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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

#181
post #136
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'm going out on a limb here and guess you're in the US because that's the only place I've seen hyperfixating on China during COVID discussions. I don't think "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" because that's not even what anyone remembers them as today, outside the US. And even in the U…

Not in the US, nor am I a particular fan of the US or US foreign policies. I also think Trump's IQ is sub 90. This was still a massive Chinese fuckup IMO, with the local CCP in Wuhan implicated in particular.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

You seem confused. Popular narrative is not driven by scientist, it's driven by saber rattling morons who will crucify anyone that speaks against them. For example, what the scientific community understood about efficacy of masks, and how utterly useless cloth masks are, disappeared overnight with covid. Perhaps your memory is failing you but I can recall people being chastised for even suggesting they might be usele…

No post body was provided.

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

#183
Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future.

It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink.

And yet political leaders will face no consequences.

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

#184
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong. Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be reall…

There are many degrees of airborne. One of the theories for why the models break for COVID (and influenza) so badly is the possibility that these viruses can travel very long distances and remain viable. Like in the upper atmosphere, long distance.

This is hardly a radical notion. Ferguson's useless 2001 era foot-and-mouth models relied heavily on the idea that the virus would be spread by the wind between nearby farms, even if there was no close physical contact between animals. The field of "aerobiology" investigates this topic (whether our understanding of what can survive long distance travel might be flawed). If this is correct then it'd explain many otherwise unexplainable facts about COVID and influenza, like the way outbreaks start and stop more or less simultaneously over huge geographic areas.

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

#185
post #151
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was especially confusing when my company at the time (in sfbay area) hired someone to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small and also we'll be back in the office soon. :)

> to tell us that masks won't help because viruses are small It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...

Here's a short explanation of how some of the mechanisms mention in that diagram work [1].

[1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...

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

#186
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was disgusting how many people became totally close-minded, hateful authoritarian bullies regardless of who was "right" and even if there were no mistakes or blatant misrepresentation of risks and benefits of certain policies. - A person's bodily autonomy is the most fundamental freedom there is. Of course there is a balance to be weighed when it affects others, but there is no absolute right or wrong answer. - Pe…

Amazing that in reply to an article about Covid being classified as airborne and transmitted as an aerosol, with specific concern for indoor venues due to wide variation in ventilation, there are still comments like this this about bodily autonomy. As if clothes weren’t already a requirement for visiting your public venue of choice.

"But clothes" isn't an argument.

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

#187
A dutch data scientist repeatedly showed, with data that Covid was airborn and ventilation should be a top priority [0] (dutch). Unfortunately has was ridiculed. I wonder how much better we could have done taking these early warnings more serious. Part of me thinks we wanted an easy option (masks) instead of expensive changes to existing ventilation systems.

[0] https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-maurice-de-hond-in-het-coron...

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

#188
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I am Chinese and I was physically in China early 2020, I disagree strongly with with the narrative that China "was not forthcoming". What I saw there on the ground was totally different from Western reporting and narratives. News about an "unknown decease" was right there on TV even as early as December 31[1]. On the same day, the news was already reported world-wide[2]. Later on, Western reporting said that China "l…

Interesting perspective from you, particularly as I'm at uni and my close friends circle is probably 75% Chinese. Two of those friends were back in China visiting in December 2019 and January 2020. One of them was in Shanghai and was there for only 2 days before he put the pieces together, realised something very bad was going on, and got the fuck out back to the country we're in.

Let me be clear: I don't think that China purposely infected anybody, or intentionally let the virus spread. As for the lab leak theory, it's plausible, but I don't think we'll ever know (thanks to the CCP), and the fact is it doesn't matter now.

What I do think is that the CCP, and the local Wuhan CCP officials in particular, tried to cover their own asses. That may have included literally keeping information from Poobear and the other top CCP brass, but the point is that I don't think it was intentionally bioterrorism so much as the CCP hierarchy utterly failing to look after its local population and that of wider China, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

Nor does one need to be a Trump fan (I'm certainly not and I don't even live in America) to think that this was wholly China's fault, or to think that China is still to this day lying and covering it up.

China isn't so much blamed for failing to 'stop COVID' as much as it is blamed for blatantly lying to the international community, misleading WHO officials (the very officials China planted there - look it up), continuing to mislead and deceive the international community and investigators, and just generally being abhorrent outside of COVID. See: China's pathetic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's failure to even condemn it in mild terms; China's posturing with its military in the South China Sea and in territorial waters off Australia's coast, neither of which are places where China has legitimate claims to territory; China's behaviour in Hong Kong, which represent more lies (this time, lies directed towards England back in the '90s).

In short, the rest of the world thinks China - and particularly the China of the CCP - is a jingoistic, self-obsessed, arrogant shithole that lies to its citizens, firewalls them off from the rest of the world, and generally does whatever China thinks is in China's best interest, with no regard to principles or moral underpinnings. This is the place where asbestos is still widely used in construction, after all. It's also curious that global pandemics going back to the Black Death all seem to emanate from China. And before you say it, lots of places have/have had very high population densities without sprouting global diseases every few centuries, and of course the CCP knew this would be the reaction - which is why they covered it up. Maybe the Chinese should just stop eating bats, anteaters, and other truly wild animals saturated with known pathogens? But I digress.

In short, China is a morally bankrupt country that lies to its citizens and to the rest of the world, and seems to be increasingly aggressive militarily. COVID just happened to be the confluence of all those factors into something that fucked the rest of the globe over. And let me be clear: one could just as easily call America a morally bankrupt shithole, too, and they'd be right - but the fact is, America's moral bankruptcy has resulted in local wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American incompetence has never fucked the entire world over like China just did.

And let's be clear: If a virus broke out in India and the Modi government sat on it, obfuscated it, gagged local doctors, refused to allow media to report on it etc., there'd be just as much condemnation towards India as there was/is towards China. The reason China gets so much hate is because it is a dishonest bully whose modern rise rests on how well it has stolen Western intellectual property over the past 30 years, and not because the rest of the world has something against the Chinese specifically. China is called bad because it's bad.

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

#189
post #95

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 (a…

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

No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.

Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.

This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.

Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:

1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.

2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.

[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I heard it around that time from gaming news sources as it was expected to effect computer part supply.
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