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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

#321

Post by native_samples »

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.

No, it's actually correct. You've got the logic here backwards, so please think about this a bit.

How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.

Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?

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

#322

Post by righttoolforjob »

Clubber wrote: post #264
scoopertrooper wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not actually lying though. Expressing an opinion is not lying.

Michael Jordan was a shitty basketball player. That's an opinion, am I lying?

Except you don't actually believe it, so it's a lie, not an opinion.

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

#323

Post by slibhb »

fivea wrote: post #300
parkingrift wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote?

The example you chose is funny because, in my view, it's utterly insane that we ever had lockdowns preventing people from "going for a stroll". That you think any reasonable person ("an adult," apparently) agrees with you just shows how far off the reservation you've wandered.

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

#324

Post by gurkendoktor »

spookthesunset wrote: post #286
gurkendoktor wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point: I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy. The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandator…

Yup. It is kind of a massive engineering failure. Everybody was doing exactly what they were incentivized to do. Everybody thought they were doing the right thing. But combined they drove the train right off the track. There was nothing in place to throw the brakes on and tell society to chill the fuck out. No amount of data or leadership could fix it. The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with f…

I agree about the engineering failure, but I'm not sure if mass hysteria is the right term. It was messier than that, we also saw a few leaders chilling out too much too early. My favorite: https://twitter.com/billdeblasio/status/1234648718714036229

And if anything, governments have been too relaxed about the origin of the pandemic (which has now officially killed 6 million!), while panicking about other details.

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

#325

Post by native_samples »

chimprich wrote: post #302
spookthesunset wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Kinda unsettling that we even required masks on the public with no evidence they worked going in, eh? No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it. The downside, of people being mildly inconveni…

> The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets.

You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:

1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.

2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.

> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed

If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.

But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.

Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1592670/covid-news-babies-...

The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”

There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.

Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.

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

#326

Post by reducesuffering »

yucky wrote: post #293
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.

>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..

That's a technicality. People vote for Presidents by including the combo of them and their VP pick. The VP pick is known, even on the ballot, and understood to assume the President's role in case of emergency. So it's quite realistic to say we know full well we're voting for the package.

I wouldn't extend this to the President's cabinet, as these people aren't known to us when voting.

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

#327

Post by fivea »

disambiguation wrote: post #320
fivea wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time. What exactly do you mean by "works"? I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections. But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it? The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of…

Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it! Let me make it easy: 1. majority of infections happened pre-vaccine rollout. 2. we created a system that locked people out based on vaccine status. 3. the system should have included those with natural immunity. /q

> Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it!

There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not.

And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people.

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com...

Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bullshit.

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

#328

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

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…

Ideally, hospital wards would have killer ventilation and air filtration systems. I have no idea if this is the case in the UK (or anywhere else).

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

#330

Post by geysersam »

disambiguation wrote: post #281
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.

Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).

They are also not political leaders. Besides, to me it's rather unclear what punishable offence they have committed. (I'm genuinely curious. Don't understand the downvotes.)
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