Covid-19 Was 'A Preventable Disaster,' WHO-Ordered Report Says
wbur.org
wbur.org
- WHO took a _long_ time to declare a pandemic when member countries were asking for it.
- WHO actively discouraged international border closures for containment.
- WHO took way too long to declare aerosol transmission even when countries had identified it.
In a global scale event like this, there's no individual country who should have been the shepherd. It should have been the WHO, comprised of all its member inputs, really showing the lead here.
Each individual country owns responsibility for their own preparedness, no doubt or question about that, but the WHO needs a re-organization big time.
However given what we now know for sure we can safely say that border closures without an eradication policy (strict lockdowns and mass testing until the cases are undetectable followed by contact tracing) would not have changed anything.
Which is what the models that WHO epidemiologists had used to give the guidance that airport closures would not be very effective used as premises and found.
We know that by the time the border closures were suggested the virus was already definitely already in every country. From then on an extra five or six cases a month don't really affect the trajectory of the epidemic much at all.
Unless you go for an eradication strategy. But in Western states that waited until deaths started mounting to lockdown and then opened back up mostly before they went to zero we can confidently say that airport closures would not have been a factor in avoiding the disaster.
How do you make the conclusion that without a policy reducing travel wouldn’t have helped? That doesn’t even make sense.
If we had stopped travel, we would have hit that point maybe a week or two later. Travel is linear while community spread is exponential.
In the end, given the incredible efficacy of lockdowns, the total amounts of deaths and infected would have been the same or thereabouts, because the point at which it was clear a lockdown was going to happen would just have come sooner.
If you base your public health measures on number of infections, and if community spread is exponential, then adding a dozen cases from travel doesn't change the point at which cases start to decrease, because the cases decreasing is contingent with them reaching a certain amount to begin with.
1. Lockdown and travel restrictions are not the same.
2. Travel restrictions and reasonable public health safety measure are not exclusive. They only work in conjunction.
I would argue that one of the most damaging things the EU did was take care of these things linearly.
As an example German Pharmacies warned the Government of mask supply issues in February. Maybe even January. I know february because beginning of February they were having those supply issues.
Fun fact, one of the biggest suppliers of machines that are required to make N95 mask threads is German(I think it was german, but could be central European). Yet, just like the US, Germany did not call for domestic mask production until months later. I'm not even sure they did at all seeing how a lot of masks later were cheap chinese masks sold over market value with quality control issues.
Contrast that to Taiwan, where fever wards were established right away, domestic mask production and distribution was increased and regulated, combined with a coherent message and paper contact tracing(i.e. no app to start right away). And before you say "but Taiwan". Yes, Taiwan has a second wave coming that will be way worse than the first one, since the top level government seems to have let arrogance forget a couple of the things they did right early on.
>1. Lockdown and travel restrictions are not the same.
Yes, this is the entire point of my argument.
>2. Travel restrictions and reasonable public health safety measure are not exclusive. They only work in conjunction.
This is not correct. Lockdowns work even without travel restrictions. Travel restrictions don't do much without lockdowns (and other non-pharmaceutical interventions).
You should look outside the window there are more countries in the world than just the EU and the USA. Taiwan had effectively zero community transmission for almost a year without lockdown. Travel restrictions were a vital part to that.
The whole flatten the curve argument was a hack to reset a botched pandemic response.
> This is not correct. Lockdowns work even without travel restrictions. Travel restrictions don't do much without lockdowns (and other non-pharmaceutical interventions).
Howd they work out in Europe? How many lockdowns will they have? They actually did Lockdowns without travel restrictions and it did not work. It did flatten the curve a bit, but the end result is still a mess.
Your entire argument is based on an assumption that the outcome is already determined.
Lockdowns have worked very well in Europe. That's why the reaction to rising cases was always another lockdown, following which case counts fell again. However, the overall strategy was not eradication, so every lockdown so far ended when there were still enough infected to start a new wave. Travel restrictions would have helped keep more infectious strains like B 1.1.7 at bay, but in their absence, already-present strains would have kept spreading anyway.
Taiwan had a policy of eradication. So I don't see how anything conflicts with what I said.
I have many friends and family that lived in Europe. They did real lockdows in the first wave, and it worked. For the second, third and fourth wave, lockdowns were very light and allowed people to go to work and often children to go to school. So they didn't work.
Given conflicting reports, underreporting, unknowns, denials, how this virus transmits, this could only be handled better with crisis policies.
The world didn't operate in crisis mode until now.
We should of course minimize crisis mode. Without it, expect similar response. I doubt the world will be going back, but will need to tackle more crises.
This one is the perfect mirror for states. Only full lockdown will contain contagion, but many don't have that sophistication yet. Those who didn't lockdown early, got hit hard economically too.
However, I am a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen living in Croatia. I am culturally American.
The US had the expertise, technological capacity, and economic investment capacity to be able to eradicate the virus. Very few governments have similar resources and the ability to scale like the US government, which is quite unique. The issue was the political party that we had in place, with their recent neoliberalism. We also have an uncooperative public, that is unwilling to take temporary pain to minimize a ton more pain (from the virus) for the future.
Croatia actually has great public health infrastructure, and also has a cooperative public that follows public health advice and orders. We also have brave politicians (a lot of them were officers in the Croatian Homeland War) that are willing to take bold, unpopular political risks. They will take one for the team, if that is what it takes.
