Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

Fauci, and way too many Medical Doctors, seemed guenuinly confused over the efficacy of wearing a mask to prevent the spread of he Covid virus.

A lot medical professionals were claiming the average person wearing a mask will make things worse by putting it on ineffectively.

I heard one doctor say, "All it takes is one virus particle to become infected. I haven't heard any doctor talk about Viral Loads, even now.

My point is our medical professionals seemed as much in the "I just don't know?" catagory as the rest of us with this virus.

I'm still shocked researchers found a vaccine.

View on HN

Zeynep Tufekci published an excellent article about this. Her thesis is that medical dogma insisted COVID (and other infections) spread through droplets and not aerosols. Social distancing is enough to prevent infection from droplets because they don't travel far. That, it turns out, is wrong, and COVID can spread through smaller respiratory particles that can float, making social distancing alone ineffective.

https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-few-sentences-that-explain-...

There was information that it was aerosolized from the early days (March)

We were lied to because america did not stockpile enough masks for first responders

I don’t think it was that simple.

If the Wired article, which was downvoted to oblivion, is accurate then the WHO and the CDC (who parroted the WHO) bear a great deal of responsibility.

They shutdown scientists who were telling them that Covid was spreading as an aerosol, way back in early 2020.

The WHO now want MORE power, yet they’re not accepting accountability nor cleaning house.

I've read the article, I do just want to clarify the statement "making social distancing alone ineffective."

It's still true that if you are covid suceptible, and if a covid-shedding person is walking around, you should try to be as far as possible from the covid. But, a brief close pass e.g. on the sidewalk, isn't as risky as sharing a 20'x10' office for hours, even if you stay >6ft the entire time.

The strange thing is that we have loads of research done over decades about all of this. It appears that the prominent doctors on the news don't know anything about it. Everything pumped out for publicity is about a sixth grade understanding of biology and epidemiology; but we know a lot more, it's just that Fauci doesn't talk about it and neither does the nightly news. If the role of journalists and the government was to inform, we would have well written articles on the loads of studies we have.

Journalists should give advanced information in digestible form about topics you didn't need to know about, but which are currently relevant. Instead, we get sixth grade hand waving in propaganda form.

Things like adaptive immune response, T-cells, immune escape, antibody dependent enhancement, viral loads, and lots of other things could be explained well but simply. It's a tragedy of modernity that we have so much information and so little understanding.

People can spend their entire lives studying one tiny aspect of our immune system; there are so many interacting, irreducibly complex systems that the average layman can be overwhelmed.

But there are simple things that can be explained visually. See, for instance, this video of Japanese scientists illuminating airborne droplets with green lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyZm6dx9Hss

Now, the contention here isn't that there are important concepts that should be explained to layman; the contention here is that there are important concepts that actual scientists need to explain to the decision-makers at the CDC.

If you’re in the ‘I just don’t know?’ category, how is it defensible to force others to adhere to your apparently unfounded strategies?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com