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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I don't think that's entirely fair. Showing airborne transmission is a dominant mode of spread (as opposed to droplet) is extremely difficult and the paradigmatic dichotomy we had in place didn't help things either.
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Replying to @ENirenberg @zeynep and
The thought of covid being airborne wasn’t helpful. It meant creating isolation rooms and wards with resources we didn’t have and weren’t clearly necessary. In March 2020 during stressful meetings every time someone asked “what if it’s airborne” it totally shut down conversation.
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Replying to @baym @jessecouk and
Yes, it wasn’t pleasant as a thought, but I think it would have been very helpful. The countries that did exactly that early on are doing so much better now. And so many health-care worker deaths around the world. It’s not like we avoided the consequences.
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It’s not that it wasn’t just unpleasant we were profoundly underesourced without guidance. A pure airborne model would mean N95s for all and negative pressure. We didn’t have those rooms or masks.
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Replying to @jessecouk @zeynep and
Still, I don’t buy that the inconvenience of reality is a sufficient reason to ignore it
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Worse, actively deny it for about another year or so, and then kinda quietly acknowledge it with the lingering result that schools have tons of plexiglass (makes ventilation worse, associated with higher infection risks) etc.
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Moving on, we now have “no evidence that the bright red line that appears immediately on that antigen test on day six corresponds to infectivity.” If we haven’t studied this *almost two years in*, not sure the interpretation is that “it does not” rather than “don’t know for sure”
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We have evidence antigen test corresponds with culturable virus. But I think contact tracing performed in Taiwan in 2020 is doing a lot of the leg work here. A potential limitation is that contact tracing usually has a cutoff date.
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