It seems the reasoning by officials is, "Yes, it's airborne, but there's not enough N95 masks for everyone so we don't want to cause panic or an N95 mask shortage for doctors and nurses by admitting it's airborne."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/ski-party-pa...
Turns out the "don't close borders" advice was a cached thought related to a plague outbreak in India over 25 years ago, and welded in place by politics.
Who says that saying its airborne "has" to mean that certain procedures have to be adopted? That's not a rule of the universe, it's a rule that humans came up with and agreed upon and humans have the power to fix. We distilled down a set of physical principles into a set of guidelines, forgot the underlying physical principles and now operate purely in the world of the manmade guidelines, totally oblivious to when the guidelines are no longer reflecting the physical reality.
To be a bit more concrete, consider the following: if you have a system where people are not encouraged to follow the rules as written, they will work against the spirit of what is written as well as what is actually written. If you have a system where people are discouraged from not following the rules, they may still engage in things that do not follow the spirit or written rules, but there is some accountability. But you can also try to work around what’s written to follow the intent as well, and I think that is where you get weird, counterintuitive, “stupid” results that can still “make sense” (as opposed to clearly corrupt cases where it is “stupid” and also does not make sense.)
I think people, especially literal minded as many here are, prefer concrete rules. But the knock-on effect is that its not easy to simply proclaim they’re made up any time it’s inconvenient, and it really shouldn’t be. Perhaps, in fact in my opinion, definitely, the “escape hatches“ for when rules don’t work out practically are broken, but I still do prefer having rigid standards, especially for health.
Hopefully, although it is probably not going to happen, organizations can have some postmortem-style reflections on what went wrong, so that hopefully next time we can be better prepared. History loves repeating though, so, you know.
Or perhaps in a different light, neither do the people who would've died if we had chosen a different branching path with negative consequences. There is some implication that there was a better outcome easily available and that is not clear at all. There should've been one, but there wasn't necessarily.
Also how do you keep information from the public without keeping it from hospitals. Widespread publicising of a controversial tidbit to hospitals would leak within the minute if not within the hour ..
I'm not saying I agree with how it was handled at all .. I'm merely pointing out the fairly obvious realities to the claims made, which seem strong on principle but lacking in pragmatism and consideration of the realities.
We would have had to prepare with 10 years of 24/6 manufacturing of N95s to stop an airborne virus, which is why the most effective response is social distancing (not going to work, the 6 ft thing is bunk).