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> Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on

Yes, but Japan is a leader in airborne disease prevention.

I mean, if you visit Japan during a "normal" winter season you will observe two things:

    1) Widespread mask-wearing in public spaces
    2) Japanese not turning up to work to cough and splutter all over their colleagues

Both the above never happened in the West. It was hard enough to get your average dumb Westerner to comply during COVID.

The Japanese mentality of taking into account the impact of your actions on others has served them well.

That is why Japan has seen less than 1/10th of the COVID cases that, for example, the UK had. Despite Japan being 2x UK population and living/working in SIGNIFICANTLY higher density.

Completely agree that Japan has done better. Putting some numbers on it:

  UK     21,461,556 cases, 313,247 cases/1M,  2,468 deaths/1M, 68,513,217 Pop
  Japan 6,832,377 cases,  54,313 cases/1M, 226 deaths/1M,  125,795,510 Pop

So its the deaths per million that is 1/10th (2,000+ vs 200+), while the cases per million are more like 1/6.

(data from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

This statistic is more striking considering the population over age 65 is 18% in UK, 28% in Japan.

The reality is we still don't know why Japan had a relatively low death rate. The factors you mentioned aren't sufficient to account for the difference relative to similar countries. Lower obesity was surely a factor but there's something else going on.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/22/japan-covid-...

Could also be artifacts if testing and labeling. Perhaps they weren’t testing everything with a pulse. Perhaps they weren’t (mis)labeling hospital patients who tested positive but were in the hospital for Covid as a “Covid hospitalization”

It will take decades and much cooler heads to determine the winners and losers. Trying to claim the winners and losers right now is a fools errand.

In almost every country the excess mortality is well above the official "Covid" death toll. They're undercounting, not overcounting.

Just because they ended up in the hospital for "other" reasons doesn't mean it wasn't Covid--someone we know recently lost her mother that way. Health issues that were under control--then they weren't. Coincidence that she tests positive after being admitted?? I don't think so!

There's also the reality that some people are clotting out in various fashions when they aren't nearly sick enough to warrant the hospital and thus likely aren't even tested. If the clot hits someplace quickly lethal (heart, brain, lungs) they end up in the morgue without ever being diagnosed.

I wouldn't widely blame workers for coming to work sick. Often they're either instructed to do so or have no paid sick leave and desperately need the money.

I'd say this is only a part of the story. I remember when I was growing up I'd go to school if I'm having "just a cough/sneeze/running nose". I.e. if it's not impacting my functioning (like a fever or pain from a sore throat would), I'd be ready to dismiss it as "not serious enough". Now, this was in Russia, so my argument isn't about the culture in Europe, but rather about the presence of cultural differences.

Nowadays, working a remote job, I can work if it's just a cough, and it won't affect my co-workers. Never thought about this benefit of remote work!

Maybe, but working around tech people in the US it seems to be cultural. Pre COVID it was so common to see "Oh I'm not contagious", etc while hacking at their desk.

But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong.

It is easy to focus on what scientists got wrong about the virus, but it's equally important to point out what was right. In retrospect, the early data about the nature of the virus itself was pretty spot on.

Modelling pandemics is really hard, even before this virus, and we've only gotten better. Coordinating a specific global response is even harder.

> But coronavirus specifically does not spread like cigarette smoke. It was one of the models that turned out to be wrong.

Wait, I think your mental model is out of date. OP is all about how COVID-19 is indeed airborne [1] — i.e. it can float through air for considerable distances — and how it took a long time for WHO to correct its messaging. I guess this is case-in-point on how initial public messaging can be really hard to correct later on, and needs to be corrected quickly and loudly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_transmission

There are many degrees of airborne. One of the theories for why the models break for COVID (and influenza) so badly is the possibility that these viruses can travel very long distances and remain viable. Like in the upper atmosphere, long distance.

This is hardly a radical notion. Ferguson's useless 2001 era foot-and-mouth models relied heavily on the idea that the virus would be spread by the wind between nearby farms, even if there was no close physical contact between animals. The field of "aerobiology" investigates this topic (whether our understanding of what can survive long distance travel might be flawed). If this is correct then it'd explain many otherwise unexplainable facts about COVID and influenza, like the way outbreaks start and stop more or less simultaneously over huge geographic areas.

