Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by jjeaff » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

disambiguation wrote: post #400

jjeaff wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your opinion, is there no such thing as a noble lie? While I don't know if I would consider this one of those cases or not, I do know with a pretty strong certainty that this particular lie can and most likely did save lives.

No, I strongly disagree that this saved lives and everyone keeps getting this wrong about the pandemic. Look at Japan and Russia. Japan was highly compliant with lockdowns, masks, and vaccine inoculation. Russia was the exact opposite. The difference being trust in institutions. You could argue lives were lost in Russia because of the inherent distrust. In parallel, the USA was caught telling blatant lies. This is ex…

There are examples of masking and lockdowns that could go either way. The part that I am quite certain about saving lives is telling people that you still needed to get the shot even if you had COVID before.

Many more people would have skipped out on getting it because they thought they had COVID. Because their immunity had waned or because they never really had COVID. I personally know someone that didn't get vaccinated because she had COVID previously. She caught it again in the Delta wave and it killed her. She never had a verified diagnosis the first time, so she may not have had it. But, even if she did, getting vaccinated would have likely boosted her immunity.

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

#402

Post by nradov » Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 1:01 PM UTC

optymizer wrote: post #392

nradov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet for the vast majority of people it really was just a bad cold. I had a bunch of friends and family who got infected before vaccines were available, and that's literally how most of them described the experience.

Ignoring the details, COVID's death rate in the US is about 1.17% (20K deaths, 1.7M infections), and let's say that on average 10% of infections require hospitalizations. You could still say that for the vast majority of people (~90%) it's like a bad cold, so your comment makes sense, but my thinking was focused on the risk/reward aspects. To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that…

That is misinformation. The CDC estimated the fatality rate at 0.6%, not 1.17%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

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

#403

Post by xracy » Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 11:10 PM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #91

xracy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also lose people when you change your mind. There's an entire group of news anchors who dedicate themselves to pointing out where people have flip-flopped. It's pretty common. I agree the not changing your mind is worse, but they also describe this thing as being driven by consensus as doctors, so you're having to change a bunch of people's minds who think they're the very best at what they do. It's a serious fai…

I feel like bending into that with increased dishonesty only makes that worse though. There's only a 'gotcha' if you change your mind while pretending you were never wrong, if you explain what evidence changed your mind then there's not that much power in pointing out 'flip-flopping'. But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should h…

9/10 times if you flip-flop, the way it is communicated is not with that level of nuance. So you can absolutely change your mind the correct way with given data, and the way it's communicated is with a headline that says "CDC/WHO FLIP FLOPS ABOUT VIRUS".

You don't get to decide how people respond to a flip-flop, so you're strongly incentivized to make them as quiet as possible because it's not valued in our society to learn from your mistakes. We just want people who were correct the first time.

If you pick a stock, and it goes up you claim you know something about it. If you pick a stock and it goes down and then up, you still point to the stock that you got correct the first time.

Also, if you read the article, it's not that they didn't think it was airborne. It was that they didn't believe in airborne viruses. The common wisdom was that viruses are too heavy to stay airborne long enough for them to think it possible to become sick from that.

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

#404

Post by legulere » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #179

xorcist wrote: 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.…

A cursory Google early in the pandemic told me that virus particles are smaller than cigarette smoke particles, so paranoid me thought masks aren't bulletproof (it feels like a lot of people think - and I exaggerate - "I'm wearing a mask, I can stand at making-out distance to this other person and I'll be fine."), and why shouldn't the virus be as airborne-transmissible as cigarette smoke? It was also funny how peopl…

As far as I know: The virus dries out and becomes non-infective when it’s in too small droplets. The droplets are larger than the gas particles of smoke that you smell. Masks also filter some of the larger particles of smoke.