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Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

nature.com

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Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#91

Post by stephen_g »

xracy wrote: post #19
cf141q5325 wrote: post #14

>“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 wra…

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 fai…

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...

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#92

Post by unityByFreedom »

ipaddr wrote: post #76
unityByFreedom wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Many of us knew in January when the Chinese doctor spilled the news before he was in-prisoned.

Feb 2020 is the timeframe mentioned by the above comment.

In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.

Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#95

Post by zhdc1 »

optymizer wrote: post #33

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 i…

> 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 messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly

The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.

So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.

The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.

What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#96

Post by unityByFreedom »

philliphaydon wrote: post #75
optymizer wrote: post #33

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 i…

We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019, at the end of Jan I flew to the UK and at the airport literally every single Asian person wore a mask, and myself. I didn't see any non-asian person wearing a mask. Wore mask the whole flight, on the way home I had 2 elderly people on the plane tell me I was scaring them for wearing a mask. I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office…

> We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019

That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]

> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.

> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.

https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#97

Post by xorcist »

lobochrome wrote: post #82

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…

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.

Re: Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

#99

Post by awb »

makeitdouble wrote: post #88
heavyset_go wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong Disagree, plenty of organizations and people lost credibility in the eyes of some for doing just this as new research emerged over the course of the pandemic.

Parent's point is that they'd lose these people's credibility either way by the mere fact of being wrong. To me the paths look like: - acknowledge your mistakes: some people will accept based on your attitude, others will resent you being wrong. - don't acknowledge: people who would have otherwise accepted mistakes now resent your stubbornness. Others will still resent you for being wrong.

Unfortunately, also in the “don't acknowledge” category are people who continue to trust out of momentum or loyalty, or who knows what else. Not acknowledging has some upside for the actor, while it remains harmful to the group.
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