyone to wear masks (questionable in any case) but allowing cloth masks (which do, at best, ~nothing, unlike actual rated masks, so definitely pointless) or quarantining billions of young people who accumulate less than 25 micromorts of mortality from covid contraction in the name of adding (on expectation) a few life-months for geriatrics who are not contributing to society and are about to keel over anyway. The unnecessary manmade destruction of utility over the last year is nearly unprecedented, perhaps the most devastating since WW2.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
roenxi 6y ago
This is an interesting article and here are some broadly relevant points: 1) HN didn't know a lot about COVID at the time it emerged into the world. If nobody was trying to inform HN about COVID, is that a failing? Probably not. It seems highly likely to me that the actual scientists had good research done on respiratory diseases and probably got a handle on the situation quickly. HN getting detailed information like this ~12-18 months after the outbreak is actually pretty speedy. 2) The mass media were and probably will continue to be serially wrong about COVID, which is expected of the media. They aren't in the business of being technically correct. If they were interested in being technically correct they'd be too squeamish to work in the media. Ditto if they had any deep understanding of how to control infectious diseases they'd have gone into careers in epidemiology rather than journalism, they're learning this stuff at the same speed as everyone else. 3) There aren't a lot of new learnings in the pandemic. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that governments can't organise themselves to deal with a crisis in less than 6 months, the government isn't a rapid response outfit. Based on the patterns of success and failure of responses it seems recent memory of SARS is a better predictor of outcomes than competence, so a lot of the broad flows of events were probably predictable and predicted in advance. Some new ideas is that this JIT business is madness, and the amount of travel people do spreads diseases in an eyebrow raising fashion (maybe there should be less of it?). 4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  >>4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea. There is a difference between being prepared, and being a prepper. If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared. If you have several booby-trapped supply caches in the wilderness that you have marked on your map, you're a prepper.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    >If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared. I think most people in my world would use the word "prepper" for this and I didn't think the word had negative connotations. Also that 99% of people don't even have that.
sanity31415 6y ago
The article's main complaint seems to be that people were slow to accept that it could be transmitted by asymptomatic people through the air, but I don't recall anyone questioning that, even from the start.
- Fomite 6y ago
  The author is eliding the debate as to whether transmission was aerosol vs. droplet (which was controversial and difficult to settle) with "did it get passed via the air", which was not. I will say the lack of fomite transmission remains surprising, and one of the few ways we have been fortunate this pandemic. There was very little debate about asymptomatic transmission. But there's a great deal of difference between "Are there asymptomatic carriers?" and "How many, and how efficiently do they transmit?"
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    > But there's a great deal of difference between "Are there asymptomatic carriers?" and "How many, and how efficiently do they transmit?" The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the state of scientific journalism is as crap as it's always been. Science does not deliver neat yes/no answers, it delivers probabilities. Can asymptomatic people spread the virus? Yes. Can you get infected by passing a random unmasked stranger on the street? Yes. Can you get infected by touching a surface that an infected person has touched? Yes. Can you get the disease more than once? Yes. Can you die from the disease? Yes. Can you develop "long covid" after having the disease? Yes. Can you get infected even though you've been fully vaccinated? Yes. Can you die from the vaccine? Yes. The above statements are all true. But their probabilities of happening to you range from very unlikely to microscopic. And that gets completely lost when media reports on it, and when people talk to each other, and when politicians make policies trying to stop the activities that people are most afraid of... And now we're in this mess where it's practically impossible for anyone to know what the right thing to do is.
rscho 6y ago
No mention of the big 2020 HN crowd aggressively promoting chloroquine as the drug that will save the world? Sad, I'd love to hear what those people have to say today!
raverbashing 6y ago
Now if only we could have firm studies on Vitamin D deficiency and its relationship with Covid instead of FUD about overdoses and the use of "Mendelian Randomization" for variables with a strong phenotipic variation.

