> There's always the risk that the West might internally reject the scientific revolution
This risk is real. Just see how many American citizens rejecting medical science in times of pandemic.
This risk is real. Just see how many American citizens rejecting medical science in times of pandemic.
[EDIT]My point is, is the self-inflicted loss of trustworthiness not well earned by the CDC? When the CDC said repeatedly that masks would only make you catch the virus or that Americans shouldn't prepare or panic about the new virus, when that turned out to be either lies or decisions based on nothing approaching the rigor or science, why should people believe things have changed? How does the layperson understand that now the CDC is basing recommendations on 'S'cience?
You say
> admitting they don't know (which is the only acceptable scientific answer when you can't back up a claim with reproducible experiments).
But what kind of response is that really, when there's an infectious disease and the center for disease control tells the public "We have no clue what the appropriate response is, we're going to tell you in a couple months after we've done some reproducible experiments"?
On the contrary, the ONLY ethical way for the CDC to act in the face of an emerging (potential) crisis is recommendations based on the current beliefs of the organization (which may be incorrect as they are, as you say, "based on their guts") and updating them the moment more evidence comes available (Which they did. Repeatedly.)
So in fact, I would not say I've had a loss of trust but a gain of trust by an institution acting in a very rational manner throughout the pandemic.
To properly calibrate how we treat their recommendations.
I'm most sympathetic to the CDC, because everyone spreading their message are con men. In the most classic of senses, literal con men. They tell me they have the must-be-believed scoop, up until they're found out. Then they have an excuse for why I was wrong for coming away from our interaction with the perception that their preliminary statements should be taken as seriously as I did. But now, this time, today, the have the real must-be-believed scoop that I can trust.
How is this political or economic? It was purely public health.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we thought we could trace and contain anybody with covid, thus ELIMINATING the virus. In this view, only healthcare workers need masks! If healthcare workers go without masks because every ordinary joe stocked up on masks and toilet paper, that means that healthcare workers get infected and become the spreaders, which is the opposite of "containing".
The original PR was something like "masks don't work unless it's an N95 mask and you wear it in a very specific way, and healthcare workers need those anyways so don't buy 'em". Yeah, I can agree it feels misleading now.
But in a world where we're trying to literally ELIMINATE the virus, it makes sense: Wearing a cloth mask near someone with the virus COULD get you infected, so you're better off not being in that situation in the first place.
Once it became clear that we couldn't just have everybody stay at home until the virus is gone, the CDC changed their recommendation to wearing cloth masks. This was about 2 weeks into "lockdowns", at the very very beginning of april.
I fail to see whats so bad about the CDC's recommendations. From the point of view of public health (again, that's what the CDC is. A public health agency), these recommendations make sense in context.
Healthcare workers aren't getting masks through the same supply chains as regular people; they are getting them through hospitals. If it truly was the case that hospitals were being outbid for supplies by private entities, that is a commerce regulatory problem arguably out of scope of the CDC. The government should have bitten the bullet and passed a law to forcibly route material to hospitals and / or eminent domained existing stockpiles for sale by companies or individuals and given them to hospitals. It is not the CDC's job to handle supply chain management in these contexts. If the CDC would like to get involved, it should be encouraging people to give masks to health care workers because they work and because health care workers should take priority. This preserves their credibility and shifts the responsibility to act onto the entities that should be bearing it: the president and congress.
The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained, and that no major outbreak would happen inside their country. This was incorrect. But if you hold this assumption, the CDC made the correct recommendation: N95 masks, properly worn, are the masks that protect against covid-19, and average people don't need them.
>The CDC (and frankly every major government in the world) believed that covid-19 could be contained
There's plenty of photos from asian countries where mask use was immediate, wide spread, and effective.
New York went to the federal government to get masks and was told to pound sand. They then ordered them from Canada and were once again impeded by the federal government[1]. So now you are in a situation where your the hospital supply chain is now gone, and you are forced to buy masks for medical workers in the marketplace, and you are now facing the real possibility that the general public may buy up all the masks before they can contain and eliminate the virus.
The CDC may have been acting in it's own best interest in the face of a federal branch who refused to believe that the virus was a big issue. If the CDC truly believed they had time to contain and eliminate the virus, I can see how telling people to not stock up on masks may have been a good idea at the time.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-fbi-redirects...