A cursory Google early in the pandemic told me that virus particles are smaller than cigarette smoke particles, so paranoid me thought masks aren't bulletproof (it feels like a lot of people think - and I exaggerate - "I'm wearing a mask, I can stand at making-out distance to this other person and I'll be fine."), and why shouldn't the virus be as airborne-transmissible as cigarette smoke?

It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine! On the flip side, it was aggravating to see moronic restaurants building enclosed outdoor tents to meet the requirements of "outdoor dining". Sure, they meet the legal requirements, but for the health requirements?

> It was also funny how people were screaming about people going to beaches, hey, they're outdoors, if the groups are distant to each other, they'll probably be fine!

The problem with trips to the beach during the height of a pandemic isn't that a couple of people sitting far apart on a beach have anything to worry about. In theory it'd be fine, but people ruin everything.

They swing by multiple houses to pick up a bunch of friends for their day at the beach, drive in from out of town, stop at the store for food and drinks and sun screen, then stop to get gas, then get to the beach and see thousands of other people have decided to do the same thing (see https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-thousands-flock-to-be...) and now you have crowds of people who might as well be at a music festival or motorcycle rally.

Yeah, people (especially those who are making great sacrifices to prevent the spread of a virus and protect their community) are going to be upset at the massive beach parties going on. It's annoying to get left out of a party even when it isn't undermining your efforts to lower the number of infections and deaths in your neighborhood.

Gavin Newsom getting on the tsunami alert speakers to bitch at beachgoers for spending time outside all while having closed room dinners with donors at the French Laundry successfully turned me 100% off from the CA democratic party, and in some ways the democratic party at large.

Shame the recall didn't go through.

State of Jefferson FTW.

As far as I know: The virus dries out and becomes non-infective when it’s in too small droplets. The droplets are larger than the gas particles of smoke that you smell. Masks also filter some of the larger particles of smoke.

No, it does spread like cigarette smoke. It's just the earlier variants required enough virons to infect that few people beyond the distancing requirements would get enough exposure to be infected. Thus we saw a few cases where prevailing airflow could infect people well beyond the "safe" distance but in general distance was safety. It's not anymore.

I think one of us is misreading things.

> with regards to Japan, actively promoted the airborne nature of COVID-19 early on. I remember seeing specials on NHK visualising the spread from a sneezing person in a room in March 2020.

Sneezing would be the droplets distribution theory, which is now "debunked". If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.

> Sneezing would be the droplets distribution theory, which is now "debunked".

Droplets only? Do you not find sneezing to be a highly effective method of spreading airborne pathogens?

> If the virus is airborne, there's no need to sneeze to spread it.

You’re essentially saying, “if the virus was airborne it could be spread through coughs too” to which the NHK study says, “yes, and sneezes.”

But they studied coughs too https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H2azcn7MqOU

Just because a sneeze isn't required doesn't mean that a sneeze isn't more effective.

> There were also a lot of helpful PSAs like the 3C model [0] and comparing the potential aerosol spread of the virus to cigarette smoke (when you would smell the smoker - he could also infect you with the virus)

Early on when people were still often forgetting to stay farther away from strangers I seriously considered switching to doing my grocery shopping between my morning workout and my morning shower to discourage people from getting too close.

I did switch to doing my grocery shopping early in the morning and it turned out there were so few people shopping then that it was easy to avoid them, except sometimes at checkout when the person behind me in line might stand too close.

That was easy to deal with by simply standing in front of my shopping cart when in line instead of behind it. That way I could decide how close to stand to the person in front of me, and the person behind me had to at least stay a shopping cart's length back.

But who knows whether a Covid infectee or carrier used that same shopping cart before you!8-) And how many times have you seen a shopper finger goods and put them back on the shelf for you or another to unsuspectingly pick up?!

Bwahahahaaaaaaah! Covid strikes again! You cannot get away!

> Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO?

This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.

"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.

The US has an outsized influece on the WHO. Dominating the whole institution from finance to its people.

At the time of the outbreak, the US administration was under a populist leader who saw the virus as an almost personal attack; emphasizing that mask wearing, and the implicit recognition that the virus spread by air, was a political symbol directed against him.

Funny how people forget this.

Quite the opposite, this implies their man inside fed and intel.

Very early 3C PSA (made by Ministry of Health and Prime Minister's Office) was really great work, but Japan's authoritative National Institute of Infectious Diseases finally admits aerosol infection in March this year. I don't know what happened.