128 points by jbegley 6y ago

It was a maddening year. I lived in Quebec until October 2020, and there the public health director was an active source of disinformation. I believe he still argues against aerosols. To have all the correct info available right from the getgo, and to have public health authorities actively spread wrong information. Maddening. One of the things that has agonized people is not knowing what is safe. There’s been basically no documented outdoor transmission. You can see friends and family outside fairly safely. Just keep a little distance. If you hug, hold your breathe. Knowing the mechanisms you can gauge what is likely to spread and what isn’t. I still know of people washing groceries and avoiding hugs but not so worried about removing masks to eat in a group indoor setting.

chipotle69 6y ago
I am yet to understand why Quebec is doing curfew. How does not going outside after 8pm till 6am somehow make the situation better? Their own health officials said curfew won’t help.
- analyst74 6y ago
  My understanding is that it's a round about way to reduce partying.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    It's really not. People definitely can and do have parties without the curfew. They just do it during the weekend or overnight. Besides, data shows that Quebecers already followed the measures pretty well, and only a small fraction of overall infections came from unknown causes or illegal gatherings, much dominated by schools and work (healthcare before vaccination). Data from the public health agencies suggested it would not and had not had any impact.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Ah, this requires a bit of knowledge of Quebec politics. The quebec premier is a pro-business populist. So, his leadership method can be accurately summarized as, doing what's best for business, and covering up for the issue this causes using populist issues (law 21, for example) or aesthetics. Well, as cases started increasing in Montréal, he wanted to act though. But he didn't want to implement an actual lockdown, as that would hurt the economy (much like fumbled the first lockdown where cases almost went to zero, but instead of continuing slightly longer and implementing mass tests and tracing, he lifted it right before tracing was up to capacity and cases went to zero, but I digress). For the same reason, he didn't want to close down schools, which are a large driver of infection here according to public health data. So, he implemented somthing he knew would look though to his base outside of Montreal, without actually impacting the economy, which is an 8pm curfew. Obviously, everyone with a bit of knowledge knew this would be useless, but there goes. As the curfew went on, vaccination of the health sector picked up, and the healthcare system went from a large driver of cases to non-existent, allowing Montreal to bring R under 1 and cases to go down. He obviously acted as if the curfew contributed, and pushed the curfew to 9:30. Then, he had the brilliant idea of : putting back schools to full-time learning instead of one-day-on, one-day-off, even as the schoolboards and teachers didn't want to - supercharching a large infection driver, but also, outside of Montreal, opening back up indoors dining for restaurants and indoors gyms (without masks!). Unsurprisingly, this led to an explosion of cases outside of Montreal, while Montreal kept stable amounts of infections despite a delayed curfew and full classrooms. So, he rolled back those measures, and to look though again, he put an 8pm curfew in the high infection periods. Despite the fact that cases weren't increasing much in Montréal, afraid that the lack of increase despite a delayed curfew would show plainly that his curfew, flagship measure, was useless, he put it back to 8pm in Montréal. Nicely, this means that people now only have two hours or so to do their groceries, supercharging the mass of people there, indoors. So there it is, it's really just aesthetics. If it helps or not doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't annoy his base too much and looks flashy, it's good for Mr. Legeault. Also, he added a mandate to wear masks in outdoor parks, while almost no infections at all were recorded outdoors.
  - jariel 6y ago
    I live in Quebec and would summarily disagree with this assessment. Your statement about the failure curfew policy and closures is definitely not true. Have a look at the data [1] (Select: Quebec and change the timeframe to include 'all time'. The original closures in January had a radically positive effect in reducing spread, and there were many more measures in place than merely curfew. You directly contradict yourself by indicating 'opening up restos schools was a bad decision' when in the preceding statement you literally said that the policies 'had no effect'. They clearly did. Schools have been opened in many places in the world, and are generally not considered to be superspreading locations - the difference 'now' is not COVID v1, rather, it's COVID v1.1 and v1.2 (i.e. other variants) which seem to be affecting young people at considerably higher rates. The policy here is not hugely different than most places in the world. [1] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/ https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/coronavirustracker/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jariel 6y ago
