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 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.
>“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…
And they created another vocal minority who doesn’t believe anything coming from official sources. It’s failure all around.
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…
Previously, in February 2020, when the cruise ship Diamond Princess was quarantined in Japan with passengers locked down in their cabins and COVID continued to spread between the cabins, that was my "this is an airborne virus" moment.
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.
Non-experts have no credibility to lose, nobody remembers or cares when their predictions are wrong. So what's the risk in concluding before you have all the data?
Experts are pinning their credibility on the line - not even if they issue every guess under a giant glowing banner saying "THIS IS JUST A GUESS WE DO NOT HAVE THE DATA TO BE DEFINITIVE YET". So: they're slower. I am not, incidentally, saying WHO's response is perfect.
> You dont loose credibility by acknowledging you were wrong Maybe that's how you think, but lots of people don't think that way. To a large part of the masses, experts have to be right the first time around, otherwise people lose trust in them. Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting. Many treat science and expertise as aut…
> Many people don't understand the scientific method or that science is not about certainty but about constantly learning and adjusting. This is the Fauci argument. It doesn't work. Aside from being incredibly Condescending to assume the masses are too stupid to handle the truth... All it does is open you up to criticism from people that understand basic logic. Those criticisms then spread between these "many people"…
I am not American and I don't care about Fauci. I'm just reporting on what I observe in the Dutch discourse.
This doesn't mean that I condone lying about being wrong. But it also doesn't mean that it's as easy as admitting mistakes.
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…
> 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 think you are talking about Fauci's flip-flop here. The point is not about his flip-flop on mask mandate. The point was about his confidence. You do not go and say confidently, on National TV, that masks don't stop the virus and that pe…
> Another big one is that WHO announced it is not human-to-human transmissible
"not transmissible" and "haven't found clear evidence of transmissibility" are not at all the same.
“Follow the money” “George Soros” “Bill Gates” Etc
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?
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".
I'm going to assume you're in the US? Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
Which countries exactly? EU kept it’s head firmly in the sand until Bergamo happened towards the end of February, and even then the prevailing philosophy was “Italians are idiots, this can’t happen to us”.
Yeah, whereas the reality seems to be more like Italians were idiots, and this could well be why it happened to us. There were several interesting things about the Italian outbreak which got downplayed or ignored (at least in the English-speaking world) because it didn't help with the preferred political narratives. The information coming out of Italy was obviously garbage. The only way for an outbreak to go from first detected community spread to hospital systems collapsing so fast was if they'd done an even worse job of testing patients with no ties to China who were hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms than the US, which had a policy of not testing patients with no ties to China hospitalized with potential Covid symptoms (and still detected them much earlier in the outbreak). Obviously you weren't going to get any meaningful figures on infection rates out of that - was it a mild disease causing lots of deaths by infecting everyone, or something slower spreading but deadlier? Who knows. Their treatment guidance was bad and likely killed people too. And it's worth remembering that pretty much no other country had cases seeded from China turn into uncontrolled community spread in the way Italy did, before or after them, except perhaps South Korea - the whole rest of the pandemic seems to trace back to Italy's massive undetected and uncontrolled community outbreak. It was obvious that something different had happened in Italy, and there wasn't enough evidence to say exactly what or what the implications would be for the rest of the world.
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…
> Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO?
This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.
"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.