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Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

234 points by sampo 5y ago

aljlkwjefl 5y ago
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y ago
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.
sirspacey 5y ago
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.
- throwntoday 5y ago
  How many do you think are scared of becoming pariahs by saying anything counter to popular narrative? I'd say it's a significant number. Wouldn't want to lose the chance to ever get a research project funded again.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    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?).
    - throwntoday 5y ago
      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.
      - shapefrog 5y ago
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Cloth masks are not as good as properly fitted KN95/99 masks, but they are not utterly useless. 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://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510705/
        nradov 5y ago
        Cloth masks do very little. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=FEwYWMPWQ72FwsqddgKung https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
        shapefrog 5y ago
        Cloth masks do very little > utterly useless. Litterally orders of magnitude.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    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.
    - nicky0 5y ago
      It's not so much the popular narrative, but rather the profitable narrative, that is difficult to go against.
- jleyank 5y ago
  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.
  - programmarchy 5y ago
    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.
    - rcoveson 5y ago
      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.
      - programmarchy 5y ago
        Sure, I’ll concede that definition. But I’m referring to truth claims presented as facts.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      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.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  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.
Blackstrat 5y ago
Simple if one thinks about it. Quit thinking of COVID itself and think of how the pandemic has been used. It’s easy to understand why after that.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  “Follow the money” “George Soros” “Bill Gates” Etc
  - warning26 5y ago
    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" Where's the bug tracker for humanity?
    - pgtjk 5y ago
    - swader999 5y ago
      It's not that secret.
    - mypalmike 5y ago
      If you believe in "the massive conspiracy", you have to see it in everything, almost by definition.
    - rvanlaar 5y ago
      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".
    - Blackstrat 5y ago
      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.
diebeforei485 5y ago
It's unfortunate that they were loud with the misinformation and very quiet with the correction.
- ipiz0618 5y ago
  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.
  - jimmydorry 5y ago
    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.
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      Ahhhh, it's not a town square. It's Mordor, the panopticon. And we're just a horde of orcs wondering when meat's back on the menu.
      - ngc248 5y ago
        We are in fact the meat.
        JetAlone 5y ago
        Actually, there's a totally apt device in LOTR already: the palantíri. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri 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.
troon-lover 5y ago
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.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  Saying it was a mistake elides responsibility and glosses over alternatives. How would you have articulated it, and would you have responded differently?
  - hassancf 5y ago
    By saying: It was a FAULT to knowingly make a false statement Fault as in: someone should pay for it. Definitely NOT a “honest mistake” The WHO is doing damage control.
ralusek 5y ago
> 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.
- xracy 5y ago
  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.
  - 3np 5y ago
    > 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. People want a lot of things. That does not automatically mean that appealing to it is the right thing to do.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    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.
danamit 5y ago
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.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  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.
  - diffeomorphism 5y ago
    > Liberalism is about liberty. 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.
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      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.
tadatafatada 5y ago
cf141q5325 5y ago
>“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.
- xracy 5y ago
  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.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    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...
elSidCampeador 5y ago
> 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 Fair enough, I'd say
laichzeit0 5y ago
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.
- thomassmith65 5y ago
  These 'overlords' also tell us to take the vaccines instead of Ivermectin. Blind disrespect for authority is no better than blind respect for authority.
  - FranksTV 5y ago
    https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089809588/ivermectin-covid-treatment-brazil-study https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089809588/ivermectin-covid-t...
  - medion 5y ago
    Lol you Ivermectin folk are STILL at it???
    - detaro 5y ago
      you misread their comment.
      - burnished 5y ago
        Good catch, I did too until I read your comment. Thanks!
  - tomp 5y ago
    Well actually they first said “no way I’m taking Trump’s vaccine” and then flipped. So yeah blind disrespect for authorities has a much better track record.
    - 5y ago
optymizer 5y ago
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.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  > 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.
antiterra 5y ago
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.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  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.
