On Jan 29th, we had an excellent paper in the NEJM from Chinese scientists (finally being allowed to publish!) that made it clear that COVID clinical presentation wasn't like SARS—which always came with fever. I tweeted about it back then. It was alarming!https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1222662053329924098 …
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Then we had months of papers/cases showing some transmission from people who were either presymptomatic, or too mildly ill to notice, or were just plain asymptomatic. There are still unknowns but doesn't matter. The public health consequence is the same. Policy needed to adjust.
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Yes, the pandemic is like the fog of war. We go in with unknowns, some of which will take decades to unravel. It made sense to have baseline assumptions from SARS. But the fog means that one has to be on *most* alert for signals that the assumptions are not holding up.
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We all should have enormous sympathy for and gratitude towards the scientists. This is necessarily an error-prone process: high-stakes and rushed. The problem isn't "oh, someone got X wrong" but that the broader policy decision-making process was not what it should have been.
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I love it when they boast "we called for highest global alert back in January" but in reality they did it so with explicit advice against restriction of movement both then and a month later.https://twitter.com/tib/status/1260137466587164673 …
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Actually, I think "some people" have been informed and they made choices.. But the current focus should be on now, as you do for the past months.. still there is no vaccinehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/29/the-guardian-view-on-herd-immunity-yes-it-was-part-of-the-plan …
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Yes - English health authorities were still explicitly advising in mid-March that you _weren't_ infectious if you didn't have symptoms. It really worried me at the time.http://www.uncharted-worlds.org/blog/2020/04/misinformation-warning/ …
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Scientifically illiterate (this was taken by East Asian public health authorities) and risk illiterate (when faced with a potentially existential threat prepare for the worst case scenarios)
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