Early on in the pandemic, Croatia came very close to eliminating the virus, and was rated by Oxford as having the strictest government response (I believe in its first review/publication of the metric?). You could not leave your neighborhood without a digital pass issued by the government, which was only given out for absolutely necessary reasons (e.g. medical care). That’s right: the Croatian police had each neighborhood cordoned off and barricaded, so you could not effectively leave without a digital pass (attempting to illegally leave would mean a big fine!). Croatia also had 30 days of food and supplies for all of its citizens in a government warehouse. Pricing was fixed for critical supplies such as food, and still is, which helps prevent panic buying. Also, if you test positive for corona, you will be issued a rješenje (a government administrative decision) ordering you to quarantine for 14 days. Besides being very cooperative, Croatians would not think of breaking quarantine, as the vast majority cannot afford to. The first violation is a 1,000 Euro fine. The second violation is a 16,000 Euro fine. Oh yeah, the police will stop by your apartment multiple times randomly to check on you to see if you are actually quarantined.
Croatia failed because they chose tourist season over attempting to eradicate the virus.
And incompetent leadership that foundered an opportunity to be the heroes of a generation.
"According to data from the Department of Veteran's Affairs, approximately 405,000 Americans died in the Second World War while 36,000 lost their lives in the Korean War. The Vietnam War resulted in another 58,000 deaths with the collective toll of all three conflicts coming in at around half a million. As of February 23, 2021, the Johns Hopkins University lists 500,310 Americans as having died from Covid-19. If a minute of silence was held for every death during the pandemic, it would take nearly a year - 347 days - to honor all the people the U.S. has lost."
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/24252/us-covid-19-deaths-...
One thing I want to see get researched the next few years is the way the slavic countries pretty much completely avoided the first wave that hit many other parts of Europe so bad, only to then get hit (in some cases much more severely) by the second and third waves.
Since this also happened to less touristy countries like B&H, Bulgaria and Slovakia I do think it is more complicated than that. (But I’m in another part of EU so I might be missing something.)
"The WHO waited too long to declare a public health emergency of international concern, the panel said, after the reporting of an initial cluster of cases in December 2019."
I think it was a difficult situation, I don't think they handled it the best they could have, but the response (in the context of massive amounts of hoarding) was understandable.
I know that this will not be a popular take here.
or worse. Keep the aerosol vector, but make it even more effective. Increase the effectiveness of surface transmission. Throw in greater resistant to surfactants (soap) and hand sanitizers.
boom!
In this sense, HIV doesn't seem like a particularly good model for anything like a coronavirus pandemic. Aerosol transmission just totally changes almost every aspect of the resulting pandemic.
What lessons do you wish we had learned from HIV?
Fauci didn't think so in 1983.
"But if ''nonsexual, non-blood-borne transmission is possible, the scope of the syndrome may be enormous,'' writes Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health in an editorial to be published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/06/us/family-contact-studied...
But dissemination of one by a govt. scientist in a prominent medical journal, however, indicates that they think it likely enough to be true.
https://www.econlib.org/great-moments-in-epidemiology/
He did enormous damage in 1983 by speculating about casual transmission of HIV within households even though he admitted to not having read the paper. He was slow to get up to speed on aerosol transmission this time around.
The comment at the bottom of that page also contains this gem from Oprah Winfrey in 1987:
> Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me.
Obviously that never happened. I was 12 that year and this sort of stuff terrorized us, even though it was based on highly dubious modeling, plus belief by public health officials in the promulgation of nobel lies.
I think we should have learned that groupthink and motivated reasoning can lead to all sorts of ancillary damage not just to psychological health, but to reduced trust in institutions, heightened political polarization, massive misallocation of resources, and putting focus on the wrong places.
We should have learned that being honest about what is known and what isn’t known and placing trust in the public leads to the public placing trust in public health authorities when it really matters. Credibility is extremely important to maintain, and protecting and encouraging a robust debate is paramount to discovering the truth and making better decisions.
The slavish subservience to authority and desperate clamor to lick boot sickens me. I mean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the gun running and drug smuggling and interventions in South and Central America, banking corruption and laundering, the subprime crash, the Panama Papers, Congressional insider trading, corporations paying no taxes while politicians clutch pearls and wring hands about how they're using legal loopholes so there's nothing they can do about it, intelligence agencies spying on congress and on citizens, fabrications of stories about collusion with Putin, the list is endless.
And yet again, like clockwork, once again the "experts" and "journalists" know what is best for us and once again the followers are all falling over themselves to prove their devotion by putting on their big shows of faith, and denouncing and bullying all the heretics and traitors who dare to ask questions.
I have to laugh if it wasn't so sad. For some stupid reason I had some hope, but after seeing it all play out again it seems like old Dick Cheney could come and start talking about Iran and WMDs or denounce the next Gaddafi, and Fox and the NYT and all those other "trusted experts" would duly start regurgitating their lines, and pretty soon everyone would fall in line and anyone who didn't want to go to war (read: send others to war) would be un-American traitors.
Have you considered that the "desperate clamor" might just be a clamor to do the best thing ? And just how would we do that?
Your entire attitude seems to be predicated on the idea that nobody actually knows anything, there's no point listening to "experts" (even putting the quotes around the word is intended to be dismissive), and there's no way to spend time learning more about something.
I thoroughly reject that POV.
Look, you've provided a great list of terrible things that the US (and other) governments have done (though it's necessarily incomplete and mostly rather recent). But in the context of your point, so what?
What about the experts that know how to build bridges properly? What about the governmental policies that actually result in positive changes? What about the doctors, engineers, designers, architects, farmers who actually do have a better understanding of their fields than an average person?
