Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths

Covid lesson: trust the public with hard truths
nature.com

They didn't trust the public with their actual thinking at any point during Covid. The guidance was initially "don't wear a mask, it will make it worse because you'll infect yourself with your hand" to "we'll just lock down for 3 weeks and then back to normal" to "we have to flatten the curve to avoid overwhelming hospitals" to the current policy of basically 0 covid tolerance.

Why would they initially tell us to not wear masks? The generous answer is that they were afraid that a run on masks would make them unavailable to medical professionals who as far as we knew at that point needed them to survive. The uncharitable answer is that the people giving advice are imbeciles who hadn't even read the national plan to respond to respiratory pandemics.

The most ridiculous part of our COVID response, at least where I am in the USA, is that we have a very detailed national plan that tells policy makers exactly how to respond to such an event. It was made following SARS (another coronavirus), and it is very good, and you can even read it online! It was completely ignored of course.

(You can find an up to date version here, originally published in 2011: https://www.cms.gov/files/document/covid-pandemic-plan.pdf )

My daughter's school just went back to 100% at-home via zoom because 'too many children had positive covid tests'. How many had positive tests? What is the threshold or flow-chart for this decision defining what 'too many' means? Was this decision made with guidance or following guidelines given by public health experts operating under the umbrella of a national (or state, or county, or even school district) strategy? Hah! As if anyone would answer any of these questions! The answer is that 'too many' cases of covid means they close the schools 'for awhile'. The part that concerns me isn't just the lack of transparency, it is that behind the lack of transparency there is nothing there, it's just a non expert going with their gut or responding to pressure from hysterical parents.

If we want to 'trust science' that starts with 'consulting scientists'!

When images come from China welding building's doors, everybody shouted. When government in Brazil said to skip the Carnival to avoid the covid from tourists, lots complained.

Now, looking back, is easy to say that one specific opinion was the best and would be perfect, had it been followed. Just remember those million other opinions that were terrible and be thankful that the worst ones weren't followed.

Speaking from an unfortunate position of experience a lot of this is driven (in the UK) by whitehall asking deliberately leading questions which are politically charged of civil servants and scientists.

aka, there is a difference between, "what do we have to do to reduce deaths due to X this summer" and "what do we have to do to eradicate X this summer"...

It's a shame that once these decisions had been made that only then the questions were asked. This is what comes from introducing data illiterate driven morons into the heart of politics, they don't understand the minutia of modelling, don't understand statsistics, and they abuse anything they find or read to a political end.