Tragedy is that it was worse than forget. Spring, Summer & even Fall 2020 was full of people with a lot of credentials, reach and power pushing back or actively blocking the idea aerosol transmission as a key driver! Honestly wouldn't have believed it if I didn't live through it.https://twitter.com/sarahzhang/status/1363956932768333831 …
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Replying to @zeynep
Did people push back on suggestions to open windows and spend more time outside? I didn't see that. The lines of this debate were often unclear and unscientific. I do agree with your sentiment that we want to give people better intuition about risks.
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Replying to @WesPegden
Actually, yes. People have been trying to get those into the guidelines and received enormous pushback, still. Many cases where people were banned from opening windows. And yes, parks were being closed around the world and people were *banned* from going outdoors.
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Replying to @zeynep
Hmm yes you're right that there are still a lot of fear about outdoors, and that it's driven by misguided policy. But the parts of the debate I saw on this platform were not about these issues, but about things like "how much would portable HEPAs in classrooms help?".
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Replying to @WesPegden @zeynep
Like is the issue more about calcification and stubbornness of big national and world health organizations, instead of groupthink in the broader scientific community?
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Replying to @WesPegden
I spent months writing & talking to experts about aerosol transmission. It went from "it's an issue only for aerosol-generating procedures" to "maybe it happens but it's actually more droplets" to "we don't know" to now which is "okay it's a thing but let's not update guidelines"
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Replying to @zeynep @WesPegden
There are key scientific but crucial errors in the knowledge (literal errors, as in wrong numbers for key but crucial parameters) that the smallish but actual crowd of experts in the field have not been able to get the agencies etc. to correct.
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Replying to @zeynep @WesPegden
It will soon become "oh, the knowledge advanced that's why we updated it" because willful amnesia is very human. It's true we have some new knowledge, but if you look at the actual evidence folks trying to communicate in Feb/March/April had enormous amount of evidence.
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Replying to @zeynep
Yes the feet-dragging from WHO, etc is not excusable. I do think that quantitatively we still understand these issues very poorly (e.g., indoors, am I 5x more likely to be infected at 6ft instead of 12ft, or 100x?) which may explain some of the messiness of the paradigm shift.
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It wasn't just foot dragging because of inertia though. They didn't believe it, or worried that it would displace hand-washing. (I was told this, directly). This is what I mean by the amnesia—I wish it were a fight in the weeds like that about the precise cut-offs or knowledge.
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Replying to @zeynep
Ok, wow. That is much worse than I thought - worrying about "displacing handwashing".
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Replying to @WesPegden
Yep. Risk compensation as a threat is very dominant way of thinking (look at it even now with the post-vaccine mask messaging) plus, in fairness, many of these people fought the good fight for years *in hospitals* trying to get other doctors to wash their hands. Last war and all.
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