I don't disagree with you about the lamentable actions of our government and the processes/structures that allow them to happen. But I reject the implication that this requires me to just be infinitely cynical about everything.
I have considered that, and rejected it.
I'm not talking about people who don't really know and genuinely get their information from whatever their TV or internet or friends tell them and they just go along with it but generally live and let live in the face of differing opinions.
I'm talking about the hateful bullying mobs going around attacking people, and the people and corporations who actually look into the information which is quite easy to see those "authorities" are hardly a good source of truth, yet they grovel down on their hands and knees to lick boot.
> Your entire attitude seems to be predicated on the idea that nobody actually knows anything, there's no point listening to "experts" (even putting the quotes around the word is intended to be dismissive), and there's no way to spend time learning more about something.
That's not my attitude.
> Look, you've provided a great list of terrible things that the US (and other) governments have done (though it's necessarily incomplete and mostly rather recent). But in the context of your point, so what?
The context of my point is that journalists, politicians, and other self-proclaimed "experts" are not. It is more the rule than the exception that they are self-interested corrupt liars and manipulators.
I'm not talking about, say, the scientist who develops climate models or the medical researcher developing vaccines. I'm not talking about actual experts.
> What about the experts that know how to build bridges properly? What about the governmental policies that actually result in positive changes? What about the doctors, engineers, designers, architects, farmers who actually do have a better understanding of their fields than an average person?
What about them? None of them are manipulating the populace into going to war, or drumming up their throngs of pathetic subservient bootlickers and brownshirts to attack and bully anybody who questions them. So I'm obviously not talking about them.
> I don't disagree with you about the lamentable actions of our government and the processes/structures that allow them to happen. But I reject the implication that this requires me to just be infinitely cynical about everything.
There was no implication.
Do you believe that people who write (long form articles, books) about a subject have nothing useful to say?
It's not always easy, but in the case of COVID there were a lot of obvious shysters who were slavishly worshipped by the mob.
Opening your eyes and thinking for yourself, and not being desperately and pathetically subservient to "authority" or to mob mentality is a good start.
> Do you believe that people who write (long form articles, books) about a subject have nothing useful to say?
I do not.
I don't hear or read people saying "we should follow what Dr. Fauci says". I hear and read saying "we should follow the science", and that necessarily means (for a novel disease, whether that's HIV or COVID-19) entering into a process in which things are not certain, opinions differ, new information emerges. "The science" isn't a single, fixed answer for any situation, and even less so for a novel disease. Pretending that "the science" can essentially be identified with a single person is tremendously foolish, both for those who want to believe that person and those who want to tear them down.
Yet we've also seen intelligent non-experts rise to the occasion. An entrepreneur like Balaji Srinivasan who was sounding the alarm about how serious this was a month or two ahead of public health officials and was mocked for stepping outside of his lane[0], a programmer/sociologist like Zenep Tufecki who has written a series of important analyses over the last year and who later admitted that she felt like she was risking her career by advocating for masks when all the public health authorities were lined up against it [1], or economist Emily Oster who has done a better job of clear communication to the public about how to balance risks and understand the different levels of certainty we had on any given COVID related topic and published clearer analyses of school safety that many states' policies still flatly ignore.[2]
These are all people who have a wide range of experience and interests but were able to make timely contributions that experts may have been too blinkered to develop.
It's not about tearing down any individual, and I apologize if comment went too far in that direction. But we should be concerned about institutions that reject well-argued analysis of available evidence because its coming from the wrong place, or failing to even consider counterarguments and their full slate of implications. One concept that I recently learned about is the 10th man rule which Israeli intelligence adopted after the surprise attach that led to the Yom Kippur war. Essentially that if there are 10 people in a room and the first nine all express the same opinion, it becomes the duty of the 10th man to argue the opposite case regardless of what he or she believes. There are a lot of 10th men out there who had their opinions or voices excluded for too long.
Whatever it is that filters intelligent arguments from outside of the establishment is something that should be addressed before we need to go through something like this again. We would also do well to find ways to include a role for smart dissenting outsiders in conversations like these early.
[0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21128209/coronavirus-fe...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/business/media/how-zeynep...
> When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.
> But he kept silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the C.D.C. had blundered by saying protective face coverings should be worn by health workers but not ordinary people.
> “Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”
[2] Articles in various publications + https://explaincovid.org & https://www.qualtrics.com/news/national-covid-education-dash...
This coronavirus might have spread to ~10,000 people and already jumped to Italy before anyone was aware there was a brewing medical crisis.
* Masks don't help, there's no point in wearing them
* Lots of people are gonna get infected, all we can do is tamp down this current spike
* We'll go back to our normal lives in a month or two
were all well within what was reported to be the expert consensus at the time.
Suffice to say both sides love to “follow the science” when it supports their political views.
Weirdly, medical professionals were also being told not to wear masks. Multiple nurses were either fired or quit over the issue, because hospital policy didn't allow general mask-wearing out of a fear of scaring people:
https://www.wbrc.com/2020/03/23/nurse-claims-he-was-fired-we...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85760
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/nurse-fired-wearing-mask...
Which is the greatest irony of all. Nothing is more terrifying than finding out you are being lied to, it's actually way worse, and leadership has no clue what it is doing.
I am curious if that is due to the WHO messaging or just because with thousands of hospitals, the probability of having a stupid manager approaches 1.
Everyone should have been masking up as soon as possible in the pandemic. Case counts were low, we didn't know much about the route of transmission, and we also thought it was even more dangerous than it turned out to be. Precautions were indicated, but health authorities were decrying mask use as late as the end of March.