Can you point to the studies that they would have used to confirm this belief?
> If they didn't believe that masks worked, why would they do that?
Because a healthcare professional stuck in a room with symptomatic people is a different situation to a member of the public walking around.
Especially because HCPs are trained to use masks, they use them in combination with other PPE and routine handwashing; their PPE is made to standards and tested to make sure it complies with those standards; HCPs are audited on their use of handwashing and PPE.
This is debatable, but in any case, is it excusable for the CDC to hold beliefs that are so badly wrong in the first place? Especially in the face of evidence from the rest of the world?
1) People often don't use masks properly. They often touch their masks and their faces. The initial thinking was that the virus spread largely through touching contaminated surfaces.
2) Mask mandates are difficult (as we are seeing now) and significant portions of the population refusing to use masks undercuts their efficacy.
3) There was a shortage of PPE when the pandemic started. The CDC and NHS didn't want to find themselves in a situation where hospitals had a hard time procuring masks because scared citizens hoarded the supply.
The anti-science issue in the US appears to have a few prongs to it. There has been a growing distrust of science for quite some time with the anti-vax and flat earth movements. I'm not sure what caused it, but it sadly appears to be a growing trend. Also, as we are seeing with the Coronavirus response, a lot of people seem to misunderstand that scientific consensus can change as new data is collected.
2) doesn't make sense to me: because masks aren't perfect and some people refusing to wear masks makes them less efficient they'd advise to not wear masks at all?
3) is a political stance, not a scientific one.
Would people have reacted differently to masks if they weren't intentionally mislead on so many levels about Covid-19 in general (the WHO losing a lot of credibility) and the efficacy of masks? When you have people who are skeptical of the government, and the government lies to them and gets caught, won't that make them even more skeptical of whatever the government says next?
I don't think there ever was a scientific consensus that masks aren't effective against airborne diseases. There was a political decision, and that can change any time, but it has nothing to do with data collection or the scientific method.
2) This ties into the fact that PPE supplies were low when the pandemic started. They did not want to declare a mask ordinance while hospitals were still having a difficult time sourcing PPE themselves. The fact that many people would either be unable to purchase masks or be unwilling to participate made it so that they would just be working against themselves at a time when supply management was critical.
3) Is sociology not a science? It is a matter of public policy. Ensuring that healthcare professionals have access to PPE is the prudent course of action when dealing with a pandemic.
>> I don't think there ever was a scientific consensus that masks aren't effective against airborne diseases. There was a political decision, and that can change any time, but it has nothing to do with data collection or the scientific method.
What are you even talking about? Mask use continues to be studied widely[1]
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
As a set of methodologies, science is inherently skepticism, test, verify, etc. Nothing wrong with being wrong, it just means you gather more data and learn.
As a cultural totem, annoying liberals will say "science says" when they're clearly innumerate, and dumb conservatives will say "I don't trust them experts" when they clearly don't know better. The CDC making a mistake is a political misstep, rather than a step on the way to better understanding.
Could you cite where and when the CDC said that?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24729209.
Western world is built upon modern science and technique, but the people are users, not thinkers.
Very few people understand science, even in tech. You have to play with physics first hand to consider how far we are and are far behind most humans are.
[0] research is funded by companies producing comfort devices or hidden infrastructure to sell to ignorant people. You cannot sell a physical principle or an engineering tool. So the society spreads itself from people with knowledge fueling the lives of a large mass of less knowledgeable.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...
Our current pandemic response is mostly a faith-based policy based on irrational fears rather than a science-based policy based on objective reality.
And the NYE party I host is also made up of billionaires on average if Bezos shows up.
Also, 0.35% means that if everyone in the US contracts it that's a million dead people. And that's only from the disease.
Millions more will die because of the medical resources tied up with taking care of the sick and those who don't die. Arguably, more people will die because of the one person who takes up 20 days of ER resources and survives COVID than the person who shows up and dies of COVID on the first day.
Which is exactly what happened in the hotspots which were hit first and hard in Europe and North America.
The single worst aspect to America's Covid response was that what should have been a medical or scientific debate became politicized.
The politicization of anything to do with public health is inevitable. Science can provide useful inputs, but ultimately the decisions have to be made by elected politicians. We live in a republic, not a technocracy.
