Zeynep Tufekci writes (NYT),
If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others. We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary. Instead of blanket rules on gatherings, we would have targeted conditions that can produce superspreading events: people in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, especially if engaged over time in activities that increase aerosol production, like shouting and singing. We would have started using masks more quickly, and we would have paid more attention to their fit, too. And we would have been less obsessed with cleaning surfaces.
If you were reading me back in the early days of the pandemic, you will see that I noticed, without understanding the science, that outdoors was especially safe. I was also a big skeptic of what I called “doorknob effects,” the idea that you could get the virus by touching a surface that someone else had touched.
The point is not that I know virology better than the virologists. I don’t. But I believe in drawing inference from evidence. My biggest complaint with the public health establishment, which I voiced emphatically and often, is that they would not conduct experiments to test hypotheses in a situation where there was considerable uncertainty.
In the early days of the pandemic, we were not following science. We were following bureaucrats, who put way too much emphasis on “computer models,” which anyone with a strong scientific mind could see were garbage. They refused to use evidence-based reasoning, and they never considered conducting experiments.
The problem was much deeper than just the one issue that Tufekci describes.
We have all known since April 2020 how the virus was transmitted. Still the public health officials persisted in calling for blanket shut downs and lockdowns. The statement that if we had known we would’ve done otherwise is false.
Sorry, in Logic every IF x than y statement is true, when x is false.
If the moon is made of green cheese, I or you or both of us are idiots — this is a logically true statement.
The “if we had known” point is crucial – we didn’t know.
Best evidence was from Diamond Princess, but was not taken seriously by experts because it wasn’t statistically significant, enough.
All reactions were far too politicized — Trump was ABSOLUTELY, and courageously, correct to stop flights from China in Jan. 2020, despite so many experts being against that, and being wrong.
Health officials not ‘understanding’ how the virus was transmitted was the whole point…as if coronaviruses – including this one – are not very well understood with regards to vectors. This was an engineered organism originating in a lab, with an increasingly marginal probability it was released on purpose.
Like I said above, not ‘understanding’ its transmission vectors was the whole point.
Is that why Trump pulled the inspectors from the Wuhan lab? So they could release it?
Dr. Fauxci would be the one to ask that question. I’m sure he knows all about it.
I wonder whether too much emphasis on computer models, a a failure to draw inference from evidence and and little experimentation to test hypotheses is driving public policy in any other areas…
We are still following bureaucrats.
Kling did advocate the common sense actions mentioned very early on. Many other reasonable people did as well. Avik Roy is another pundit who also advocated these types of common sense actions.
The issue was politics not faulty computer models.
Many Democrats were cheering for economic catastrophe to hurt Trump’s strong economic numbers and tank his re-election effort. Remember Krugman tweeted in ecstasy when the stock market tanked: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1239650000914862081
Do you think Krugman and other leaders of the left were eager to enact more reasonable pandemic rules that could minimize economic damage? Or did they want to exaggerate the pandemic, and see more spectacular catastrophe on the eve of Trump’s reelection bid?
The Trump campaign was based on outdoor rally events. The Biden campaign’s strategy was to focus on driving anti-Trump sentiment, hide Biden from public as much as possible, and keep his image as just some generic politician. Using the pandemic to forbid and prevent outdoor rallies was perfect for the Democrats.
The pandemic worked with the movement of protests and riots. The pandemic emergency was also used to bend election laws in Democrats favor and circumvent normal laws governing that process.
Leading Democrats, such as Andrew Cuomo, worked to stop/delay the vaccine rollout before Biden’s inauguration. Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t take the vaccine in 2020 and discouraged the public from doing so. The announcement of the vaccine itself was stalled until after the election. If you think this was faulty computer models and not obvious political motivations, then you have a sunnier disposition than I.
+1
Reading this I wondered “How would Joseph Henrich explain the behavior patterns of policy makers?”
It is interesting how, as is so often the ca se, policy guidance enhancing individual autonomy would have been more effective but was discarded in favor of promoting top-down hierarchical exercise of authority.
So much of policy making involves exercising preferences for displays of dominance that there must be some psycho-sexual evolutionary explanation.
Women remain strongly attracted to males who display dominance over other males, despite all the can’t to the contrary, because from earliest hunter-gatherer times it made sense as a strategy for enhanced reproductive success. The royalty and aristocracy always enjoyed better reproductive odds in most cultures, although reading the history of the Indus plain in Abraham Eraly’s Gem in the Lotus one gets a sense of heterogeneity out there around the globe.