But it turns out that the primary vector is aerosols, not droplets or fomites. Any mask will mitigate droplet contamination, and the resulting fomites: this is why influenza has practically disappeared, masking is very effective against influenza, where those are the primary vector.
But no mask will do much to filter aerosols on exhalation. That's simply not how they work, positive pressure puts most of the gasses out through the sides of the mask. Even a P100 filter with cartridges won't do it, that's why they have a vent, otherwise the face seal would be broken every time one exhales. To be generous, I'll say that a cloth mask catches 30% of aerosols. It doesn't, but say it does: that's not nearly good enough. Which case counts after universal masking mandates illustrate quite clearly: they rise, and fall, and the masks don't have anything to do with it.
A good mask will filter some aerosols when inhaling: but a cloth mask won't. So once aerosols were identified as the culprit, WHO and CDC should have emphasized air filtration, which is quite effective, limiting the number of people indoors on the basis of how many air exchanges a HEPA or ULPA filter was capable of doing. Messaging should have emphasized that cloth and surgical masks are completely useless, and that at-risk people should stay home, and if they can't, should get a proper mask (KN94, (K)N95, P100) and learn how to use it. COVID doesn't survive on surfaces very long, so reuse is more-or-less ok, and there were plenty of proper masks by June, which is when these facts were available. If WHO and CDC had listened to them.
I vape, so I can illustrate this to myself quite easily: I can hit the vape through a cloth mask, but not a KN94. And with any mask, I can take a hit, put it on, and exhale a visible cloud of, yep, aerosols, around the side of the mask.
I still wear a KN94 indoors, it's the best I can do. But I'm walking around in indoor spaces with no HEPA filters, surrounded by people who are unprotected, just wearing a talisman. This was preventable.
The study in this article [0] is still in pre-print but it claims that a change to mandatory mask wearing was a critical factor in crushing the virus in Melbourne's second wave.
I've seen some comments on HN that masks aren't effective but from what I've read and observed in Melbourne/Australia they have been very effective.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-14/face-masks-number-one...
Melbourne did everything they could think of, and the sum of it worked. This included a very severe lockdown, contact tracing, masking in the very limited public interactions which were allowed, and starting with a relatively low case count. I'm fairly confident that masks were the least important part of this, and that shutting down basically every part of public life was the most.
I did say that masking early on was indicated, and that WHO and CDC failed us there. I sort of glossed over the part where case counts were low, but it's there, and it's pretty important.
What the US and Europe needed early is what New Zealand and Australia (and Taiwan, Korea, maybe a couple other Southeast Asian countries) actually managed: universal masking, a nearly-complete cessation of public life, widespread testing, contact tracing, and central quarantine for the infected. Instead, we got dithering and "wash your hands".
It was too late for that suite of interventions to be effective by 1st April at the latest. Earlier for Europe, which had the early wave epidemic in Italy.
So of course, that's when masking was adopted, as a totemic symbol that the powers that be were "doing something". But we had crossed the point where it could help, and it was always the least important thing.
I took a look at your sibling comments, but I don't see any sources linked that suggest cloth masks are so ineffective as to be useless.
Here are a couple studies suggesting they aren't useless (searched "cloth mask aerosol protection" via DDG):
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252 (effectiveness had a very wide range, depending on weave, thread count, etc.)
https://www.nist.gov/publications/filtration-efficiencies-na...
I get what you're saying in general, that "cloth mask" means many different things, and that those things aren't going to have the same levels of protection, but you seem to be pushing the idea -- without evidence -- that all cloth masks are worse than useless. Science doesn't seem to agree with you?
There's an issue with statements like that. "Cloth mask" is not well defined - are we talking literal layer of cloth, or the cloth-synthetic-cloth design recommended in some countries. Either way there's some gradient between 100% protection and nothing - cloth masks will still be better than nothing, but purpose-designed masks will outperform them.
This is not a trivial scenario to talk about, so the more specific we are the better.
I don't think it's accurate to say that those are better than nothing. The false sense of security could easily lead to people staying longer indoors, or entering indoor spaces which they would consider dangerous if they didn't have the misconception that cloth masks protect them. It's a very small amount of protection, so it doesn't take much moral hazard to overwhelm it.
Could you maybe get a little less sick, if say 10% less viral aerosols passed through the mask? Ok, if I'm going to be very generous, sure. At the margins, someone is going to inhale a sub-infectious dose of aerosol who would have gotten a just-barely-infectious aerosol dose.
But this is like talking about condoms with holes in them. Most of the semen would stay in! It's not as pregnancy inducing as going bare! But I wouldn't call it birth control either.
Any source for that? I mean it has always seemed likely that both aerosols and droplets would be a factor but where did 'primary' come from?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/protecting-agains...
I suggest, without intending to be dismissive, punching "covid aerosols primary" or the like into your search engine of choice and going to town. It's been a long debate, and by late last year every prestigious organization except CDC and WHO were in the aerosols camp. Even they have kind of low-key admitted it, while insisting that the measures to control it they promoted on an erroneous theory are still the correct ones. Which is, of course, nonsense.
A droplet is just a large blob of the same saliva that makes up the aerosols. If it gets in your lungs, it will make you sick. This is pretty easy to avoid behaviorally, and with face shields for workers who have to have contact with the public. Wearing a mask will also mitigate this, but it isn't necessary (just don't point your face at other people) and it isn't sufficient, because of aerosols, which are therefore the primary source of transmission.
