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Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

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

#121

Post by blenderdt »

thephyber wrote: post #102
blenderdt wrote: post #85

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).

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 inve…

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.

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

#122

Post by nstart »

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 don't know if this has been tested, but I'd venture a guess that this has something to do with how one flip flops.

Exhibit A:

"This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".

Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong. We will say that as institution C Org, we have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise is wrong"

VS

Exhibit B:

"We as A Org, have reason to believe that X is the most true thing we know given current knowledge. We acknowledge fact Y exists and are actively investigating it and its implications. For people searching for guidance, A Org recommends actions S,T, and U. We will continue to research and revise information where necessary"

---

I feel like Exhibit A, which is something I see a lot from government entities (confirmation bias makes me want to add "in the US") makes a changing of mind a thing of pride since you've staked a bet on it. A bet which usually is condescending and says "I'm right, you're wrong"

Exhibit B leaves the hatches open while still getting a firm message down based on today's knowledge.

Sadly there's no A/B testing we can turn to to know which approach would be better. But just out of sensibility, I wish more entities engaged in the latter approach

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

#123

Post by shapefrog »

throwntoday wrote: post #5
sirspacey wrote: post #2

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 matte…

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.

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?).

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

#124

Post by philliphaydon »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #113
philliphaydon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taiwan notified the WHO on the 31st of Dec. Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.

> Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports. It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1], > WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic…

So what you're saying is that because Wuhan University sent samples to be tested on the 30th of december for 'sars like virus' sorry 'atypical pneumonia' (commonly used to refer to SARS) which was posted in a forum, which Taiwan picked up and forwarded to the WHO. That Taiwan did not make the WHO aware.

That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.

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

#125

Post by mschuster91 »

laurent92 wrote: post #78
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. This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020. It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From…

> I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.

They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.

Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.

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

#126

Post by divbzero »

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…

In addition to your hunch “wow this spreads fast”, there was also highly suggestive evidence that came out bit by bit. The one that sticks in my head was the news report of the virus spreading at a choir rehearsal in March of 2020:

Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.

The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.

In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back.

Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...

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

#127

Post by nabla9 »

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…

The article was a good and balanced piece looking from the all aspects. Only thing you see is people picking only quotes that help to propagate the nihilist condemnation of WHO as corrupt and incompetent.

The evidence for airborne transmission was really low quality at first. It's pretty normal, but very unfortunate, that people get primed to their early experience of new theory and can't see above it.

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

#128

Post by avazhi »

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…

"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."

This statement applies to the WHO, and it applies equally to China, which will wear the shame of COVID for centuries. If China had been forthcoming from the start of the pandemic instead of obfuscating and frustrating every single attempt by the rest of the world to ascertain COVID's existence, its nature, and the risk it posed, China's role as COVID's origin would have been merely a footnote relegated to the introductory paragraph of all future histories written on the subject. Now, though, China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years. On top of that, the Chinese are so incompetent that the truth got out anyway. Great job, Xi.

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

#129

Post by heavyset_go »

nstart wrote: post #122
xracy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know if this has been tested, but I'd venture a guess that this has something to do with how one flip flops. Exhibit A: "This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong". Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong.…

> Exhibit A: "This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".

I've noticed a pattern where people will take this as their default assumption, and even selectively read evidence to the contrary in order to maintain that assumption.

For example, a while ago on HN[1], someone posted this link[2] about a CDC announcement titled "CDC director says data 'suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus'". The claim was that the CDC director, Walensky, insisted that vaccinated people do not carry COVID and insisted that they were 90% protected against infection, and the CDC wouldn't walk back on those claims.

However, when reading the article, it shows that the assumption that the CDC was using Exhibit A's method in their announcement was wrong, and the CDC actually used the more reasonable method in your Exhibit B:

> Walensky was referring to a new CDC study of nearly 4,000 front-line workers, some vaccinated and some not, who tested themselves weekly for COVID-19 infections between December and March.

> But more data is still necessary to say so definitively, which is why researchers are recruiting thousands of college students across the country to find out more about the likelihood of asymptomatic spread of this virus among vaccinated people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30649479

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated...

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

#130

Post by andybak »

kurupt213 wrote: post #115
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…

Everyone knew since the original sars outbreak that the only protection was a respirator. The N95 is the lowest level that provides meaningful protection.

Are there any good sources of evidence for that? I'd also like to understand how you are defining "meaningful" and whether you are considering reduced viral load.
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