Imagine if two years ago, the narrative was "Sure, the novel coronavirus is more transmissible than SARS-1, but thankfully it's also less severe!"https://twitter.com/MDaware/status/1477660022788313092 …
Complex systems, wicked problems. Society, technology, science and more. @UNC professor. @NYTimes columnist. My newsletter is @insight: http://www.theinsight.org
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Jo Walker 🏳️⚧️ Retweeted Seth Trueger
Imagine if two years ago, the narrative was "Sure, the novel coronavirus is more transmissible than SARS-1, but thankfully it's also less severe!"https://twitter.com/MDaware/status/1477660022788313092 …
Jo Walker 🏳️⚧️ added,
I was thinking about this yesterday. Have we collectively lost the memory of SARS? I wonder if we could have better connected that at the beginning of the pandemic.
Great point, but be careful throwing around "we", I was 5
I also think about how we were primed by the memories of 2009 H1N1, which generally had less of an impact than feared, and Ebola and Zika, which had limited impact in the global north.
Yeah this biased me too. I figured it would be like SARS where it might get some spread around the world but with low case numbers overall and good containment. And then everything went to shit
I also remember the bits of "good news" that were clung to at the beginning. "No evidence of human-to-human transmission!" (until there was), "No infections of HCWs!" (until there was), "no traveler cases!" (until there was), "no deaths" (until there was)
I think a lot about the communication blunders in the beginning. “No asymptomatic transmission” was a huge one. And the airborne thing could have been better explained to the public.
This entire thing has been one example of mistaking “we don’t have solid evidence of X happening” with “X doesn’t happen” regardless of whether it makes sense. It’s been an abject failure of medicine’s fanatical empiricism
I don’t disagree—a lot of “no evidence that” was “we don’t know, yet”—but the process by which airborne transmission kinda sorta finally got acknowledged also shows a strong tendency to *reject* empirical data as valid until it became overwhelming. It’s more selective empiricism.
If anything pre/asymptomatic transmission also fits selective empricism. The lone ship doctor at Diamond Princess—ordinarily attending to hangovers etc.—had concluded presymptomatic transmission was driving cases by February 9, 2020. Epi papers from China stated it outright, too.
I also remember the “no evidence that infection will confer any immunity” in Spring/Summer of 2020. I guess hitherto study and science of other viruses and all the other human HCoV wasn’t evidence? Weirdly atheoretical stance.
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