When a droplet lands on a surface, it becomes a fomite. Picking these up with ones hands, and transmitting them to eyes, nose, and lips, is a major route of infection for influenza. It does not appear to be a significant route of infection for COVID.
Diseases which spread primarily through droplets do so by forming fomites. Unlike someone spitting on your face, it's very easy to touch a surface someone else spit upon, and people touch their faces a lot.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
It's really good, I learned a lot of new things. Please read this if you're at all interested in the subject: and who among us isn't at this point?
The bigger problem was not the WHO, it's very common for such organizations to be highly dysfunctional and corrupted. It was the slavish adherence to authority (aka boot licking), and piling on, bullying and hatefully attacking anybody who dared to question this corrupt authority. Everyone was getting in on the action, from mega corporations to the average "useful idiot" internet bully.
Unfortunately it's a big problem for some people who put politics above reality to cope with that idea, because WHO is on "their side", for various reasons.
WHO is just an NGO, a reflection of multiple member states cooperating through it. Not all states are faithful or trustworthy.
Those who listen to, act on advice from, censor and attack opposition to the WHO give it authority. This seems to be very upsetting to you for some reason.
There is nothing wrong with my initial comment about the WHO's authority, it absolutely has a measure of authority. Why you would try to make up some definition of the word "authority" that nobody else uses, and then try to attack my comment with it is beyond me.
This is trying to play a psychological game with other posters. No point continuing any argument after that, as evidently you have no good intention of having a respectful and balanced discussion, as later posts clearly indicate.
Just because we have different opinions, there's no need for such cheap tricks.
Anyways, to finish my point of view: I have no crocodile tears to shed for authorities trying to scapegoat one of many NGO they are member of. Each country have their own experts, many of who serve for WHO from time to time, so have ample means to come up with new findings at any point in time. Such findings can of course always be shared with the international community, and with WHO. Collaboration is about what you contribute, not what you try to take away from it.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but I don't find it coherent in any other regard than authorities not taking responsibility for their own decisions, actions, indecisions and inaction.
You shouldn't have been the one to start using them then.
Anyhow, have a good day!
COVID-19: declared pandemic at 114 infected countries ( https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-... )
We have already seen multiple instances where leadership avoided testing to make the virus appear contained. Now imagine what countries would do early in the pandemic if they saw countries essentially sanctioned for trying to contain the virus. Did WHO make the right choice? I don't know, most likely not, but the world is not black and white. They should, however, rigorously go through their actions these past two years to see what they could have improved and what policies to put in place to prevent this from recurring again.
From all around the world, the issue was governmental competence.
Almost every government in the world did not treat the issue with the due amount of urgency.
Almost every government in the world screwed up on airborne transmission for a good while.
Almost every government downright minimized the issued and wasted precious months of time that could have been used to ramp up testing, set up contact tracing, and organize the initial lockdowns to be more effective. My country still doesn't have an effective contact tracing system with people employed there complaining of massive dysfunction, over a year in.
It's not for lack of power either - almost every government in the world has already assigned themselves a tremendous amount of emergency powers during pandemics and in general, from the authority to lockdown to mass surveillance.
Yet very few used this authority effectively. The governments that claimed not to want to use these powers by respect for civil rights overwhelmingly... Still reserve those powers to themselves and abuse them in ways that don't help.
Why is it that governments are so competent when it comes to mass surveillance and repression but completely fumble the ball in cases where governmental power is genuinely helpful and where the argument for them being justified is so much stronger?
I think it is less about competent. It is actually are you willing to set out policy to solve the problem but lose your popularity? Is government is ready to make the hard choice? People can only do that during war time.
$ 7,919,196,000 – CDC FY 2020 total funding
$13,316,000,000 – CVN-78, USS Gerald R. Ford
$62,000,000,000 – National Intelligence Program FY 2020
Practice helps.
In France for instance, there was recent history of the swine flu epidemic in 2009, where the government responded with urgency, mass buying of supplies and vaccines, and a mass vaccination drive; and it was a huge flop, they were ridiculed and criticized because the epidemic stopped by itself and all the resources were wasted.
So subsequent governments were reluctant to jump too quickly to full on panic lockdown mode; what if it were "just a flu"? Nonetheless the Health minister was changed with an actual doctor in ~february, who has done pretty well since.
It's easy to criticize with the benefit of hindsight.
But was it? Perhaps it was theoretically preventable but not in practice. Something across political systems, human psychology, religions makes it objectively non-preventable.
I think governments didn't react correctly as this is the first time in the lifespan of many to happen. Countries that had similar outbreaks recently did well. I bet you Covid-22 will be handled differently.
"""
Identifying a systemic issue, the report said the WHO lacks the power to investigate and act swiftly when confronted with potential outbreaks.
"Technical expert missions can be dispatched to individual countries only with their permission, and a system of preauthorization of missions has not been established," the report said. "Often lengthy negotiations with governments for access by missions are required after an outbreak has been notified."
"""
There's a "systemic issue" where you won't let our 'expert missions' into your country and boss you around.
I mean: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1390738628528201735
We have actually seen similar patterns in many countries. Strong resistance to measures because of the fear of economic effects and pressure from industry. Only when it was really too late did they implement measures. Similarly as soon as things looked up again they opened everything way too quickly which caused the inevitable second and third waves.
Take Germany for example, while they had a good initial response, much of that advantage was squandered because they did not really investigate how the virus spread and wanting to keep the economy (especially the large companies) running at all cost. This lead to measures like being very harsh about only few people meeting outside, but at the same time many factories etc, keeping to work without significant distancing, likely a much larger spread vector.
