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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

Key point from the article- it doesn’t generally spread from person to person

B. pseudomallei is not considered to be transmitted via air or respiratory droplets in non-laboratory settings. Person-to-person transmission risk is considered extremely low as there have only been a few documented cases of person-to-person transmission; contact of damaged skin with polluted soil or water is the most frequent route for natural infection. Healthcare personnel are generally not at risk if they follow standard precautions. However, laboratory personnel are at increased risk because some lab procedures may aerosolize particles and release B. pseudomallei into the air. Laboratory personnel can reduce their risk of exposure by following good laboratory practices.3 Laboratory staff who may have been exposed to B. pseudomallei should refer to existing CDC guidance.

https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2021/han00448.asp

https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1217043229427761152?ref_sr...

This isn't the Chinese authorities reporting on this bacteria though.

Also key: All four are known to have had contact. It's not random.

Sure? The article says that the cases are "connected", but not that the individuals have been in contact. (It could have been that they happened to use the same contaminated product.)

> CDC investigators determined that all four cases are connected and they suspect a so-far-unknown imported product may be to blame.

reading comprehension : 1 tenfourwookie : 0

I'm wrong. It does not say this.

Where have you heard that before?

Do you actually have reason to doubt it here? Because cynical skepticism isn't a helpful alternative to genuinely doing our best to understand and correcting course when better data is available.

Also, just to flog that old dead horse for the umpteenth time: Nobody said that "COVID-19 does not spread from person to person". What the WHO reported, on January 14 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic when very little was known, was that "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission".

If you read that tweet and conclude that the WHO says that there is no human-to-human transmission, then you have a problem with reading comprehension.

WHO was largely denying the possibility of airborne transmission as late as July 2020.

https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/71/9/2311/5867798

Yes, there are things to criticise the WHO for (the initial advice against masks, and the delayed acknowledgment of aerosol/airborne transmission you allude to). But that often misrepresented tweet is not one of them I'd say.

My original comment pertained to a general pattern of communication from public health agencies-- I believe you were the first to bring up that tweet.

But if you want to explore the topic, by 14 January 2020 the virus had been sequenced for over a week, and its status as a beta-coronavirus with substantial sequence similarity to SARS established. Even if the sentence "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" was true, rather than merely asserted by Chinese authorities (as now seems more likely) it's just not a terribly pertinent thing to report if you're trying to be Gricean about it. It was one instance of a pattern of minimization from public health agencies that persisted even after it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 had global reach: https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/things-can-get-r...

It was early in the pandemic and very little was known, so issuing a statement that says “…no clear evidence of human to human transmission” was irresponsible. There was no clear evidence against human to human transmission either.

Simply saying nothing about it or we don’t know yet would have been better than that statement which guides a non pedantic reader, which are common outside of HN, to believing that human to human transmission was unlikely.

It's simply a matter of applying a prior: when I hear an organization's claim, I consider the base rate at which past claims have proven trustworthy, adjusting for whether past errors were honest mistakes, noble lies, culpable failures to apply medieval-peasant-tier common sense, the fruit of transparently ulterior motives, and so on. I sure hope they're right in this case but it's not clear why in particular I should think so.

What do you do?

I consider all my priors, not just a single one about the source.

I'm not saying you should reflexively believe the opposite of what any given source reports, just bear in mind the track records.

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