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Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

Bless your soul, but what I've learned from the way we handled the pandemic worldwide (and are still handling it) is that information that's readily available and should in theory reach everyone, flows ridiculously slowly, even among specialists and political figures, it's easily corrupted and distorted, and a loud ignorant minority counts as much in the public discourse, as the voices of millions of reasonable people.

I'd say we have more evolving to do. Both biologically and socially. Individually (some) of us are relatively smart. Together we're as dumb as a piece of wood.

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Absolutely. Considering how long it took CDC and WHO to even acknowledge airborne transmission, even though the Chinese were very clear about it from very early on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airbo...

"even though the Chinese were very clear about it from very early on" I'm not sure this adds as much credibility as you seem to think. See (for example) - propaganda videos of people dropping dead in the street in Wuhan in early 2020.

Not sure what you're getting at. Preprint for this paper was out in Apr 2020:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32240078/

Chinese health authorities not being a credible source of information throughout the pandemic?

I'm not defending what they did, but let's make the facts clear.

Initially (december?) they denied there was human-human transmission, and tried to down play magnitude of the virus.

And once Wuhan was locked down, they down played how harsh it was, cut out the media (with the excuse of not causing panic).

But even before Wuhan locked down, they allowed the release of the virus sequence (Jan 2020), their mitigation efforts in Wuhan (the field hospitals built there, the thousands of doctors sent there, the treatment strategy the doctors used, what worked, what didn't), the air borne transmission, treatment methods, and all of that.

I was following this pretty closely, and the Chinese released very relevant information very early on.

But when Italy got hit, it was like they didn't even bother listening to anything the Chinese already put out. The Italians re-discovered pronation, low oxygen flow intubation, anti blood clot medication, etc.

Blaming the Chinese health authorities for not being credible is fine. But simply discounting everything they said is stupid. And completely ignoring their information even with mounting other evidence because "The Chinese are not credible", is doubly stupid.

It's like the world put on stupid blinders, and just wished that the Chinese were lying and Covid would just disappear magically.

I don't suggest ignoring everything the Chinese health authorities said, that would be ridiculous. "Take everything China allows to be released to the West with a pinch of salt" is a sensible starting point though - you can use it as an input, but you have to be more skeptical of information fed to you by a communist-controlled authority than you would otherwise be, and you certainly don't add credibility by pointing out "the Chinese authorities said so".

My point is that even the "untrustable Chinese" were saying airborne transmission at the outset. And other evidence that they were right came pouring in from other countries like Korea, Hong Kong, Italy, etc right from the start.

The CDC and WHO's decision to deny airborne transmission 14 months into the pandemic is purely idiotic.

So who do I trust now? Independent Scientists. Basically Twitter, ffs.

Why on Earth are you calling them “propaganda” videos, when China was trying to downplay the pandemic at the time?

See, this is one big reason we’re collectively dumb. Everyone and their big conspiracy theories.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. You escalated more than once in this thread. We're trying to go the opposite direction here!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There hasn't been a single case reported in the West, of anyone dying instantly in the street of COVID-19. Ergo, videos filmed within China, allowed by the authorities to be viewed outside China, purporting to show this scenario, are the very definition of propaganda.

We also saw videos of sick people left to die in Chinese hospitals from their own phone recordings. Is that also propaganda?

And no, a video of something that isn’t what we thought it is, is not the definition of propaganda. Propaganda has a goal.

This video doesn’t match a single goal China has. If it does name it.

True, but there was many other reasons to think masks would work. Its demonstrated efficacy in other coronaviruses and the cultural evolution of dense Asian countries to use masks as a way to combat virus transmission. The WHO and CDC behaved liked total idiots, setting the burden of proof way too high for what should've been a pragmatic, common sense decision made with some uncertainty. Not atypical of bureaucrats to miss such a layup.

I don’t think they were total idiots, at least not from the angle you’re pointing out. The CDC knew masks were effective, but they wanted to make sure masks were reserved for healthcare workers. Remember at the time nurses were given a single mask to use for multiple days, and many hospitals had drives to collect donated masks. The CDC lied to prevent the general public from making the situation worse. Was it worth the long-term loss of credibility? It’s easy to say no, but we’ll never know the counterfactual. For all we know some other issue would have become as politicized as masks were.

To me, this was a glaring reminder that public health deals with more than cold hard science. It’s about ensuring public health first and foremost, given the realities on the ground. See harm reduction as another example. Again, I’m not sure they made the right call here. But it wasn’t due to ignorance.

It's hard to attribute the same charity to the WHO. They were dragged kicking and screaming to mask recommendation and this happened many, many months into the pandemic, well after any concerns of mask shortages were alleviated.

I see your point about the CDC. But they should've recommended home made masks. Other countries did that. They messed up big time. It's impossible to know the counterfactual with perfect confidence, but we can make a sound judgement given what we know.

Yeah, it's disappointing to see how I still see people wearing their masks incorrectly, e.g. just over the mouth and not covering their noses.

Sometimes I think human beings are advanced, but then I walk into a public toilet and I see evidence how many are still no better than animals. It's a simple technology, urinate into the hole where the water can wash it away and we'll remain hygienic, but a lot of people still fail at that.

There are a couple of defensible reasons that people don’t put their mask over their nose outdoors. Firstly, if you wear glasses, then on humid days your glasses can fog up to a degree that you can’t even cross the street safely.

Secondly, in some countries the public has chafed against laws requiring outdoor mask wearing in places that are not even remotely crowded. (In my own country, the same scientists advising the government on the COVID response have also opposed this law and urged the government to overturn it, arguing that it is clearly unscientific and only undermines the government’s credibility in getting the population to observe the public-health measures that really matter.) At that point, wearing a mask in a half-ass way is a way for the population to signal their discontent. It has happened that such laws were lifted when ruling parties saw mass flaunting of them, because such strictness might cost them the next election.

To elaborate, I saw these people inside a supermarket, where it's probably in their own interest to wear it properly. And no they weren't glasses wearers.

But yes governments just repeating unscientific rules also annoy me, I agree in the empty outdoors masks are most probably unnecessary. (This statement is hedged because hey, I'm not an epidemiologist). They emphasize the "6ft apart" stuff but not the ventilation of indoor places...

And they say outdoor dining is okay, so restaurants put up tents which are poorly ventilated, and hey, the fucking things are outside, that follows the rules, so that means they're safe, right?

I should just join Wonko the Sane outside the asylum...

This is just something that happens with masks. I think you're reading too much into it.

In years past in Japan, where mask-wearing was always common, I noticed that just covering the mouth and not the nose was quite common. It still covers most of what people are trying to cover (odor, droplets). Which would still help for the worst contributors to covid too. If people are feeling claustrophobic or legitimately having difficulty breathing, I think it's an acceptable compromise.

Also, if people are talking a lot, then the mask tends to get pulled down off the nose constantly due to jaw movement. Hence in Japan you'd see store clerks and people in such roles often wearing the mask that way. Also this happens practically every word for many kinds of cloth masks. So if you see a public speaker somewhere with a fancy cloth mask not covering their nose (a shaming target I've noticed on twitter etc.) they probably can't help it.

I can't help but look at some peoples' rejection of public health guidance in the US as "not a bug/won't fix."

The relevant authorities (including traditional mainstream media) injected politics into the public discourse, which destroyed trust in what should be a normal public health process. Not only that but the relevant leaders of agencies decided to try manage the supply of masks through "steering" the public by downplaying the usefulness of masks.

Distrust of untrustworthy leaders is a feature, not a bug.

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