  It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life. I feel it's more powerful than the time we were seeing NYC hospitals blow up in COVID disaster. It's 'over there' when it's on TV ... but when you 'have to get home by 8' it a visceral effect. To the point wherein never before have I truly contemplated the authoritarian nature of the order - though I'm fully sympathetic to the Provincial Leaders trying to stop mass death, it's pretty scary that this can happen and the Supreme Court ruling on the case that was brought before them was really scant. Basically, the Judges said 'it's for the good of the people and proportional so it's ok' - but there's basically zero in the way of parameterized logic, precedence, or specific legality to all of it. As far as the Health Officers supposedly miscommunication information, I suggest that these are intelligent people, and that obviously there's still not as much consensus as the comment implies. 'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    >'Gaslight of Science' I think is better exemplified by those denying COVID or vaccines. The Quebec governmnent's refusal to publish public health guidance on decisions that experts think are ineffective while insisting that they are based on evidence definitely qualifies as gaslighting science. >It's partly a social signal. I live in Quebec and the notion of 'curfew' has a very eerie and ominous 'feel' like nothing ever in my life. It was also a strong social signal to everyone I know that the handling of the crisis was aestheticized and politicized as there was no evidence of it's efficacy. Certainly for some it had a chilling effect, for many it led to a complete loss of trust in a government that was already playing fast and loose with rigor and trustworthiness.
  - mardifoufs 6y ago
    The government of Québec mismanaged the crisis to a phenomenonal level. Literally thousands of deaths were directly caused by that mismanagement (from the catastrophic handling of nursing homes) even with a population that was (and still is) one the most compliant to the restrictions.in the world . But we still are blamed and pusnished by the government for "slipping up" and not being responsible while we all know no one in the government will be held accountable for the CHSLDs collapsing and Quebec having some of the worst outcomes in the world. That's who's gas lighting here, not a very tiny group of fringe weirdos with almost 0 impact denying covid.
- graeme 6y ago
  > Their own health officials said curfew won’t help. I’m no longer following quebec public health’s announcements closely, but did they seem credible? They’ve been wrong on most everything so I’d need their reasoning rather than their authority to believe them here. A curfew makes gatherings substantially harder. You have to buy food and drink in advance, and people have to be able to sleep over and be comfortable doing so. Contact tracing won’t detect many clusters at private gatherings if people don’t say they were violating rules. Public health’s data may not be accurate here. If I were in charge I wouldn’t use a curfew mind you. I would instead fix public health’s rules: emphasize ventilation, mandate open windows, require masks at work while seated, etc. But I suspect the curfew actually achieves its purpose. Quebec is doing better relative to other provinces than it did pre curfew, iirc.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    >inhibit parties and gatherings [citation needed] - anecdotally all of the people I heard of that partied before still party after, either on the weekends eariler or they stay over. >another major cause of spread. [citation needed] - The "activities and events", which includes legal events, is 285 out of 11 158 in the sum of outbreaks collected by Quebec public health. "Other environments", which is where they put clusters that they can't identify is even lower at 46 out of 11 158. All other categories are verified using hard data, and one couldn't lie to classify the cluster somewhere else. So no, this isn't a data issue : https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coronavirus/situation-coronavirus-in-quebec https://www.quebec.ca/en/health/health-issues/a-z/2019-coron... By far the dominating sources of infection are work and school, and it's not even close. Followed then are places of commerce. What curfews actually do though, is force much higher concentrations of people indoors and in public transit, which strongly contributes to the infections in work, "other establishments", and legal "activities and events". Which has a big impact on infection, unlike the other factors. Politicians had many other tools they chose to relax or not to use right as they enforced the curfew. For example, restrictions on schools were relaxed, a major driver of infection - places like gyms and so on were opened, which already infected hundreds of people, rapid tests were not used in outbreak environments, schools were not outfited with basic ventilation (even just an air purifier would help!), contact tracing is in a horrible state, etc... Most of all, the politicians could actually release the data behind their decisions, going a long way to increase goodwill and compliance, but chose not to. They chose the curfew because it would placate those who asked for stricter restrictions and get people to disagree with them, because it would be flashy and hard to ignore, because once restricted to Montreal it wouldn't cause issues to their voterbase, and because it's very easy to implement and doesn't hurt businesses with which the current government is incredibly cozy.
oezi 6y ago
A lot of trouble originated in advice being adjusted to market availabilities rather than science (e.g. don't recommend masks so people wouldn't stockpike them). > If you hug, hold your breath Does this still hold with B117? If outsides are so safe why are curfews still a popular measure?
- worker767424 6y ago
  > If outsides are so safe why are curfews still a popular measure? I think California's curfew in the fall was later seen as ineffective. Why are they popular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
- graeme 6y ago
  Yeah, people believe B117 still transmits via aerosols, not fomites. If so, how could you possibly transmit it if you aren’t breathing while hugging? The curfew’s intention is to block people from having social gatherings. You can’t so easily go to dinner at a friend’s if you have to sleep over for the night, and all the stores are closed to buy stuff.