aljlkwjefl 5y ago
joemazerino 5y ago
Michael Olsterhelm stated on the Joe Rogan podcast in Feb 2020 about the virus being airborne.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  People on his podcast also said it was a hoax in that timeframe. Your statement is just illustrating survivor bias.
  - choward 5y ago
    That's more confirmation bias than survivor bias.
  - benbruscella 5y ago
    Interesting. Which episode mentioned COVID was a hoax?
pmlnr 5y ago
Related read: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
- slategruen 5y ago
  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.
reactspa 5y ago
Can someone please clarify for me what is the implication if Covid is airborne? Does it mean that masks and social distancing were actually useful? Or the opposite?
- sofixa 5y ago
  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).
- hassancf 5y ago
  Masks (N95 or equivalent) are useful because they filter out the virus. Closed spaces: ventilation or HEPA filters are necessary. Think of cigarette smoke: if you can smell it, you’d get the virus
- usrusr 5y ago
  It means that hand washing was wildly overrated and that 1.5m are no substitute for masks at all.
lobochrome 5y ago
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? [0] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.html https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.ht...
- fomine3 5y ago
  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.
- xorcist 5y ago
  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.
  - divbzero 5y ago
    > 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission
blenderdt 5y ago
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).
- thephyber 5y ago
  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.
  - blenderdt 5y ago
    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.
  - rvanlaar 5y ago
    The case with Mauride de Hond is different. His expertise is statistics. He is well known in the Netherlands for gathering election polling data. He really looked at a few superspread events and drilled down in how it could've spread.
  - sampo 5y ago
    > 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.
Danielle69 5y ago
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nullc 5y ago
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.
jansen555 5y ago
kurupt213 5y ago
russellbeattie 5y ago
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.)
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  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.
akomtu 5y ago
Because WHO and CDC are political organizations first. Not long ago we've separated Church and State. Now it's time to separate Science and State.
- choward 5y ago
  They've effectivity turned science into a religion by not allowing people to question anything.
titzer 5y ago
Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink. And yet political leaders will face no consequences.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > Which governments specifically? Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up. And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.
    - chimprich 5y ago
      > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin". You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.
cersa8 5y ago
A dutch data scientist repeatedly showed, with data that Covid was airborn and ventilation should be a top priority [0] (dutch). Unfortunately has was ridiculed. I wonder how much better we could have done taking these early warnings more serious. Part of me thinks we wanted an easy option (masks) instead of expensive changes to existing ventilation systems. [0] https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coronadebat-wordt-gesteund-in-de-verspreiding-van-de-aerosolentheorie https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coron...
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  His (de Hond) reputation is abhorrent as he did a complete made-up witch hunt for his personal prime suspect in the Deventer moordzaak, of which he was way off and never really apologized to damages he caused to the victim that he created.
  - cersa8 5y ago
    That absolutely tarnished his reputation I agree.
reuben_scratton 5y ago
"Taking full precautions against airborne transmission would require major changes at hospitals" Major changes such as, er, occasionally opening a window to let some fresh air in? That's a basic, obvious precaution that's been known since the dawn of time that wasn't done at all in the UK hospital ward where my mother caught and then died from Covid late last year. I know because I was there. The cluelessness re. viral spread almost two years into the pandemic was just astounding and I'm still very, very angry about it.
- verytrivial 5y ago
  I'm sorry to hear about your mother.
- foxhill 5y ago
  i’m not sure operating theatres, ICUs, NICUs, private examination rooms, MRI facilities, etc. have much in way of windows. i also don’t think i’d appreciate a gentle breeze rolling over my internal organs whilst my appendix is being removed :) i’m sorry for your loss. there’s no doubt that governmental denial and reckless mismanagement - especially prevalent in the early days of the pandemic - is directly responsible for the deaths of many. the whole thing has been utterly shambolic. honestly though, that’s not the thing that angers me the most. it’s the large number of people that think the government handled the pandemic well. i think we’re doomed as a country, potentially even a species.
  - swores 5y ago
    There's quite a difference between a ward like they talked about and an operating theatre. There may well be valid reasons for keeping windows shut in the former too, but jumping to talk about the latter was a bit irrelevant since (except for the teams who work in their all day, who are a tiny % of the hospital population) time spent in wards is far greater, and surrounded by far more unmasked people, than time spent in theatres.
    - foxhill 5y ago
      sorry, i thought it was clear from my smiley & general tone that i wasn't being serious with that part of the response.
juanani 5y ago
freddealmeida 5y ago
Well, if we had a actual sample of covid, I may believe this but we don't so yeah, I'm going to go with bullshit.
greenail 5y ago
Hard to define something correctly when the definition has been wrong for 50 years. https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... <--- 2021

