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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

#291

Post by spookthesunset »

sampo wrote: post #214
thephyber wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Or is it simply that the domain experts are overwhelmed with noise We have learned that while medical doctors are domain experts in treating diseases, they are not domain experts in how infectious diseases spread around. Some doctors follow the front lines of science, whereas other doctors refuse to update their knowledge, and stick to what their old textbooks say. And we have learned that when it comes to airborne…

> Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models.

And they are pretty bad at that too… their models have been horrifically bad. Most of them seemed designed to show the absolute worst case (see all the hockey stick charts these people published)…

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

#292

Post by spookthesunset »

seattle_spring wrote: post #49
jimmydorry wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labelling is one thing (putting a warning underneath posts with the current understanding of a given topic), but the step too far (in my opinion) was the silencing and deplatforming by way of removing posts and banning users. No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.

Then the "town square" would become completely overrun with hateful people yelling falsehoods through microphones. Normal people would avoid the "town square" like the plague.

I agree. But wait until you have rational thoughts that get you banned and deplatformed for “misinformation”. I didn’t think it would ever happen to me until it did… there is definitely a balance between keeping toxic crap off a forum and labeling everything the admins happen to disagree with as “misinformation”

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

#293

Post by yucky »

geysersam wrote: post #273
titzer wrote: post #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, deepenin…

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.

>They are democratically elected.

No they're not. The only person in the Executive branch (which includes all cabinet positions) who is elected is the President, with whoever their VP is riding along on the ticket..

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

#294

Post by dgellow »

makeitdouble wrote: post #232
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…

Speaking for France, we had a lot of flat out lies throughout the pandemic. The most obvious one was on masks and their lack of protection, hammered week after week by the gov spokesperson, until there was enough masks to be distributed. Then masks started to be pushed by the gov, people were encouraged to make their own, and we all know the story from there. There was no lack of information or evidence, and they pai…

Yes, I’m well aware of France situation, and yes your health minister was a joke with her posters in airports. Same for the Élysée spokeswoman who lied about not being able to use her mask. That was at the very beginning and was a complete disaster everywhere in Europe.

Over time communication has been improved, governments have been quite transparent at communicating their decisions (relatively speaking).

I don’t think it’s fair to pain the past ~2years as “governments lying” because of a few mistakes in time of high uncertainty.

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

#295

Post by spookthesunset »

pasabagi wrote: post #66
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…

I think anybody with a feeling to go with the words 'exponential growth' could tell that this virus was going to be a huge problem from very early on. That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.

Except they don’t spread exponentially like some startup hockey stick growth chart. They might start exponentially but eventually it gets harder and harder to find the next host to the spread peaks and eventually declines. The chart of a virus spread is not really exponential at all.

Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.

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

#296

Post by rambojohnson »

bcrl wrote: post #280
geysersam wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.

Misinformation is a problem and causes harm to society. Punishing people who knowingly spread misinformation despite having more accurate knowledge seems like a possible way of improving public discourse. It doesn't even need to be a massive penalty, a fine is probably sufficient in most cases to make someone think twice.

you're not wrong, but if the last 5 years were any indication that is a naïve fallacy.

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

#297

Post by spookthesunset »

chimprich wrote: post #213
native_samples wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That blog post is complete nonsense. You can't look at graphs of when mask mandates were introduced and then lifted, because you can't isolate cause and effect. Mask mandates tend to get introduced when cases are going up, and removed when cases are going down. This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.

Kinda unsettling that we even required masks on the public with no evidence they worked going in, eh?

If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.

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

#298

Post by fivea »

disambiguation wrote: post #285
muh_gradle wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know Collins has resigned until I read this. What problems do you have with Fauci and Collins? I am just curious and am reading more and not trying to be aggressive about this. It seems to me like they were the sole rational voices during the Trump administration.

As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption. - flip flopping on mask policy - surface transmission - vaccine efficacy - herd immunity - natural immunity - gain of function I'm not going to argue whether or not this was best course of action, because there's no way to know what the alternate reality would look like. It is however an interesting revelation about the character of our le…

> As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption.

Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?

I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".

Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?

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

#299

Post by spookthesunset »

xracy wrote: post #17
ralusek wrote: post #6

> For example, even in the middle of the fast-moving epidemic, the WHO dismissed field epidemiology reports as proof of airborne transmission because the evidence was not definitive, something that is difficult to achieve quickly during an outbreak. It seems the responsible thing to do in this situation, rather than tweeting definitively that the virus was "NOT" spread via airborne transition, would've been too withh…

The problem with this, is that people want action items. No one wants to go to the WHO and find out nothing about the virus. If you wanted to do that, you could go anywhere. So they're encouraged to put something down. That something was wrong. It happens, it's a group run by humans. It would be great if they got everything correct, but unfortunately they don't, and to make matters worse, it sounds like they're an or…

We should have included far more “experts” than just doctors and epidemiologists. We should have had “experts” from business, arts, education, you name it at the table. The myopic fixation on Covid was the result of only giving a voice to exactly one form of expert: the doomsday epidemiologist.

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

#300

Post by fivea »

parkingrift wrote: post #235
chimprich wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" Is that supposed to be a quote? It doesn't seem to be a quote from the article. Not creating a panic seems to be a sensible thing to do in most circumstances. You want people to react with appropriate concern to risks, but not behave irrationally.

People are adults. You tell them the truth. Lies don’t work as well now that we have access to so much information. We now have a sizable percentage of people who not only don’t care what the WHO has to say, but also want to outright cut funding to the organization. Great outcome. Panick avoided.

> People are adults.

No, not really. Not all, at least.

I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll.

And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates.

People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.

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