NoblePublius 6y ago

It’s fascinating to me that a scientist would look at the Diamond Princess and it’s 14 deaths of almost entirely 80+ year olds (no one under 65 died) and see evidence to justify mask mandates and school closures and firing half of the people of color from their jobs. Why not, say, quarantine for senior citizens or any sort of coordinated response to protect and provide for the elderly? When people talk about a covid hoax, it’s not denying the virus exists. It’s denying that the popular mitigation strategies don’t do anything but drive value for Amazon share holders.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
We unfortunately had (and in many places are still having) both an emotional and fear-driven reaction to the spread of the virus. A lot of people understand the risk is much lower than the measures used to contain it, such as full school closures and closing parks and playgrounds. In retrospect I hope we can admit at least those preventative measures were a mistake. My fear is that if another more serious virus lands on the scene, there will be no credibility to do it again.
- amluto 6y ago
  The park closures made very little sense. The playground closures made sense when people were worried about fomites, and the early lab studies (that largely measured the wrong thing) suggested that fomites were an issue. A school is neither a park nor a playground. Schools are mostly indoors, mostly in inexpensive buildings with correspondingly poor ventilation and/or air filtering, and have a lot of people talking and breathing the same air. This is a totally different situation.
- vaidhy 6y ago
  Is this science driven or emotion driven from the other side? If virus is airborne and can spread without symptoms, are you saying younger age group does not get the virus or does not show the symptoms? If they do get the virus, then they can spread it. The closures were to prevent the virus from spreading and I do not understand why the measures used to contain it are a mistake. From the OP, it seems clear that virus is airborne, spreads in clusters and people spread it before showing any symptoms. I am open to suggestions on what are the alternative ways of stopping the spread?

grawprog 6y ago

I've spent a lot of time reading the science over the last year and a half or so. These claims of gaslighting go both ways. I've seen numerous studies passed off as fact and that have been used to guide policy with unacceptably low sampling sizes or other sampling problems. I've seen very little 'good' science being conducted over the last year. You've got inadequately sampled studies throughout the duration of covid that have led to drastic policy decisions, I've seen biased studies coming from massive corporations being used to guide policy decisions and not one step along the way have I seen anyone who's gone... 'Hey wait a second, maybe we should check this data before we take drastic action' Be listened to or taken seriously.

newacct583 6y ago
Care to name some examples? I mean... the broad arc of the policy choices have been correct, right? Stay home. Wear a mask. That stuff works. We thought it worked last April and we were right. There's some genuine argument about the efficacy of specific facilities, like schools. But that's stuff at the margin. I guess I don't see any good candidates for the "drastic policy decisions" based on "biased studies from massive corporations"... Really most of what the world did was pretty textbook disease control stuff. What is it you mean?
- neilwilson 6y ago
  The reliance on unusual concepts - like asymptomatic transmission and the effect of wearing masks which have become semi-religious in their belief even though there isn’t really any actual solid RCT evidence they do that much good out in the field rather than in the lab (much like hydroxychloroquine which is similarly effective in a lab but not in the field). There is no blow out in Texas et al and Sweden has just tracked the same path as everybody else suffering much less than Belgium for example, and today isn’t anywhere near the top of the charts. There’s an awful lot of curve fitting to beliefs going on - because it is so difficult to do solid experiments.
  - watwut 6y ago
    How is symptomatic transmission unusual concept?

barathr 6y ago

Her earlier two related posts on metaepistemology were amazing as well: https://zeynep.substack.com/p/lessons-from-a-pandemic-anniversary https://zeynep.substack.com/p/lessons-from-a-pandemic-annive... https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-...