I bet none of these ideas are in the report.
* read article *
Nope.
* reads report *
Oh, I got one: Waive IP rights to vaccines.
Their suggestion: Give the WHO more money. They'll do it better next time apparently.
I guarantee you, if China had said, "A bioweapon we were developing escaped the lab, lock everything down!"
This would not have happened.
IBTimes quotes "The Australian" newspaper. (Murdoch)
"The Australian" quotes the book "The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapon".
The above book is based on a discredited claim that the US engineered SARS as a weapon against China, which has now been twisted into a counter claim that China in turn engineered COVID against the US (see below).
https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/going-viral-how-a-book-on-...
Now getting back to the article's actual content - I don't think the article makes a great case for dismissing the notion that the Chinese government was interested in biological weapons. One of its sources, Luke de Pulford, is quoted as saying about the paper/book, "What’s beyond doubt is the paper’s provenance. It’s legitimate and poses questions which deserve thorough probing." It goes on to note that Xu Dezhong, who authored the paper/book, is “not a fringe player”. "He held a senior position at the Air Force Medical University and reported to the Chinese Military Commission and Ministry of Health during the SARS epidemic in 2003." It then goes on to say "Conspiracy theories are regularly published in China, including by those connected with the government" to discredit what Dezhong has claimed. But that isn't evidence that Dezhong's claims are wrong - it amounts to saying "a nonzero number of people in China have said false things before, so therefore we cannot take the word of this military official".
All that said, it is entirely possible that China was not and is not interested in biological weapons, and that the source is untrustworthy and false. But we have to process this possibility using probabilities, since there are no definite answers proving or disproving anything here. Given that China's government took over Tibet, has been oppressing Hong Kong, operates concentration camps in Xinjiang, has built up various military capabilities as it threatens aggression against Taiwan, suppressed early reports of COVID-19, arrested journalists who reported on the virus, and denied visits to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for over a year, there is no reason to trust them or give them the benefit of the doubt on matters relating to SARS or COVID-19 or militaristic goals. As Homeland Security Committee member Ron Johnson is quoted in this article when asked about China preparing biological weapons, “Does that shock anybody? It certainly doesn’t shock me."
As a side note: your mention of Murdoch seems like an ad-hominem argument, using his name as a boogeyman to discredit this story. But that's not a substantive argument.
The "Murdoch" press includes newspapers such as "The Australian" and "The Telegraph" in Australia, "Fox", "WSJ" and "New York Post" in the US, "Sky" and newspapers such as "The Sun" in the UK. They quote each other, as if they are independent sources (in this case the story in " The Australian" was first published in "The Telegraph"), but in reality they are all one source, with the Murdoch family exercising ultimate editorial control.
That's the background to the use of the term "Murdoch". It's not referring to the person but identifying a group of media companies that are effectively a single source.
I agree we shouldn't trust reports from China.
WHO could have simply requested permission to send an early investigation team, and if refused, warn the rest of the world that investigations were refused.
They could have been the canary in the coal mine and let other governments, who do have power, pressure the one that refuses to cooperate.
https://www.who.int/sidcer/links/en/ " World Health Organization An inter-governmental organisation whose objective is the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health."
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...
Been catching more of the business and economic study breakdown the past few weeks, I've learned a lot more than I was anticipating.
And if it does turn out that gain of function research in WIV, potentially funded by the US, led to the leak of an extra infectious coronavirus, that will have been another way in which COVID-19 was a preventable disaster. And for some reason the WHO’s delegation to visit Wuhan included Peter Daszak, despite very obvious conflicts of interest (https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/02/world-health-organization...), so we may never get a trustworthy answer on that possibility.
This report mentions exactly none of that. It is a ridiculous farce, and the WHO is not to be trusted when it comes to a global retrospective on what went wrong.
Huh, isn't that unprecedented and would mean involuntary detention of non-citizens by preventing them from leaving?
In practice it is more "Send them to their home country's embassy and it is their nation's job to take them back safely. They'll likely be a bit cross but if they mess up and infect themselves repatriating without proper quarantine procedures you can't blame us."
I was in China in early-mid january, there were warnings about the Wuhan virus all over all of the airports, it was not being hidden.
How do you reconcile the transparency you saw on the ground with the fact that early reports were suppressed or downplayed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...), or that a journalist was arrested and sentenced to years of jail for reporting on COVID (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/world/asia/china-Zhang-Zh...), or that China may have misled the world and hoarded COVID supplies (https://abc7news.com/china-misled-world-coronavirus-us/61470...). Is it possible that China was trying to walk a fine line by being transparent in those settings where it would be futile to lie, while acting differently in other settings to serve their own interests as much as possible? I'm genuinely curious to hear the opinion of someone who was in the middle of all this.
The warnings were definitely addressed to travelers from Wuhan, and mentioned a virus or pneumonia, I don't think they called it the "Wuhan virus" however.
Look, I think responding to a lot of these reports will make me seem like a China apologist, and to the extent that I think that China's early failures were less the cause of the outbreak in the US than the US' failure to react quickly once information was public, I guess I am. That said, of course all of this is in the context of China being a repressive, authoritarian state, which is obviously bad.
We know that there was a period of 5 days where Chinese leaders knew (or should have known) that the virus was airborne yet did not release this information publicly. I am not claiming they were fully transparent, it's clear that they weren't. But this was a delay on the order of days, it took weeks-month for the United States to mount anything that looked even remotely like a real policy response after they learned it was airborne. I do not think that those 5 days would have made a substantive difference to US policy.
