In the past week:
- The CDC director acknowledged and downplayed the severity of omicron by stating the vast majority of hospitalized patients have multiple comorbidities. This has been true since the start of the pandemic, but is only being addressed now.
- CDC and several states are making the distinction between "hospitalized from" and "hospitalized with" COVID. This has also been a point of contention for the past 2 years. For some reason we're changing that now. Your guess is as good as mine, but I'd bet it has to do with the omicron spike making govt. middle manager KPI graphs look bad.
"Trust the science" is a nonsense term. We're being asked to "Trust the policymakers". Why should we? Ok, so they're informed by science. But if the scientific consensus is obviously in rapid flux and can't be used to predict anything, then why should we trust the policies or their makers?
There's a reason emergency services dispatchers have such a stressful job, they're making these decisions all the time based on very limited amounts of data. Unfortunately we're all living in a situation right now where we're making emergency decisions as new information emerges.
Not me, but you seem to be hooked on fear. May you find some peace in life.
This is an unnecessary insult. You could have left it with "I'm comfortable not treating this as an emergency situation." I'm not sure what you gained from this post. Hopefully you got the performative internet points you were looking for.
Furthermore, there is now widespread suspicion that the CDC's current recommendations are not based on science anymore: for example, the 5-day vs 10-day isolation period.
What's especially bad is the advice not to use tests after 5 days, followed a few days later by advice that tests are optional after 5 days -- everyone knows that advice would be different if there were not test shortages. That's not science, that's pragmatism, and that's fine and they ought to just say so, but the CDC continues to make the transparently false claim that their advice is based purely on science.
That really hurts the CDC's credibility -- now, when they make an announcement, we all have to ask ourselves whether it's truly based on science. Smart people of all political stripes now realize this. Even the liberal cable TV talking heads are attacking the CDC over this.
People will put up with just about anything if they think there's a good reason for it, but if instructions seem arbitrary then people tend to stop giving officials the benefit of the doubt.
Transparency can go along way towards maintaining public trust. I'd rather the CDC err on the side of over-sharing than the reverse.