epistasis 6y ago
Zeynep is one of the best possible writers out there for a HN crowd, IMHO. Super intelligent, dives deep into the relevant data, and thinks things through.
- timr 6y ago
  You have to be careful with her writing. She overgeneralizes quite a bit, and conveys anecdotes as if they're definitive evidence. There's a lot of 20-20 hindsight bias going on. For example, this article is basically -- when you reduce it to non-redundant claims -- the opinions of a few people, and two examples: the diamond princess, and the Washington choir. The diamond princess is presented as if it were a definitive example of aerosol spread. But even Japanese experts were debating it at the time, as -- despite the implication of "lockdown" as used in the piece -- the people on the ship were still mingling on a regular basis to eat. It's simply misleading to present this as an obvious-at-the-time counterfactual. In fact, NHK did a whole documentary discussing it (no longer available [1]), and did this re-enactment to show how it might have happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGQEuuv9R6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGQEuuv9R6E The debates about fomite transmission at the choir are simply dismissed as ridiculous by a single researcher -- an aerosol researcher who has been vocal since the beginning of the pandemic that aerosols are responsible. So you have to consider the source. He's entitled to his opinion, but others weren't gaslighting by having the temerity to disagree with him. There were actually legitimate scientific questions at play, and the opinion of a single person doesn't negate those questions, even if that person turns out to be right in retrospect. If I had to pick a broad "scientific" trend from the pandemic that disturbs me, it's the over-reliance on anecdote and canonizing of opinion. This seems very much like another example of that broader trend: taking opinions, cherry-picking the ones that look right in retrospect, and anointing those opinions as heroic, while all other opinions are somehow deliberately misleading. That isn't how science works. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20200509/4001358/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/documentary/20200509/4...

CivBase 6y ago

Why do so many people think science is some neat and clean process adhered to by altruistic seekers of knowledge in lab coats? Science is chuck full of competition, posturing, and political shenanigans - especially for popular subjects where there is fame and fortune on the line. Scientists are human beings. They, just like the rest of us, want to be right and to be rewarded for it. We humans are often not graceful about being challenged or proven wrong. Worse yet, this messy process is filtered and spun by politicians and political media before being presented to the public. Really, it's remarkable that things have worked out as well as they have. We have at least three viable vaccines being widely distributed and only a tiny uptick in mortality in the mean time. Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse.

galaxyLogic 6y ago
> Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse. The question now is what can we learn from how things were handled by the government in power at the time that half-a-million people died of Covid-19 in the US? As relates to the article of discussion the question is: Was there gas-lightning going on that made things worse? Of course everybody makes mistakes and we should and can learn from them. But, "gas-lightning" is not a mistake. It is intentional.
- CivBase 6y ago
  The article wasn't talking about the government gaslighting scientists. It talked about scientists gaslighting each other. This is nothing new. Science isn't clean. Just like anything run by humans, it's full of politics and nonsense. We just don't normally pay so much attention to it.
worker767424 6y ago
Because they're treating it like a religion. I saw a news clip of a woman getting vaccinated saying she trusts the vaccine because she "likes science." The vaccines appear to be mostly safe, but because you "like science" isn't a reason to trust them. What she means is she likes Mythbusters and thinks that's science.

taurath 6y ago

That the CDC didn’t update guidelines that the virus was spread in the air until October seems near criminal - how much political pressure was on them to say “it’ll all go away soon”, as was stated by political leadership over and over?

graeme 6y ago
Unfortunately the CDC is doing better than most OECD health authorities that I know of. Canada still hasn’t updated its guidance to my knowledge. I haven’t checked Europe in a bit, maybe they updated. But judging from their poor showing presently, I doubt it. There were lots of problems in the US response, but it was far from uniquely bad. And aerosol resistance was ingrained across western health authorities, it didn’t come from the president.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  Saying "Europe" in this context is like saying "America" (the continent, not the US). You won't get a useable picture putting Norway, Italy and Russia[1] in the same basket just like you won't with the USA, Peru and Brazil. 1: Did you mean the EU? EU != Europe. Russia is 40% of Europe's area and 15% of its population. European Russians are 80% of Russia's population.
Fomite 6y ago
One note here is that "aerosol" =/= "spread through the air". The debate was not over whether or not the virus was spread through the air, but whether or not it was spread via droplets (relatively "large" particles that spread through the air, but will settle relatively quickly onto surfaces) or aerosols (relatively small particles that are likely to linger for longer). The evidence for aerosol transmission outside of specific medical procedures (the aptly named "aerosol generating procedures") wasn't nearly as overwhelming, and most epidemiologists I know were more than willing to characterize the transmission of COVID-19 as likely being on a continuum (documents I wrote were discussing this in early May).
- taurath 6y ago

centimeter 6y ago

The biggest gaslighting of this whole affair has been the political adherence to clearly insane propositions like forcing everyone to wear masks (questionable in any case) but allowing cloth masks (which do, at best, ~nothing, unlike actual rated masks, so definitely pointless) or quarantining billions of young people who accumulate less than 25 micromorts of mortality from covid contraction in the name of adding (on expectation) a few life-months for geriatrics who are not contributing to society and are about to keel over anyway. The unnecessary manmade destruction of utility over the last year is nearly unprecedented, perhaps the most devastating since WW2.

