131–140 of 200 posts
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That is not true, in the Netherlands a critic had one of his videos pulled by YouTube for claiming COVID-19 spreads through aerosols when this was not the consensus. Yet.
You are referring to Maurice de Hond I assume?
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Years later I still run into people not aware of the semantics and the difference between a disease being an aerosol and a disease being airborne. Which smacks of poor communication.
Lots of people are bad at listening/reading, sadly. There's only so much that can be done as a speaker/writer. They could and should have done more here, but there will always be a lossy step when people doing the actual work take the information to "the public".
Aerosol: A suspension of fine solid or liquid particles in gas [1]
Air: The mixture of invisible odorless tasteless gases (such as nitrogen and oxygen) that surrounds the earth. Also : the equivalent mix of gases on another planet [3]
Are people bad at listening or bad at explaining?
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/airborne
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Any source to back up your claim. I read Wikipedia Tedros receive overwhelming majority of the votes. The problem is WHO is don't have enough power to do it's jobs. Based on below article. Even US and UK ignored WHO advice. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/apr/10/world-health-or...
this is the second result from Google for "tedros Chinese support who election": https://www.cfr.org/blog/who-and-china-dereliction-duty
This is what the article they cite in support of the One China policy statement actually says:
> In a meeting with Li Bin, minister of China's National Health and Family Planning Commission, Tedros said the UN agency will properly handle the Taiwan-related issues based on the resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making body.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2017-05/25/content_294905...
> The who therefore played down the risks of aerosols, issuing guidance via its Twitter and Facebook pages at the end of March 2020 that the general public need not worry. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, adding that any claims to the contrary were “misinformation”. Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing. This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy…
So the tweet certainly was a typical science communication error, i.e. they forgot that words can have different meanings in different milieus, but it wasn't wrong.
My town's school system is all in on healthy buildings -- they got parent MD/PhDs to read the literature and invite outside experts to advise, then they set minimum air change per hour and minimum filtration criteria (something like, classrooms may reopen iff they have 5 air changes per hour with outdoor or MERV 13+ filtered air). They did a bunch of HVAC work to support this goal and have reopened okay. The town's o…
in the recent years many offices, especially new and deeply remodeled got "green" certified, and decreased ventilation flow has been among the ways to achieve the energy saving for the certification. I don't hope they would turn the ventilation/AC back on to good levels - instead i think there would spring a cottage industry of "virus filters" to be installed on top of those "green" systems.
Additionally these new/remodeled offices have those hip open ceilings with no noise blocking what classic office ceiling provided - as a result any meaningful flow increase causes very uncomfortable low frequency noise from those uncovered ventilation ducts.
I believe Home Automation needs to start with proper climate control (not with iKettles) because just bringing fresh air from outside probably isn't enough, it depends on many things. There's so much wasted heat, varying humidity, overabundance of co2 and particulate matter due to pollution in some places - keeping it all at optimal levels throughout the year is no small task. Everyone knows about air conditioning, b…
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> Fortunately, we also live in a world where the UN and its agencies do not have a monopoly on good information. We live in a world where the UN is basically a formality. I don't see how this organization has been helpful in solving world problems and preventing wars at all.
The ITU (a UN agency) helps solve the world problem of what country code to use to call countries, and coordinates new codes for new countries. If that's not a world problem, and it's not solved by the UN, I don't know what would satisfy you. There have been very few wars since the UN was formed. Instead, we mostly have armed conflicts and military engagements, preventing many wars.
> There have been very few wars since the UN was formed.
Because the US is the only global superpower, since 1945.
Our taxes have paid for relative global peace, which is not the normal state of mankind. (The normal state is a situation like Saddam annexing Kuwait, and then on to KSA.)
However, the US was prepared to use nuclear weapons against China during the Korean War, the USSR planned to use them in 1969 against China, and Castro (and China) wanted to use them against the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which went on for years after the press stopped covering it.
Prior to that, the pre-UN League of Nations was a joke, with Japan simply walking out, and then attacking everybody in the Pacific.
The parent comment illustrates the childish understanding of the world prevalent on HN. And BTW, the US has been the major funding source for the UN since its inception, despite how corrupt it has become (ie. a CCP mouthpiece.)
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> FACT: COVID-19 is NOT airborne. > The coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. > To protect yourself: > -keep 1m distance from others > -disinfect surfaces frequently > -wash/rub your > -avoid touching your From: https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/fact-covid-19-is-not-airb... Further reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/05/28/who…
> The coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. Emphasis mine. Honestly there was no way around the mess, thanks to social media amplifying any popular outrage and misunderstanding to 11. And I'm not excusing the WHO, their role has been borderline criminal at the beginning, and their reactions slow, but it's also very difficult to convey complex i…
> The who therefore played down the risks of aerosols, issuing guidance via its Twitter and Facebook pages at the end of March 2020 that the general public need not worry. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, adding that any claims to the contrary were “misinformation”. Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing. This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy…
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr... Coronavirus press conference 11 February, 2020 Tedros gives the money quote: > That was exactly what we were trying to do in DRC so we don't want, as WHO, to go into speculation. Okay, people can have projections. We prefer, what can be done with the equipment or the solutions at hand and do our best to contain it at the source without undermining its gr…
The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible, and to only institute travel restrictions if there is clear scientific evidence that they will help. Prior to this pandemic, I think the general view among epidemiologists was that for a highly infectious respiratory disease, all but the strictest possible travel restrictions would be ineffective.[2] This is the reason why the US government's own pandemic influenza response plan downplays travel restrictions - they were only considered a short-term delaying tactic.[3]
If you look at how SARS-CoV-2 initially spread in the US, the WHO was not wrong. The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe. The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks. The actual travel restrictions the US implemented were largely useless. The only travel restrictions that would have helped would have been a complete ban on all international arrivals, coupled with extensive testing to find cases that were already present in the US.
If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing. The WHO stressed the need for testing, in order to both detect and curb the spread of the virus, under the assumption that whatever travel restrictions that countries would implement would be ineffective. What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic? A lack of testing, leaving the country blind to the huge outbreak that was developing.
The US could have taken a much more extreme approach, banning all travel, but absent mass testing, that in itself would not have prevented the cases that were already in the US from spiraling into a major outbreak. And I simply do not believe that the US would have taken such a drastic move in response to such an uncertain situation.
1. International Health Regulations (2005): https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241580496
2. Effectiveness of travel restrictions in the rapid containment of human influenza: a systematic review: https://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.14.135590
3. National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza (PDF): https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pandemic-infl...
4. Preparing for Cases of COVID-19: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/PI...
I believe Home Automation needs to start with proper climate control (not with iKettles) because just bringing fresh air from outside probably isn't enough, it depends on many things. There's so much wasted heat, varying humidity, overabundance of co2 and particulate matter due to pollution in some places - keeping it all at optimal levels throughout the year is no small task. Everyone knows about air conditioning, b…
You mention home automation, but it's actually interesting with newer houses that are built smarter, there is less to automate:
- The ventilation system needs to be sized for the house, then it can be left running all the time (you could turn it off or down when nobody is home, but these systems often consume under 100W of electricity - it's just two fans).
- With low temperature hydronic underfloor heating in a concrete floor, it takes so long for the system to heat up or cool down that turning it off when nobody is home will barely affect the temperature. If the system is balanced correctly, taking into account how much energy from the sun each room receives, you can do without individual temperature controllers in each room. Once it's setup the only adjustment needed is to turn it on in the autumn and off in the spring.