234 points by sampo 5y ago

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.

sirspacey 5y ago

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.

throwntoday 5y ago
How many do you think are scared of becoming pariahs by saying anything counter to popular narrative? I'd say it's a significant number. Wouldn't want to lose the chance to ever get a research project funded again.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  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?).
  - throwntoday 5y ago
    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.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Cloth masks are not as good as properly fitted KN95/99 masks, but they are not utterly useless. 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://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510705/
      - nradov 5y ago
        Cloth masks do very little. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=FEwYWMPWQ72FwsqddgKung https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
        shapefrog 5y ago
        Cloth masks do very little > utterly useless. Litterally orders of magnitude.
- adrianN 5y ago
  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.
  - nicky0 5y ago
    It's not so much the popular narrative, but rather the profitable narrative, that is difficult to go against.
jleyank 5y ago
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.
- programmarchy 5y ago
  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.
  - rcoveson 5y ago
    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.
    - programmarchy 5y ago
      Sure, I’ll concede that definition. But I’m referring to truth claims presented as facts.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    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.
spookthesunset 5y ago
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.

Blackstrat 5y ago

Simple if one thinks about it. Quit thinking of COVID itself and think of how the pandemic has been used. It’s easy to understand why after that.

thehappypm 5y ago
“Follow the money” “George Soros” “Bill Gates” Etc
- warning26 5y ago
  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" Where's the bug tracker for humanity?
  - pgtjk 5y ago
  - swader999 5y ago
    It's not that secret.
  - mypalmike 5y ago
    If you believe in "the massive conspiracy", you have to see it in everything, almost by definition.
  - rvanlaar 5y ago
    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".
  - Blackstrat 5y ago
    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.

diebeforei485 5y ago

It's unfortunate that they were loud with the misinformation and very quiet with the correction.

ipiz0618 5y ago
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.
- jimmydorry 5y ago
  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.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    Ahhhh, it's not a town square. It's Mordor, the panopticon. And we're just a horde of orcs wondering when meat's back on the menu.
    - ngc248 5y ago
      We are in fact the meat.
      - JetAlone 5y ago
        Actually, there's a totally apt device in LOTR already: the palantíri. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri 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.

troon-lover 5y ago

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.

aspenmayer 5y ago
Saying it was a mistake elides responsibility and glosses over alternatives. How would you have articulated it, and would you have responded differently?
- hassancf 5y ago
  By saying: It was a FAULT to knowingly make a false statement Fault as in: someone should pay for it. Definitely NOT a “honest mistake” The WHO is doing damage control.

ralusek 5y ago

> 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.

xracy 5y ago
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.
- 3np 5y ago
  > 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. People want a lot of things. That does not automatically mean that appealing to it is the right thing to do.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  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.

danamit 5y ago

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.

JetAlone 5y ago
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.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  > Liberalism is about liberty. 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.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    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.

tadatafatada 5y ago

cf141q5325 5y ago

>“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.

xracy 5y ago
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.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  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...

elSidCampeador 5y ago

> 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 Fair enough, I'd say

laichzeit0 5y ago

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.

thomassmith65 5y ago
These 'overlords' also tell us to take the vaccines instead of Ivermectin. Blind disrespect for authority is no better than blind respect for authority.
- FranksTV 5y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089809588/ivermectin-covid-treatment-brazil-study https://www.npr.org/2022/03/30/1089809588/ivermectin-covid-t...
- medion 5y ago
  Lol you Ivermectin folk are STILL at it???
  - detaro 5y ago
    you misread their comment.
    - burnished 5y ago
      Good catch, I did too until I read your comment. Thanks!
- tomp 5y ago
  Well actually they first said “no way I’m taking Trump’s vaccine” and then flipped. So yeah blind disrespect for authorities has a much better track record.
  - 5y ago

optymizer 5y ago

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.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
> 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.

antiterra 5y ago

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.