deleted 6y ago

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roenxi 6y ago

This is an interesting article and here are some broadly relevant points: 1) HN didn't know a lot about COVID at the time it emerged into the world. If nobody was trying to inform HN about COVID, is that a failing? Probably not. It seems highly likely to me that the actual scientists had good research done on respiratory diseases and probably got a handle on the situation quickly. HN getting detailed information like this ~12-18 months after the outbreak is actually pretty speedy. 2) The mass media were and probably will continue to be serially wrong about COVID, which is expected of the media. They aren't in the business of being technically correct. If they were interested in being technically correct they'd be too squeamish to work in the media. Ditto if they had any deep understanding of how to control infectious diseases they'd have gone into careers in epidemiology rather than journalism, they're learning this stuff at the same speed as everyone else. 3) There aren't a lot of new learnings in the pandemic. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that governments can't organise themselves to deal with a crisis in less than 6 months, the government isn't a rapid response outfit. Based on the patterns of success and failure of responses it seems recent memory of SARS is a better predictor of outcomes than competence, so a lot of the broad flows of events were probably predictable and predicted in advance. Some new ideas is that this JIT business is madness, and the amount of travel people do spreads diseases in an eyebrow raising fashion (maybe there should be less of it?). 4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea.

enraged_camel 6y ago
>>4) I think the real take away from this is that crazy preppers aren't actually crazy, and having some reserves (financial or otherwise) put aside for disasters is still a good idea. There is a difference between being prepared, and being a prepper. If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared. If you have several booby-trapped supply caches in the wilderness that you have marked on your map, you're a prepper.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  >If you have six months of savings in the bank, a few gallons of gas and clean water in the garage and dry food in the pantry, you're prepared. I think most people in my world would use the word "prepper" for this and I didn't think the word had negative connotations. Also that 99% of people don't even have that.

sanity31415 6y ago

The article's main complaint seems to be that people were slow to accept that it could be transmitted by asymptomatic people through the air, but I don't recall anyone questioning that, even from the start.

Fomite 6y ago
The author is eliding the debate as to whether transmission was aerosol vs. droplet (which was controversial and difficult to settle) with "did it get passed via the air", which was not. I will say the lack of fomite transmission remains surprising, and one of the few ways we have been fortunate this pandemic. There was very little debate about asymptomatic transmission. But there's a great deal of difference between "Are there asymptomatic carriers?" and "How many, and how efficiently do they transmit?"
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > But there's a great deal of difference between "Are there asymptomatic carriers?" and "How many, and how efficiently do they transmit?" The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the state of scientific journalism is as crap as it's always been. Science does not deliver neat yes/no answers, it delivers probabilities. Can asymptomatic people spread the virus? Yes. Can you get infected by passing a random unmasked stranger on the street? Yes. Can you get infected by touching a surface that an infected person has touched? Yes. Can you get the disease more than once? Yes. Can you die from the disease? Yes. Can you develop "long covid" after having the disease? Yes. Can you get infected even though you've been fully vaccinated? Yes. Can you die from the vaccine? Yes. The above statements are all true. But their probabilities of happening to you range from very unlikely to microscopic. And that gets completely lost when media reports on it, and when people talk to each other, and when politicians make policies trying to stop the activities that people are most afraid of... And now we're in this mess where it's practically impossible for anyone to know what the right thing to do is.

rscho 6y ago

No mention of the big 2020 HN crowd aggressively promoting chloroquine as the drug that will save the world? Sad, I'd love to hear what those people have to say today!

raverbashing 6y ago

Now if only we could have firm studies on Vitamin D deficiency and its relationship with Covid instead of FUD about overdoses and the use of "Mendelian Randomization" for variables with a strong phenotipic variation.