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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

This story is trying way too hard to be controversial, starting with the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”. His recounting of his personal Google search results is an amusing anecdote but it’s just showing his search history - the same search without a Google cookie turns up a couple of recent peer-reviewed studies which found smokers had higher risks of complications from infections.

The actual topic is more interesting than the framing: it’s been observed since pretty early on and covered in both conventional and social media but there wasn’t a firm explanation, and nobody sane was going to recommend taking up smoking as a preventative measure so it’s unclear what other coverage the author expected.

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> the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”.

This is a not an incorrect claim, it is a correct claim.

Do you have any citations? I saw both of those claims being discussed heavily on Twitter and Facebook during that time without those disclaimers so if there was some campaign it appears to have been pretty limited.

Anecdata but the more "official" covid subreddits /r/coronavirus and then /r/covid19 started off pretty free speech but then began bringing in more and more moderation and allowing less divergence from agreed upon narrative, if parent poster is a heavy Reddit user perhaps that is where their feelings come from.

That could definitely explain something like that - basically upgrading some random Reddit moderators to “Big Tech”, and substantially broadening the perceived scope.

> Anecdata but the more "official" covid subreddits /r/coronavirus and then /r/covid19 brought started off pretty free speech but then began bringing in more and more moderation (...)

Aren't you talking about the growth in conspiracy nuts fabricating all sorts of conspiracy theories and assorted loony claims, such as the infamous "covid is caused by 5G" idiot fest, which were flooding covid-related forums?

Are we now expected to turn a blind eye to all the sadly avoidable deaths that conspiracy nuts and antivaxxers with their bullshit claims brought upon the world in the last couple of years? I mean, countless people ended up queuing veterinarian supply stores to gargle on horse dewormer thanks to these morons. Depicting these loonies as innocent truth-seekers that just asked questions and fought conspiracies is intellectually dishonest.

> “Are we now expected to…”

I think you are jumping waaay past the assertion you are replying to.

Here YouTube itself is stating you can’t contradict local health authorities on COVID transmission:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en

It’s a really stupid policy because the ‘truth’ depends on who your local health authorities are, they can easily contradict.

Given that YouTube is region aware, why is it stupid? Just index to whatever the local health authority says and show only items which agree with that.

It’s stupid because there is a pretense they are defending the truth, while the difference between what local authorities claim make it plainly obvious there either is no truth or if there is a truth it can’t ever be what half of the authorities are saying and thus what YouTube is defending.

And that’s of course just an example the dumb anti science stance of forbidding disagreement with the ‘scientific’ status quo, it really puts YouTube in the position of the church silencing Galileo. The church was as sure they were right as are those local authorities.

The policy was first applied in May 2020 so it wouldn't have been relevant during most of the period in question but even if it had, the examples do not make it seem like they'd be going after someone who said that an N95 would protect you against COVID-19.

http://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://support.g...

Part of why I asked for specific examples is that a common problem you'll see in alternative health circles is where someone will say something which isn't completely wrong in the middle of a bunch of blather which is, and then when they're moderated they'll claim that the former was the reason and a bunch of people will hear that claim without the full original context.

Both the original SARS and coronaviruses in general are known to spread via droplets in the air, and from the beginning folks assumed this was one way SARS-COV-2 spread.

What was unknown was how long the virus could remain viable after the droplets landed on surfaces. If it is a long time, then mishandling a soiled mask could easily undo any benefit of wearing it. This is the same reason people were washing their groceries and mail. We now know that is spreads very poorly this way, so we wear masks and we don’t wash our groceries anymore.

It was apparent very early that there were spread patterns only explainable by aerosols. The Diamond Princess was the earliest publicized example, with cases occurring onboard despite isolation in cabins. Japanese experts understood the lesson immediately and implemented a "three C's" approach to counter airborne spread: avoid close contact, closed spaces, and crowds.

Western governments and experts and the WHO instead took a "lalalala I can't see this" and to this day many still deny airborne transmission and advocate droplet and fomite precautions.

There was not in fact any great mystery about aerosol spread unless you were positively convinced it was impossible. The early tech fact checking was based on this denial, rather than a good faith uncertainty.

Zeynep Tufecki wrote a good article about how airborne spread was resisted: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airbo...

