Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne

Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire.

We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin".

Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up.

And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.

> have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics

Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. New rules are announced and rescinded a week later (e.g. Germany not ending quarantine of infected after all this week). During lockdowns, people were allowed to work in the same offices if required, but meeting anyone from outside your household was forbidden. Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach. I personally experienced police harassment for leaving the house. Green pass validity is still jumping back and forth (Austria). Let's not even get started on the endless amounts of lies, inaccuracies and moving goal posts surrounding the disappointing covid vaccines, the blacked out contracts to buy BILLIONS of them and the rejection of natural immunity after infection. Our governments have absolutely failed us and lost the last ounces of our trust they had.

The most obvious one was on masks and their lack of protection, hammered week after week by the gov spokesperson, until there was enough masks to be distributed. Then masks started to be pushed by the gov, people were encouraged to make their own, and we all know the story from there.

There was no lack of information or evidence, and they paid a lot to keep a full stock of emergency masks up until two years before the pandemic stroke (and then fucked up by giving up on emergency preparation). It was just plain criminal lying to avoid being confronted.

Corona has given Western governments a taste of power and they’ve used that to silence critics and restrict civil liberties - often based on faulty data.

Yes we’ve seen a lot of fuck up, but given the insane circumstances things have been communicated and handled way better than I would have expected. Of course you will have a lot of contradictory or stupid decisions when you have to adapt that fast to a rapidly spreading, deadly virus that blocks your entire hospital system. The scale of the problem was insane.

We now have a sizable percentage of people who not only don’t care what the WHO has to say, but also want to outright cut funding to the organization. Great outcome. Panick avoided.

No they're not. The only person in the Executive branch (which includes all cabinet positions) who is elected is the President, with whoever their VP is riding along on the ticket..

  UK     21,461,556 cases, 313,247 cases/1M,  2,468 deaths/1M, 68,513,217 Pop
  Japan 6,832,377 cases,  54,313 cases/1M, 226 deaths/1M,  125,795,510 Pop

(data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...

Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be really hard to correct later on, and needs to be corrected quickly and loudly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission

It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine! On the flip side, it was aggravating to see moronic restaurants building enclosed outdoor tents to meet the requirements of "outdoor dining". Sure, they meet the legal requirements, but for the health requirements?

Droplets only? Do you not find sneezing to be a highly effective method of spreading airborne pathogens?

> If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.

You’re essentially saying, “if the virus was airborne it could be spread through coughs too” to which the NHK study says, “yes, and sneezes.”

But they studied coughs too https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU

Bwahahahaaaaaaah! Covid strikes again! You cannot get away!

At the time of the outbreak, the US administration was under a populist leader who saw the virus as an almost personal attack; emphasizing that mask wearing, and the implicit recognition that the virus spread by air, was a political symbol directed against him.

Funny how people forget this.

No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.

Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?

What would be your preferred approach?

We have learned that while medical doctors are domain experts in treating diseases, they are not domain experts in how infectious diseases spread around. Some doctors follow the front lines of science, whereas other doctors refuse to update their knowledge, and stick to what their old textbooks say.

And we have learned that when it comes to airborne diseases, even epidemiologists are not domain experts. Epidemiologist are more trained in statistics and abstract mathematical models. With statistics, they know how to observe epidemics. With mathematical models, that can make bad predictions on how the epidemic progresses, but these predictions turned out to be wrong more often than not. Now nobody makes these predictions anymore, they have lost credibility.

But they are not trained in physics to actually understand the physical mechanisms of how the virus can spread from one person to others.

And that public health is also a matter of economics and engineering, and again medical doctors are not good domain experts here. Medical doctors can advice you not to drink dirty water, but population scale water hygiene is a matter of civil engineering. If we want air hygiene, we have to turn to engineers.

I agree you cannot go down the rabbit hole by checking what everyone is saying. But there are experts in other domains who can present proof in their domain. And then it's silly not to listen.

He really looked at a few superspread events and drilled down in how it could've spread.

People want a lot of things. That does not automatically mean that appealing to it is the right thing to do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...

They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.

Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]

> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.

> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.

https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...

Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.

What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.

I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):

Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.

So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.

To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...

Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.

No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.

Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.

This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.

Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:

1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.

2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.

[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.

("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)

The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.

Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.

In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.

The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.

But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.

To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?

That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.

So yeah blind disrespect for authorities has a much better track record.

But at a deeper level, it shows that they should have been more careful with the messaging from the start. The actual message should have been "There's currently not enough evidence to say COVID is airborne" which is a lot easier to correct to "Actually, it appears that it is airborne" than going from saying it definitely wasn't and being completely wrong...

The masks thing was also just crazy. Completely indefensible, claiming that "we had to lie because otherwise people would have panic-bought masks" just destroys trust even more into the future...