Now onto your points:
1. Your wikipedia article about Covid-19 misinformation hits on the point about the 5 day delay, absolutely. Many of the other misinformation efforts cited are by individual politicians or smaller government apparatus, not necessarily the central government's stance. You can see similar misinformation promulgated in the United States among top politicians. I certainly buy, as per the wiki page, that somewhere like the 'Economic and Commercial Office of the Chinese Embassy in Kazakhstan' tweeted out misinformation about coronavirus, I am somewhat more skeptical that that had a serious impact on the coronavirus response.
2. Zhang Zhan arrived in Wuhan in February and was highly critical of lockdowns. While reprehensible, I do not think her arrest had a serious impact on people being aware of the reality of the virus, which was already public knowledge by then. Much more impactful in my view was the early suppression of reports from doctors in December conducted by the local (not central) government. So early in the pandemic, this could have had a size-able impact.
Governments like to save face. In Florida, state authorities fired and then arrested someone for revealing that true death counts were higher than reported.
3. I had not heard of this report. I've tried to do a bit more research on these claims, but haven't really been able to find much. I think it is important to note that, at the time, we were in the midst of a trade war with China, so there was a general decline in exports. I would like to hear more about this though.
> Is it possible that China was trying to walk a fine line by being transparent in those settings where it would be futile to lie, while acting differently in other settings to serve their own interests as much as possible?
Definitely, at least to some extent. If they were exclusively serving their interests, they probably didn't need to notify the WHO when they did and they probably could have suppressed a little longer, but it's clear they were manipulating the informational landscape for their own benefit. Really, my only claim is that the root of the pandemic in most of the West falls more on failure in Western nations to respond forcefully and less in the 5 day delay between knowledge of spread and disclosure.
From the speed of spread of covid, it was clear that it was airborne. I don't need a PHD in epidemiology to not mislead the public.
So talking about how covid-19 was preventable is meaningful because it's treating it as a case-study.
"WHO Chief Urges Countries Not to Close Borders to Foreigners From China "
> “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”
> ...
> As an American CDC employee, they said, Quick was in an ideal position to be the eyes and ears on the ground for the United States and other countries on the coronavirus outbreak, and might have alerted them to the growing threat weeks earlier.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
The buck stops with her on bad scientific advice she peddled to the world
Criminal incompetence.
She comes from Indian princeling family. Her dad was key person Ms swaminathan who ran green Revolution in India
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
The WHO can't be trusted unfortunately.
>catches covid via eyes
sigh
When has global political leadership ever not been “absent”? These are experts?
Only Hitler could unite most the rest of the world, and only then because that was near the peak of colonialism so world power had never been so concentrated.
Similarly, just because the US' leadership is both absent and therefore ineffective in an area does not imply that were the US' leadership present, it would still be ineffective.
Certainly, per the parent comment, we have examples of the US' past leadership in this context leading to a very different outcome. We know that leadership was abdicated (and in fact, actively eviscerated) during the prior presidency.
And they continue to say that. This isn't on Trump.
Second, yes Trump accelerated some things, but deep changes that caused Trump more than they were caused by Trump have been having more effect on international relations far long. Don't forget all the same complaints about not funding the state department were made in the Bush years.
Trump is a bad, don't get me wrong, but this seems like trite hawk Democrat thinking to me. It's precisely the nature of the US-led order in recent years that free trade agreements, IP laws, etc. etc. were more easily done than tackling issues of high global importance like global warming and Covid.
I was also not saying that Trump was a solitary problem.
I was not even judging Trump in my post, or making any partisan claims.
I was pointing out that you're attacking a strawman in your original post (as well as the one above). The original claim was simply "US policy in the past helped prevent pandemics. Under the prior administration, that policy changed, and we got a pandemic".
In response, you talked about global warming and Hitler. So I tried to explain why the logical leaps you took did not make sense.
Even if a president wanted to tackle climate change, a border wall or a Babylon tower they would be unable to get anything done before their term is up. I’m not old enough to know how things felt before Bush, but it seems like Congress used to actually exercise its power in the past
It was great that they contained Ebola. But, containing a disease that makes you literally bleed from your eyes and requires bodily fluid contact and has an outbreak that starts in a low-density area of Africa, is much different than containing a disease where people who have the disease may only have a fever, and has airborne transmission, and the outbreak starts in a heavily populated city in China.
I recall many “powerful” people and news orgs ridiculing Trump’s actions early in the pandemic even so far as claiming in some cases to never even use a vaccine created under his administration. A vaccine that the same people now herald as a savior once the current administration took charge. Is that the leadership that you are talking about?
The prior administration actively ignored and undermined all of that (as referenced in some of those prior links, and https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n... ).
The concern with a vaccine at the time was that it was going to be a mickey mouse one designed to show a win, rather than be effective, similar to Trump's claims about hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectants. But as people saw Moderna and Pfizer go through proper clinical trials, and be proved effective, even at the accelerated rate, and to be recommended by actual trusted medical professionals, they came on board. Well, obviously not everyone; now that it's been tested and shown to be safe it's Bill Gates' 5G mind control shot, despite Trump having received one.
Plenty of times in history. Consider the 20th century. Almost all of it was defined by global political leadership.
Are you trying to go down the NRx rabbit hole of "World War II could have been avoided"? It's basically a Godwin's Law at this point. Most of the other conflicts you mention are actually American and Russian conflicts, so you're also falling into the trap of "America is the world".