JetAlone 5y ago
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.

aljlkwjefl 5y ago

joemazerino 5y ago

Michael Olsterhelm stated on the Joe Rogan podcast in Feb 2020 about the virus being airborne.

gilbetron 5y ago
People on his podcast also said it was a hoax in that timeframe. Your statement is just illustrating survivor bias.
- choward 5y ago
  That's more confirmation bias than survivor bias.
- benbruscella 5y ago
  Interesting. Which episode mentioned COVID was a hoax?

pmlnr 5y ago

Related read: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

slategruen 5y ago
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.

reactspa 5y ago

Can someone please clarify for me what is the implication if Covid is airborne? Does it mean that masks and social distancing were actually useful? Or the opposite?

sofixa 5y ago
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).
hassancf 5y ago
Masks (N95 or equivalent) are useful because they filter out the virus. Closed spaces: ventilation or HEPA filters are necessary. Think of cigarette smoke: if you can smell it, you’d get the virus
usrusr 5y ago
It means that hand washing was wildly overrated and that 1.5m are no substitute for masks at all.

lobochrome 5y ago

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? [0] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.html https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2020/avoiding_the_three_cs.ht...

fomine3 5y ago
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.
xorcist 5y ago
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.
- divbzero 5y ago
  > 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission

blenderdt 5y ago

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).

thephyber 5y ago
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.
- blenderdt 5y ago
  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.
- rvanlaar 5y ago
  The case with Mauride de Hond is different. His expertise is statistics. He is well known in the Netherlands for gathering election polling data. He really looked at a few superspread events and drilled down in how it could've spread.
- sampo 5y ago
  > 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.

Danielle69 5y ago

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nullc 5y ago

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.

jansen555 5y ago

kurupt213 5y ago

russellbeattie 5y ago

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.)

_-david-_ 5y ago
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.

akomtu 5y ago

Because WHO and CDC are political organizations first. Not long ago we've separated Church and State. Now it's time to separate Science and State.

choward 5y ago
They've effectivity turned science into a religion by not allowing people to question anything.

titzer 5y ago

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink. And yet political leaders will face no consequences.

dgellow 5y ago
Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > Which governments specifically? Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up. And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin". You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.

cersa8 5y ago

A dutch data scientist repeatedly showed, with data that Covid was airborn and ventilation should be a top priority [0] (dutch). Unfortunately has was ridiculed. I wonder how much better we could have done taking these early warnings more serious. Part of me thinks we wanted an easy option (masks) instead of expensive changes to existing ventilation systems. [0] https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coronadebat-wordt-gesteund-in-de-verspreiding-van-de-aerosolentheorie https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coron...

hetspookjee 5y ago
His (de Hond) reputation is abhorrent as he did a complete made-up witch hunt for his personal prime suspect in the Deventer moordzaak, of which he was way off and never really apologized to damages he caused to the victim that he created.
- cersa8 5y ago
  That absolutely tarnished his reputation I agree.

reuben_scratton 5y ago

"Taking full precautions against airborne transmission would require major changes at hospitals" Major changes such as, er, occasionally opening a window to let some fresh air in? That's a basic, obvious precaution that's been known since the dawn of time that wasn't done at all in the UK hospital ward where my mother caught and then died from Covid late last year. I know because I was there. The cluelessness re. viral spread almost two years into the pandemic was just astounding and I'm still very, very angry about it.

verytrivial 5y ago
I'm sorry to hear about your mother.
foxhill 5y ago
i’m not sure operating theatres, ICUs, NICUs, private examination rooms, MRI facilities, etc. have much in way of windows. i also don’t think i’d appreciate a gentle breeze rolling over my internal organs whilst my appendix is being removed :) i’m sorry for your loss. there’s no doubt that governmental denial and reckless mismanagement - especially prevalent in the early days of the pandemic - is directly responsible for the deaths of many. the whole thing has been utterly shambolic. honestly though, that’s not the thing that angers me the most. it’s the large number of people that think the government handled the pandemic well. i think we’re doomed as a country, potentially even a species.
- swores 5y ago
  There's quite a difference between a ward like they talked about and an operating theatre. There may well be valid reasons for keeping windows shut in the former too, but jumping to talk about the latter was a bit irrelevant since (except for the teams who work in their all day, who are a tiny % of the hospital population) time spent in wards is far greater, and surrounded by far more unmasked people, than time spent in theatres.
  - foxhill 5y ago
    sorry, i thought it was clear from my smiley & general tone that i wasn't being serious with that part of the response.

juanani 5y ago

freddealmeida 5y ago

Well, if we had a actual sample of covid, I may believe this but we don't so yeah, I'm going to go with bullshit.

greenail 5y ago

Hard to define something correctly when the definition has been wrong for 50 years. https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... <--- 2021