Exhibit A:

"This fact X is correct and we as institution C Org have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise wrong".

Changing this later to "This fact Y (that people were asking about, shh) is true. We won't mention that it contradicts X that much. We won't say we were wrong. We will say that as institution C Org, we have institutional knowledge that makes us right and anything otherwise is wrong"

VS

Exhibit B:

"We as A Org, have reason to believe that X is the most true thing we know given current knowledge. We acknowledge fact Y exists and are actively investigating it and its implications. For people searching for guidance, A Org recommends actions S,T, and U. We will continue to research and revise information where necessary"

---

I feel like Exhibit A, which is something I see a lot from government entities (confirmation bias makes me want to add "in the US") makes a changing of mind a thing of pride since you've staked a bet on it. A bet which usually is condescending and says "I'm right, you're wrong"

Exhibit B leaves the hatches open while still getting a firm message down based on today's knowledge.

Sadly there's no A/B testing we can turn to to know which approach would be better. But just out of sensibility, I wish more entities engaged in the latter approach

The evidence for airborne transmission was really low quality at first. It's pretty normal, but very unfortunate, that people get primed to their early experience of new theory and can't see above it.

I think you are talking about Fauci's flip-flop here. The point is not about his flip-flop on mask mandate. The point was about his confidence. You do not go and say confidently, on National TV, that masks don't stop the virus and that people should stop buying masks from stores as it is needed for emergency workers. Then turn around half a year later, after the pandemic is in full swing and say that masks are important as it stops the virus. Both times he said it he said that it is based on credible scientific evidence. This is what ticks people off.

If you do not know something and have no facts to back up your claim, don't say it. If you want to still say it (as you don't want people to hoard masks), appeal to the people to not hoard masks out of fear as those masks are needed for the frontline workers. Better still, get the US Government to buy those masks or ban stores from selling masks to general public until you have equipped frontline workers. Then ease the ban. Do not lie by saying that masks don't prevent virus as it sends a negative message and reassurance that everything is fine. Then turn around half a year later and say it is dangerous! This sort of flip-flop is not acceptable to anyone. Especially when it comes to disaster response.

You are an expert for a reason. People trust your words. You are in a position of power when it comes to your own field. Don't degrade/misuse that position.

The reason WHO lost its credibility is because of it shutting down alternative takes, continuous flip-flops and ever changing directives/mandates.

It would have been better if WHO started by saying "We don't know. It is a novel virus. We are still learning as we go along. We will issue directives as and when we get more information. Please note that these directives are temporary and only based on evidence we have right in front of us. If things change, we will keep you informed. We still aren't sure what to make of it". This is all WHO needed to do. This would have instilled a bit of fear yes (which in hindsight was actually needed to make lockdowns effective and mask mandates effective). You took away the "fear" factor at the very beginning of the virus outbreak and then when people got the message, you try to tell them to now start fearing the virus. Why would people buy your argument? And how many of them will take you seriously after such a drastic flip-flop? Rather than confidently put out statements that the virus isn't airborne or doesn't spread through contact WHO should have been honest from the start. That it doesn't know anything and is learning as we go along. That the virus maybe dangerous and that we have to be cautious.

Another big one is that WHO announced it is not human-to-human transmissible: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152

"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."

There was no disclaimer to say that this investigation is ongoing. That this preliminary data collected will have a final investigation as well. That it can change as more data becomes available. Communication is key in disaster response. You do not say anything with 100% certainty if you do not know it to be true.

A lot of people who looked into COVID were saying this doesn't add up. They were were framed to be in the 'small vocal minorities that say all sorts of crap'.

"the system" was all pointing and looking at each other. Big tech censored content that was deemed misinformation by the standards du jour.

"the system" failed what it said it would do, follow the science. And the WHO has been a major part of that system.

To me the paths look like:

- acknowledge your mistakes: some people will accept based on your attitude, others will resent you being wrong.

- don't acknowledge: people who would have otherwise accepted mistakes now resent your stubbornness. Others will still resent you for being wrong.

I don't think "China will forever be remembered as the wannabe superpower that was so scared of the truth that it knowingly fucked over the rest of the world for more than 2 years" because that's not even what anyone remembers them as today, outside the US. And even in the US I don't think that's going to matter or create any semblence of a legacy in any way that matters. China was very quick to rebound from the economic downturn and as far as I can tell came out ahead of everyone else.

Not to mention that every single other country fucked up their pandemic response so badly that getting angry at China requires several layers of indirection (though some US media has been better at making this detour).

News about an "unknown decease" was right there on TV even as early as December 31[1]. On the same day, the news was already reported world-wide[2].

Later on, Western reporting said that China "lied about transmissibility" (i.e. that China said it was "not transmissible"), but what they actually said was that "evidence of transmissibility was not clear (at that moment)" — when knowledge of the virus was only a few weeks old and when Covid was nowhere near as transmissible as it is now.

