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Comment by eric__cartman | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: we don't know

Which is way better than what the media has been "speculating".

I do wish people would be more specific when saying “the media”. There are a lot of media outlets out there, some are level headed, some are hysterical.

Which ones do you believe are level headed?

The Economist.

The financial press is always better on this sort of thing because they are only really interested in the economic outcomes.

Not really, the FT was the first one to go hysterical.

Yes, but media outlets that go "hysterical" are the ones that get the most views and get talked about most. Nothing we can do about that in a free society, it's just human nature.

Usually when people say "the media", they mean the mainstream liberal leaning news companies like CNN[1] or New York Times[2]. When talking about Fox (conservative media), people usually just say that.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/28/world/coronavirus-omicron-var...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/governors-omicron-covi...

You’re kind of proving the point here, the media does not only exist in some “conservative vs not conservative” binary. CNN is a cable news network, NYT is a subscription based newspaper. Their output differs accordingly.

I just caught myself on the funny fact, that my level of trust for some stranger on HN is higher than the level of trust for WHO. They worked hard to ruin their reputation.

Yeah, not after this: https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?s=21

We're still doing this?

"Preliminary" is a key word, as is "clear". The clear evidence came (to the WHO, at least) about a week later. On the same day as the tweet, they provided further information that doesn't fit in a tweet indicating they expected things to potentially change:

> The timeline states that on that date, a WHO official noted in a press briefing that there "may have been" limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus between family members and that there was "a risk of a possible outbreak."

The WHO doesn't have a covert intelligence arm, so they only had what information the Chinese were willing to provide at the time. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/may/30/brian-fitz...

Wasn't that the most up-to-date data at the time? Are you claiming that they did find clear evidence and were lying about it, or that they somehow should have had evidence to the contrary at that time?

Just like any burgeoning subject, you should generally keep up with the expert recommendations. Expecting them to have had all the answers and get everything exactly right in a circumstance with as many unknowns as this pandemic has had is foolish. It's silly how many people are treating medical agencies like this as if they're complete amateurs because some of their educated guess have ended up not being ideal, or that they've updated their recommendations regularly based on recent data.

It seems like people are expecting medical organizations to be like politicians. Updating recommendations based on new data regularly isn't "double backing" or flip-flopping, it's updating recommendations based on new data. It does mean that sometimes their advice will not be correct, especially when the data is thin, but it's literally the best choice you have available.

I really expect a technical community to be better about this kind of stuff. Limited data means less reliable conclusions.

> Wasn't that the most up-to-date data at the time?

No, China was already arresting doctors for warning about human-to-human transmission in December.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/world/asia/Li-Wenliang-ch...

It was the most up-to-date data the WHO had their hands on at the time.

Weren’t there already YouTube videos documenting this at the time? Unless they came out the next week.

The WHO likely doesn’t accept “some guy on YouTube says so” as “clear evidence”.

Can’t believe we still have to deal with this FUD.

No, China “hasn’t been arresting doctors”; in particular Li Wengliang was never arrested. He had “a talk”, similar to certain American YouTuber visited by NSA for not being patriotic enough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang

What, specifically, are you hinting at?

"Vagueposting" is really annoying. Tell, don't make us guess.

The same thing happens with e.g. Fauci's mask remarks from March of 2020. Somehow people pretend like that was the fatal communication sin of the whole pandemic and the reason there's little trust in the medical community and they ignore the months and months of downplaying the virus and just an endless stream of disinformation from literally everyone else in the administration in service of trying to get reelected.

Also not after this: https://text.npr.org/1016436749

They very confidently ruled out the lab leak theory (while admitting that they know basically nothing else about the origin, except that it couldn't have been a lab leak), then had to backtrack on that.

This makes me suspicious of their current claim (that they know that "Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death." while at the same time claiming to know basically nothing else).

Did you read it?

How then did this even become a"variant of concern" if so little is known about it?

The rate at which they noticed it spreading in SA and the number and type of mutations.

The "concern" in "variant of concern" is a function of the number of potentially significant mutations in the spike protein. It's an indicator of unknowns (and therefore unknown risks), not a positive indicator of risk.

Because it's it became the most dominant strain of covid in SA in about two weeks. And it has a massive number of mutations compared to other strains. The former might be partly due to the collapse of last wave of delta. Latter tends to scare immunologists.

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