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.
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Replying to @vlamers
Great point, but be careful throwing around "we", I was 5
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Replying to @VaccineJo @vlamers
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.
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Replying to @VaccineJo @vlamers
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
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Replying to @ENirenberg @vlamers
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)
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Replying to @VaccineJo @vlamers
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.
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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
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Replying to @baym @ENirenberg and
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.
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Replying to @zeynep @ENirenberg and
Yeah, and I guess that’s even more damning
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Replying to @baym @ENirenberg and
Literally the first January Nature paper on the virus says “good to assume airborne” (I paraphrase), same month Chinese health minister is giving press conferences pleading “watch for presymptomatic transmission”, China is using airborne PPE in hospitals etc. All by January 2020.
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Definitely, making our way would be hard, so many unknowns and uncertainty. But I was reading epi papers from Japan in February 2020 that nailed every crucial aspect: overdispersion, airborne, presymptomatic transmission. They were public! Anyway…
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