Second, why not learn from the Far East and adopt a mask wearing, social distancing culture and prepare and lockdown?
Pandemic control measures such as mask wearing and social distancing can be helpful to "flatten the curve" on a temporary basis but are obviously not sustainable and won't be sufficient to eradicate the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is now endemic and will be with us essentially forever, even after a vaccine is developed. People need to think about what can work over longer time frames while objectively weighing both costs and benefits.
However, if folks are willing to wear seat belts (although in the vast majority of trips they are useless) for a less likely cause of death, many will put on masks, avoided crowded indoor spaces and practice better hygiene for the 3rd leading cause of death. This will occur whether legally mandated or not.
So far there have been about 218,000 American deaths. There is no scientific basis for your 1,148,700 number. The only way we could have prevented all of the American deaths would have been by completely sealing our borders back in December, but at the time no one realized how serious it was. We now know there was already widespread community transmission by January and at that point a high death toll became inevitable.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/when-did-covid-hit-earliest-dea...
It's amusing for someone arguing "science" to be unable to multiple two fucking numbers.
You are saying 1,148,700 deaths is okay, that people are "panicking" for no reason. A 40% increase in death rate (the CDC says there were 2,813,503 deaths in 2019) seems like a pretty reasonable reason to "panic".
Trying to save a sixth of a Holocaust seems like decent public policy.
I never claimed that any number of deaths is "okay" so stop arguing in bad faith and putting words in my mouth. Panicking is irrational and never helpful. We need rational, science-based policies now more than ever.
Certainly we should save as many lives as possible, but we can't get tunnel vision and focus on COVID-19 to the exclusion of all else. The lockdowns also kill people. They die slowly from lack of medical care, depression, substance abuse, and suicide but in the end they're dead all the same. It's like trying to run a business by focusing entirely on revenue and ignoring costs.
The panic makes more sense if you consider the overwhelming majority of people are looking not just at their own age and pre existing condition but also realizing the people who enrich their lives are also at risk.
I happen to share the social- and political-views of the first part of people I talked about, but I've started to very largely diverge when it came to how the virus should be handled. In late January - early February this year I certainly thought that the fatality rate would be around 3-4% (especially after the first images coming out of Wuhan), but as the disaster in Northern Italy and then Spain was unfolding and we were starting to learn more about it I started to think that that number would be more close to 1-2%.
Most of the summer I thought that the fatality rate would be 1%, and then in early August I saw a recent study carried out in Sweden bringing that number down to 0.4%-0.6%. In the last couple of weeks I've started seeing even lower numbers (between 0.3% - 0.4%), which, if I'm not mistaken, would make this virus 3 or 4 times more deadly compared to the normal flu (which afaik has a 0.1% death rate) which is not great, but which is also not catastrophic.
Now, I've tried having this exact conversation with a couple of my friends just yesterday and it did not go well at all, they were accusing me of being anti-mask and of not taking the virus seriously enough. Apparently the bare numbers don't work even on educated people.
However, in the face of incomplete information, isn't erring on the side of caution the right way to proceed? If they had underplayed this, and had the mortality rate really been 3-4%, then you would have both millions dead AND economic devastation.
The scientific consensus is by definition a dynamic thing, ever changing in the face of increasing evidence. And thankfully so.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
Personally, I am refraining from adopting a position as it make take years to have a better idea of what the fatality rate is.
If a strain of influenza suddenly spiked to higher fatality rates, less drastic measures could contain it because it's usually obvious when you are contagious with influenza.
Also, as someone who had SARS-COV-2 and didn't die, it was fucking awful and I fully blame the complete failure of US leadership for the current fiasco.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/
You could have already killed someone without even knowing it by transmitting the flu to them. There's no way to know for sure.
US federal and state handling of the pandemic has been mostly terrible. But even if we had competent, honest leaders I doubt the long-term death toll would be much different. Community transmission was already widespread by the time anyone realized there was a serious problem, and by that point it was too late to contain the pandemic.
https://www.wsj.com/graphics/when-did-covid-hit-earliest-dea...
I sometime forget to not bother commenting on overly politicized things on HN. Your own links show 20% potential asymptomatic influenza infections, which is only a tiny bit different from the estimated 80-95% on SARS-COV-2.
Downvote away though.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315794/
So where are you coming up with that 80-95% number?