Currently more people have COVID than at any point in the past [1]. This means COVID is evolving faster, as it has more chances to mutate. The danger of a new vaccine evading strain emerging is increasing along with the number of global infections. There's a risk that the rate of mutation accelerates to the point where we can't get updated vaccines into people fast enough.
It's sobering that only 4% of the world has been fully vaccinated in 4 months [2] and the job will get more difficult once all the easy to access people are done.
[1] Assuming cases in a 2 week period is a rough proxy for number of currently infected people. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
China managed to pretty much completely mitigate hundreds of thousands of deaths just by having a reasonable policy response. It makes me embarrassed to live where I do
Seriously my dad is 85. Death rate in his age group is not 'low'. These kinds of people simply refuse to consider the implications.
We have it very good ... for now. But it is a tightrope walk until we can get the vaccines going properly.
Edit: brevity
What is IS about is the impact of the disease on public health. You'll remember, perhaps, "flatten the curve". The biggest, scariest problem is not how many people die from COVID-19 (or even suffer from long COVID, or after effects of the infection).
It's what happens when your public health system is overloaded. Every single thing that requires that system (i.e. more or less any healthcare situation that can't be resolved via teledoc or its equivalent) is now a potentially fatal situation. People die from COVID-19 because of the overload, but they would also die from car accidents, knife accidents, serious bacterial infections and more - all of which may have been successfully treated had the system not been overloaded.
The fear of COVID-19 should never have been about how many were going to die of it (or even suffer long term issues). That's certainly bad enough. But the fear was a system overload, with the concomittant side-effects of that. COVID-19 is extremely contagious, was a novel virus that no human had immunity to, and requires hospitalization in enough cases that public health system overload was extremely likely (and has happened in many places around the world, at least for some period).
The various parts of societies responsible for messaging failed quite significantly at getting this message across. Your message is yet another example of that.
> It's what happens when your public health system is overloaded. Every single thing that requires that system (i.e. more or less any healthcare situation that can't be resolved via teledoc or its equivalent) is now a potentially fatal situation. People die from COVID-19 because of the overload, but they would also die from car accidents, knife accidents, serious bacterial infections and more - all of which may have been successfully treated had the system not been overloaded.
It is believed that SARS-CoV-2 can easily mutate to evade current vaccines, and it is just a matter of time before it happens. People with chronic illnesses, along with the disabled, really need to be thinking in the very long-term, wherever they reside.
I have 2 rare immune-mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system, plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent). I live in Croatia, and I am culturally American. I hold dual citizenship in the US and the European Union (Croatia). I left for Croatia right at the start of the pandemic. I feel so lucky, and quite guilty, that my health has improved during the pandemic, thanks to Croatia. Many of my chronically ill and disabled American friends have become so much more sick during this pandemic. I am so worried for them, and I am fighting every single day for them.
The fear is real and will never go away: I now use a device that is much better and efficient than an N95 or KN95 mask when I am around people. It is called a PAPR (powered air purifying respirator) and the device filters out 99.8% of impurities. I will probably do this for the rest of my life, as getting sick is just not worth it. For people who have health issues, this is something to very seriously consider. You can easily die from having to defer medical care, and I cannot afford to be in that situation. That is why I decided to get a PAPR. Mine can be worn in a hospital bed, 24/7, including when lying down, and the battery lasts for 14 hours. You can also charge a spare battery while the PAPR is in use, and the PAPR that I have uses a standard USB-C charger, and the spare battery itself is inexpensive. The PAPR I have is called the Optrel Swiss Air [1]. It is a PAPR with a really nice mask form-factor, but it does not require a qualitative fit test (which N95 masks and other tight-fitting masks do) to ensure its seal and filtering capability. It filters 99.8% of impurities. Unfortunately, it does not have any source-control, as it has exhalation valves. But, I got a hoodie-styled balaclava which I put over the mask of the PAPR [2], for source control. This is probably the best PAPR to use if you are chronically ill and need protection long-term.
There is another PAPR worth looking into that is innovative and extremely cool looking, called the CleanSpace Halo [3]. It also has source control features [4][5], which makes it a good choice. However, it requires a qualitative fit test, to ensure proper fit, so filtration occurs at the guaranteed rate. But, the tight fitting mask affords it 99.97% filtration protection. You also have to be more careful when donning (putting on) the mask, to ensure that you have a proper seal, so that its filtration is guaranteed, for your safety, compared to the Optrel Swiss Air. It appears that you can use it lying down (but I am not sure). However, the seal of the mask (it is supposed to be a tight-fitting mask with a strong seal all the time--the Optrel Swiss Air does not have this issue) could be compromised very easily by lying down. So, the Optrel Swiss Air is probably a better choice, especially as it is does not require a tight seal. Also, the Optrel Swiss Air is a very small backpack device, so there is almost no weight on your neck, unlike the CleanSpace Halo. The CleanSpace Halo is extremely neat though!
[1] Optrel Swiss Air: https://optrel.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/swiss-air-folde...
[2] What I use for source control for the Optrel Swiss Air: https://www.etsy.com/listing/911933127/handmade-fleece-hoodi...
[3] CleanSpace Halo: https://cleanspacetechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/...
[4] Official CleanSpace Halo Source Control Apparatus: https://cleanspacetechnology.com/healthusa/wp-content/upload...
[5] DIY 3D Print for CleanSpace Halo Source Control Apparatus: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/cleanspace-halo-exha...
Of course, we could just throw our hands up and admit defeat and roll in whatever shit the dirtiest of us swine digs up and let bugs run rampant in the population, because it's "just the flu" or some idiotic crap like that.