Then later on, stories about "cover-ups" appeared, mostly referring to Li Wenliang, but these are complete misrepresentations.

- Li Wenliang was not a "whistleblower", his social media posts merely leaked through his contacts. And Li Wenliang's post was posted on Deccember 30, but literally the next day the case was already escalated to WHO[3].

- Li Wenliang also wasn't the first doctor who discovered something was wrong: dr Zhang Jixian was, who discovered the case many days before Li's actions. It was dr Zhang who worked on the process of escalating to China's national CDC and to the WHO.[4]

- Li Wenliang was never arrested, jailed or punished. The police merely reprimanded him. He had to sign an NDA promising not to spread rumors (the rumor being that "it was SARS", when it wasn't SARS and nobody knew what it was). That's it. He wasn't detained, he could go on working right after.

- Later on, the judge judged in favor of Li Wenliang, ruling that the police's behavior was unacceptable. The police then apologized.[5]

There were also stories about how China "infected the world" by deliberately allowing international flights from Wuhan — except China didn't do that, all flights from Wuhan were cancelled with the exception of diplomatic expatriation flights.

When I arrived back in the Netherlands by February 1, Wuhan had already been locked down for a week. And what did the western world do? They pretended like the virus would stay in China. Nobody took any measures to prepare for COVID. Nobody on the airport asked for my contact details. I called the Dutch CDC but there was no way to get tested, not even if I pay for it myself.

Meanwhile the media was full of stories about how "lockdowns are human rights violations", that "it's just a flu" and that "free press would have prevented this strategy". There were no "China was not forthcoming" stories back then — only stories gleeing about how big of a disaster China was. Only after it was apparent that it wasn't just a flu did the "China didn't warn us" stories began.

After it was apparently that the western "free press" failed to prevent the epidemic from spreading to their own territories (even with China's super-obvious warning of locking down Wuhan), did they take responsibility for the fact that they blamed it on China's "lack of free press" (even though China's press did report)? Of course not, they just swept that narrative under a carpet.

Then a year later, Delta appeared in India. Did anybody criticize India for not having stopped Delta despite already knowing about COVID for a year? Of course not: only if it happened in China does it deserve criticism. That China actually did report? Not important, we'll just keep pretending they didn't.

The problem isn't that "China wasn't forthcoming", the problem is that the west does not treat China fairly and has a tendency to scapegoat China. "China wasn't forthcoming" is merely an excuse to cover up the west's own failures and to stick to old prejudices about how China is a hellhole that can never do anything right.

I didn't use to care all that much about western reporting on China, but being on the ground in China during the early days of COVID opened my eyes and incensed me. It made me so angry to see all the lies in the media. It shocked me how ridiculously different reality was from western reporting.

What's more shocking to me was that I discovered that during the 25 years in the Netherlands, western media had effectively been lying to me about China the whole time. The false reporting about COVID was not a one-off fluke: I discovered that western media had always behaved that way (with other China-related topics), and will continue to behave that way. So if anyone wonders why I say things that sound like a "paid shill" (just to get ahead of the inevitable accusations just because I have a different opinion about China): this is why.

[1] http://tv.cctv.com/v/v1/VIDEZAj6WeYo0NLoxitYHgAd191231.html?...

[2] https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1YZ0GP

[3] https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

[4] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-charges-a...

[5] https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2044252365/politie-wuhan-doo...

This is the Fauci argument. It doesn't work.

Aside from being incredibly Condescending to assume the masses are too stupid to handle the truth...

All it does is open you up to criticism from people that understand basic logic.

Those criticisms then spread between these "many people".

On the other hand, if you told the truth up front, you might have "many people" misunderstand something, but you have the upside of the many other people being able to argue why they're wrong over the following months. Eventually truth and facts prevail.

You maintain credibility with people that do understand science, and you get eventual credibility from those who misunderstand.

Sure some will never change but you were going to instantly lose credibility to them either way.

The idea is that science should be continuous discovery process - scientists are meant to be acting in good faith, not hiding or 'managing' information. If we are genuinely seeking understanding (not attempting to sell people on a particular viewpoint), why shouldn't new information be widely disseminated?

Whatever has been going on, it is clear that from the start this has been a massively politicised process directing the world's governments. That it is so politicised means that I personally have very little faith in the scientific proclamations that are handed down.

They decided to spend public trust to what end?

Flip flopping for all the right reasons makes all the difference as G-man would say.

Fault as in: someone should pay for it.

Definitely NOT a “honest mistake”

The WHO is doing damage control.

Only in the rest of the world. In the US that word was redefined to mean "people I do not like" and they use "libertarian" instead for the original meaning.

As if clothes weren’t already a requirement for visiting your public venue of choice.

Where's the bug tracker for humanity?