There's a paywall on nytimes so I can't confirm if it's the same topic, but see also https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

The screw-up the title refers to is that the medical definition of the droplet/aerosol threshold has been wrong for most of a century, and the source only just tracked down in late 2020/early 2021.

Also buried in there is an interesting tidbit that experts resist aerosol spread in general because it's too similar to the long-discredited miasma theory, so each virus has had to individually be proven in a lab to have aerosol spread before it's acceptable to say so.

This is true but a more subtle distinction about size of droplet.

If the virus spread primarily by aerosols then cloth and surgical masks would have little preventative value. But we know that they do have preventative value.

The reality as understood today is a mix of droplet sizes. Larger droplets carry more load and hence more risk but work over a smaller radius. But smaller droplets can carry enough load to infect; especially since later variants seem more infectious (i.e. require a smaller load to gain a foothold).

Not so. Surgical masks still filter about 50-60% of aerosols. They are made of similar material to N95 masks, only issue is fit.

A 50-60% reduction has substantial effects! There's been a lot of "perfect is the enemy of the good, and the good is useless" in this pandemic, but we know that 100% of people do not get instantly infected when exposed, so dropping levels by half will have a substantial impact, especially if the infected source wears such a mask too

Just to be clear, I am not in any way defending the CDC’s botching the understanding that COVID’s primary means of spreading is airborne. I just remember reading about this on social media, including Zeynep’s many posts, without ever seeing those moderated. Given the general tenor of this post, I suspect that the author might have been lumping reasonable claims many experts supported in with more speculative claims.

While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread, it's hard to say that stuff like Diamond Princess could ONLY be explained by airborne spread. It was early in the pandemic, the disease was poorly understood. It's hard to know if the quarantine was effective--passengers could have continued socializing, sick workers distributing food may have been spreading it, etc.

It's a big leap from a single data point.

The more damning issue is that the assumption that it wasn't airborne in the first place wasn't really well founded.

> While it took way way way too long for the scientific community to recognize airborne spread

I would make that more specifically as referring to the Western public health establishment, especially the CDC and WHO. Actual scientists were comfortable saying recognition was overdue fairly early on, reaching the point in July 2020 where a large group published an open letter:

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2311/5867798

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

Ok, best explained. If you had no prior bias, airborne spread was most likely cause for Diamond Princess pattern. Western society and WHO had a 100 year prior bias against accepting that respiratory diseases spread via the air.

It all comes back to the victory of germ theory over miasma theory. Germ theory is accurate but people got overzealous. Not all germs need be fomites.

The issue of an airborne disease is not just a matter of droplets, but whether infectious particles are aerosolized such that they hang in the air for hours. The 6 feet social distancing rule only makes sense in the context of droplet based, non-aerosol transmission. It was only after more than a year into the pandemic that CDC acknowledged that COVID is airborne and updated their guidance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-airbor...

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

“Airborne” and “aerosols” are not synonyms. You’re right about aerosols but the question above is whether we knew that the virus traveled in a manner that a mask could interfere with. That includes short-range droplets, not just aerosols.

We knew very early on that droplets were likely and that masks could block many droplets. The question was whether the mask would itself become a major vector in the process.

No, the question was whether it was droplet or aerosol. Experts insisted on droplet even though evidence pointed at aerosol, and cloth and surgical masks don't block aerosols, the particles are too small. That's what people are referring to when they say "masks don't work".

You just made a claim, about a claim, about a claim, about a claim.

My claim is that it is getting too deep.

The actual reason is probably unrelated to the act of smoking. Smokers are different than the general population in a number of ways - Smokers are addicted to an appetite suppressant and are skinnier than the general population. Since obesity is linked to poor covid outcomes that could play a role. - I'd guess that smokers are younger on average since, grimly, they don't make it into old age as often (or they quit). Age is also linked to poor covid outcomes. - Smokers spend more time outdoors and are more likely to sit outdoors at restaurants/bars.

It's definitely an interesting statistical effect but I don't think there's any actionable information in the correlation.

Isn't this not actually what the user you are responding to was saying? Smokers have worse outcomes, but they seem to get it less. All of your points address better outcomes, with the exception of the outdoors bit.

My point is that the data is messy. Smokers aren't a randomized subset of the general population.

Smokers who took nicotine during recovery, recovered quicker.

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