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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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