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> Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease Intuitively yes, in reality no. It was known by March 2020 that

> Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease Intuitively yes, in reality no. It was known by March 2020 that quarantines had no effect because of the outcome of trying it on the Diamond Princess, a sealed environment where quarantine could be perfectly enforced. That didn't stop SARS-CoV-2 spreading between cabins and causing COVID apparently at random, i.e. it'd propagated everywhere but not everyone was susceptible. This knowledge was never incorporated into health policy. The same thing had been found during the SARS-1 outbreak in Hong Kong, where it was able to move between apartment blocks separated by a garden on air currents. The quarantine within the origin apartment block didn't work due to airborne transmission, something the WHO denied was possible. It was even known before 2020. Public health planning before this time said clearly not to use mass testing and mass quarantines because they don't work. This was torn up once COVID started. > your tone comes off as "I know better and would have been more sensible if I were in charge." Frustrated, yes, I know how it sounds. The COVID response was deeply flawed from the start, and in ways that were obvious even to outsiders. I was writing about the impossible claims being made for PCR tests and the history of failed epidemic models in Spring 2020, but I don't think I'd have done better if I ran the WHO. That's because the incentives and structures such people operate under are terrible, and apparently overwhelmingly strong. Consider this article from 2010 [1]. Der Spiegel investigated the Swine Flu "mass hysteria" and stated that the world clearly overreacted. Reporting on the WHO, "At any rate, efforts to downplay the risks were unwelcome, and the WHO made it clear that it preferred to base its decisions on a worst-case scenario. "We wanted to overestimate rather than underestimate the situation," says Fukuda." Given everything that happened since I'm really convinced that the right way to handle a pandemic is just to let individuals and their doctors get on with it. Academics and NGOs can make recommendations if they want, but giving these people power is a bad idea. Central health planners are incentivized to maximally over-react, every single time. No lessons are ever learned, and why would any be? They have absolute immunity from accountability and consider interventions to be cost free. That is corrupting. What happened with COVID will happen again. [1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of-a-mass-hysteria-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-a-682613.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of...

michael1999 3y ago
The Diamond Princess was sealed, but impossible to effectively quarantine since the cabins have shared air circulation. That was back when people were still hoping it wasn't airport.
gcanyon 3y ago
Again, there are people who get paid to spend all their time determining whether, for example, overestimation is worse or underestimation is. It is an absolute certainty that the response to covid was suboptimal. Apart from how complex the situation and the response was, just given that responses varied widely from region to region guarantees that most were not perfect. But while it's certainly possible to nitpick some aspect or another of the response, to jump from that to therefore you (or I) know better than the people being paid to do nothing but study the situation and learn from the outcomes, is as conceited as looking at the Challenger explosion and saying, "Clearly there was a problem with the O-rings, therefore I know better how NASA should be run." I didn't mean to attack you with my comment -- I just wanted to inform you of how your tone seemed in case you were unaware. It seems that you're not only aware, you think your tone is justified. So good for you, enjoy your confidence.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  You make the same argument in another post, will reply once. Your examples of experts you trust are all engineers, not public health scientists. Air disasters, power outages and rocket explosions are immediate, visible and concrete failures. You can't consensus your way out of a plane crash. If a plane goes down ordinary people demand serious answers and because plane travel is run by the private sector the operators are all very incentivized to cooperate with a real investigation, in order to reassure the public it won't happen again. The investigations into these failures are very deep, very real, root cause what went wrong and generate concrete changes. Scientists aren't operating in the same environment. Many people use as a test of scientific competence "do you agree with other scientists" and nothing else, which is circular reasoning. When scientists fail there's a tendency for them to argue that oh well the situation was complex, lots of unknowns, did the best we could, consensus of experts etc. People are trained to never argue with scientists so they can do this. Engineers don't get the same privilege. Saying "the experts decided it" is worth nothing to governments, the media or the public if your oil drilling ship just sank.

michael1999 3y ago

The Diamond Princess was sealed, but impossible to effectively quarantine since the cabins have shared air circulation. That was back when people were still hoping it wasn't airport.

gcanyon 3y ago

Again, there are people who get paid to spend all their time determining whether, for example, overestimation is worse or underestimation is. It is an absolute certainty that the response to covid was suboptimal. Apart from how complex the situation and the response was, just given that responses varied widely from region to region guarantees that most were not perfect. But while it's certainly possible to nitpick some aspect or another of the response, to jump from that to therefore you (or I) know better than the people being paid to do nothing but study the situation and learn from the outcomes, is as conceited as looking at the Challenger explosion and saying, "Clearly there was a problem with the O-rings, therefore I know better how NASA should be run." I didn't mean to attack you with my comment -- I just wanted to inform you of how your tone seemed in case you were unaware. It seems that you're not only aware, you think your tone is justified. So good for you, enjoy your confidence.

mike_hearn 3y ago
You make the same argument in another post, will reply once. Your examples of experts you trust are all engineers, not public health scientists. Air disasters, power outages and rocket explosions are immediate, visible and concrete failures. You can't consensus your way out of a plane crash. If a plane goes down ordinary people demand serious answers and because plane travel is run by the private sector the operators are all very incentivized to cooperate with a real investigation, in order to reassure the public it won't happen again. The investigations into these failures are very deep, very real, root cause what went wrong and generate concrete changes. Scientists aren't operating in the same environment. Many people use as a test of scientific competence "do you agree with other scientists" and nothing else, which is circular reasoning. When scientists fail there's a tendency for them to argue that oh well the situation was complex, lots of unknowns, did the best we could, consensus of experts etc. People are trained to never argue with scientists so they can do this. Engineers don't get the same privilege. Saying "the experts decided it" is worth nothing to governments, the media or the public if your oil drilling ship just sank.