The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill | Hacker News Reader

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

wired.com

53 pointsomnibrain7 comments

Very interesting. Good to see that eventually science does get it right.

I think the obvious reaction of getting angry at the arrogant experts who were wrong, is a bad reaction. This is just how people work. Changing a closely hels belief is hard. Even harder if you have been making important decisions based on that belief.

All we can really expect of science is to be slightly better at this. That means changing those beliefs sooner when strong evidence presents itself. And that means being slightly more open to 'outsiders' with expert knowledge that can be useful here.

Agreed. But perhaps it's not too much to ask that

1) Infectious disease experts should have known this extremely basic fact. We know all sorts of weird details about the molecular biology of viruses (which we have used to great effect), but apparently we were still stuck in the 1800's when it came to the main route of infection, and

2) the establishment should be vocal about our mistake, take it very seriously, and perhaps reflect on whether we have spent our funding in the best possible way. Perhaps some of the billion of dollars we spend on tests and cures could be directed towards a better understanding of the true basics - how infections spread in the first place.

I myself work at the national influenza laboratory, and I find it nothing less than embarrassing that our field dropped the ball this hard when it really mattered, and infuriating that we are this slow to acknowledge that we messed up that we need god damn journalists to correct us on the basic science.

I wouldn't blame infectious disease experts too much. This is essentially multi-disciplinary research. You need to be BOTH a physics expert in fluid dynamics and a virologist with a deep understanding of how virus infect the respiratory tract to crack this. Not surprised it took a pandemic to correct the error. The combination of skills would not have been put together in other circumstances.

I don't really agree. All it takes is an unwillingness to simply repeat unsourced dogma as fact, and actually ask some blindingly obvious questions. The root cause of the "mistake" wasn't a lack of fluid dynamics expertise - it was motivated reasoning, which was also terribly in evidence during the pandemic: it can't be aerosol, because that would be terribly inconvenient.

Medicine strikes me as a branch of science unusually prone to dogma. I wonder if that's at all related to the punishing hazing ritual of med school, where one is required to do nothing but regurgitate dogma for many years on very little sleep - no creativity or asking questions allowed.

We're wired to come up with simple heuristics like "smaller than 5 microns bad" and "larger than 5 microns fine". It's much harder to hold a true model of the world in our heads: a list of every different disease, how big particles containing it need to be to lead to respiratory infection, and how each type of virus and bacteria behave under different atmospheric conditions (humidity, temperature, pressure). While we can try and not rely on over-simplified heuristics, to really ensure that our heuristics aren't killing people we'll need to eventually offload a lot of this type of fine-grained simulation/prediction to software.

The issue here, though, is not that there was an arbitrary cutoff of 5 µm, but that the beliefs about how the disease actually spread between humans were flawed - not just simplified - and that the mistake led to bad public health measures during a deadly pandemic.

> In the Before Times, she would have acquired the book through interlibrary loan. With the pandemic shutting down universities, that was no longer an option. On the wilds of the open internet, Randall tracked down a first edition from a rare book seller for $500—a hefty expense for a side project with essentially no funding. But then one of the university’s librarians came through and located a digital copy in Michigan.

I believe this was the amazing HathiTrust project. https://www.hathitrust.org/digital_library

And the book is under-copyright and the HathiTrust ebook normally publicly accessible. It was provided either by their "Emergency Temporary Access Service", or some other decision to provide an emergency/fair-use copy, in ways the publishing industry doesn't like and would like to make very illegal.

This is a pretty notable part of the story, too bad the article glossed it over.

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