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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

#221

Post by cersa8 »

hetspookjee wrote: post #201
cersa8 wrote: post #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-…

His (de Hond) reputation is abhorrent as he did a complete made-up witch hunt for his personal prime suspect in the Deventer moordzaak, of which he was way off and never really apologized to damages he caused to the victim that he created.

That absolutely tarnished his reputation I agree.

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

#222

Post by sampo »

traceroute66 wrote: post #202
dgellow wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at co…

> Which governments specifically? Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for ever…

> We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin".

In defense of Boris, UK scientific advisors Patrick Vallance and Roy M. Anderson advised to go for the "herd immunity" strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Then when the 16.3.2020 Imperial College report came out, Boris did announce he is changing the strategy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302

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

#223

Post by pasabagi »

makomk wrote: post #169
tomp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fir…

V. interesting take. I always assumed that the reason why the Italians got it so bad was because they are a nation of extremely social old people who kiss every time they meet.

Old people in most countries in europe are rather lonely, whereas in Italy they crowd the streets of every town in the evenings. I could imagine in such an enviroment, a low-deadliness-fast-spreading disease could cause a very rapid collapse in a hospital system.

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

#224

Post by simonh »

rvanlaar wrote: post #154
simonh wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the more they created a vocal minority who heavily drank the coolaid loosing the ability to even consider that the god like apparatus could be wrong. They’re are small vocal minorities all over the spectrum that say all sorts of crap. The WHO isn’t the only voice of “the system” though and plenty of other services and agencies recognised covid was airborne as soon as the evidence was out. Overall I think at least h…

Respectfully disagree. A lot of people who looked into COVID were saying this doesn't add up. They were were framed to be in the 'small vocal minorities that say all sorts of crap'. "the system" was all pointing and looking at each other. Big tech censored content that was deemed misinformation by the standards du jour. "the system" failed what it said it would do, follow the science. And the WHO has been a major par…

It depends what you mean by add up. There really were lots of small vocal groups saying all sorts of utter rubbish, and still are. Also of course in the early days there were lots of things nobody knew, and people were making the best guess or estimate they could based on limited data, and refining on that as more information became available.

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

#225

Post by CTDOCodebases »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #205
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too. Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.

That turns out to be a fairly small number of people. The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny. Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Tri…

Good points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.

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

#226

Post by traceroute66 »

reuben_scratton wrote: post #198

"Taking full precautions against airborne transmission would require major changes at hospitals" Major changes such as, er, occasionally opening a window to let some fresh air in? That's a basic, obvious precaution that's been known since the dawn of time that wasn't done at all in the UK hospital ward where my mother caught and then died from Covid late last year. I know because I was there. The cluelessness re. vir…

> The cluelessness re. viral spread almost two years into the pandemic was just astounding and I'm still very, very angry about it.

I agree.

During the first months I would be willing to cut decision-makers some slack (on certain aspects, blatantly poor decision-making is different).

6–12 months in, I was becoming very frustrated at the distinct lack of learning going on.

But as you say, two years in. There is ZERO excuse.

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

#227

Post by usrusr »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #191
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…

All anyone had to do was look at the video coming out of China. Would they be wearing bunny suits and N95 masks while welding doors shut if it was a no issue? Think of the financial ramifications of shutting down an entire city. Remember they dealt with SARS too. Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.

The bunny suits where because of the unknown and because of hopes for full containment, not because they knew something others did not.

The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.

("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)

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

#228

Post by sampo »

traceroute66 wrote: post #216
chimprich wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin". You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.

> He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot. By the time Boris started appearing on TV, COVID was already on the UK doorstep having marched through China, Asia and Europe. By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discus…

> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

Like I explain in my nearby comment, two of the most decorated UK epidemiologists, being also current and former UK chief scientific advisers, recommended that strategy. Boris did listen to science, it just turns out that some of the UK's very top level scientists were really bad, worse than the 5 year old kid your talked about.

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

#229

Post by usrusr »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #225
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That turns out to be a fairly small number of people. The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny. Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Tri…

Good points. Personally I thought there was a little racism mixed in to it too. I found it amusing that people were like "but that's China". Once it took hold in northern Italy it seemed to magically become real for a lot of people.

Guilty of that. While I do remember being concerned about the virus becoming worldwide, I was more concerned about electronics supply chains collapsing at the source.

It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.

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

#230

Post by janto »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #65
leetcrew wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about not calling anything misinformation until you're pretty damn sure you're right yourself?

No, that is a complete overreaction. You can still call out "aliens did it" or other obvious nonsense.

Framing the dissenting opinion as equivalent to "aliens did it" is exactly the problem. When the opinion turns out correct are you going to continue making those categorization errors? What lead to that mistake in the first place?
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