It’s not just Covid though. Greta seeking an all powerful authority figure to control the weather is climate policy in an evolutionary psycho-sexual nutshell. Climate certainly has afforded ample opportunity for dominance displays.
An indicator that these ancient behavior patterns may be becoming maladaptive is perhaps the sacralization of autogynephilia. Steve Sailer has been looking at this from a dispassionate perspective for a while now and points out that many if not most of the surgically mutilated men parading as women are alpha males. The flourishing of autogynephilia (men getting off on imagining they are seen as women) is perhaps an indicator that a societal excess of dominance displayers is producing a frustrated drone caste. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, their is a rape like aspect to the coercion employed in forcing others to participate in these autogynephilia fantasies.
See Joe Biden.
At any rate, one probably wouldn’t go too far wrong looking at policy making in the USA as a form of sexual perversion.
Just as “rape” is about power as well as sex (more or less), control of others is about sexual release as well as power, more or less.
Sailer didn’t quite say that, but I was thinking of (Walter) Wendy Carlos and (Donald) Dierdre McCloskey as not-quite alpha males fantasizing about being women.
Control and sex have more in common than even pain, despite us having the term sadist for the pain. “Control freak” doesn’t have much sexual connotation. Yet. (Rolf Degan hasn’t found any I know of, tho he’s the guy I’d ask for studies.)
“What’s interesting to me is not that the economics answers here are obviously “right”–one can certainly point out tradeoffs that would be involved–but that the tradeoffs were barely noticed or discussed as real options.”
— Timothy Taylor (12 May 2021)
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/05/political-economy-of-pandemic-response.html?m=0
All this was known, but not proven, in March of 2020. One major issue is that “officially” close-range, aerosol transmission was not recognized. There were droplets and airborne transmission.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/03/commentary-covid-19-transmission-messages-should-hinge-science
So first there had to be enough pain imposed on the “experts” for them to accept things not taught by their professors. We’ve great lab rats as the vaccines give evidence, but horrible environmental infection vector control “experts”. Consider how many “experts” discovered the idea of using UVC radiation against the virus. With all kinds of speculative ideas. But those “ideas” were already commercial products, from putting UVC light in HVAC ducts to separate UVC decom boxes you can buy (see Sanitaire UV room sanitizer). Devices already used by WHO and others in field clinics set up for things like Zika, etc.
Ironically, while UV has been known to kill viruses since the 1880s, it was in 1935 that UV light was used in the experiment that demonstrated that viruses could be airborne “Wells and Fair demonstrate the ability of UVGI to efficiently inactivate airborne microorganisms and prove the concept of infection via the airborne route.” [Wells WF, Fair MG. Viability of B. coli exposed to ultra-violet radiation in air. Science 1935;82:280-1.]
All we really had to do was wait for the tests to show the SARS 2.0 wasn’t uniquely different, in environmental vulnerability, than all other known respiratory viruses. And it isn’t. Down to the point that SARS 2.0, like influenza, is more infectious in lower temp 10C and low humidity, 20%, likely due to more droplets evaporating to aerosol size and persisting in enclosed space air.
I’m not an epidemiologist, but this was easy to discern from a few expert comments and a review of the, sadly paucity of research into the transmission influenza over the history of the NIH and CDC. Yes, the SARS 2.0 is not the flu, but it has a very similar environmental viability profile.
What do you think of the long-standing evidence that masks don’t work against aerosol transmission? Note that the author of that paper was just banned from ResearchGate.
Kling recently said masks give him significant protection from coronavirus but not sure where he got that from since a meta analysis of RTC mask trials conclude the opposite: there is no significant reduction in transmission.
N95s properly worn protected my dentist while operating the entire pandemic.
So masks could work, but anyone whose worn an N95 knows that it is very uncomfortable and there is no way we were going to get everyone wearing them all the time. Not to mention the supply issues.
So what we debated was whether the cloth/surgical masks often improperly worn and used over and over did enough to be worth their trouble. I’d say no. I think they might slightly reduce risk in crowded indoor environments that you only briefly are exposed to, but that is a pretty limited scope. I don’t think the protect against prolonged indoor exposure and I don’t think the are needed at all outdoors.
“N95s properly worn protected my dentist while operating the entire pandemic.”
The Danish study of about 3,000 wearing masks and 3,000 not during April 2020 were N95 masks (not N95 respirators) and no significant reduction in transmission was shown against coronavirus.
I can’t speak to that. I have seen some simulations with N95 masks I found convincing.
But the real point to me was just what I mentioned. My dentist saw several people a day that were breathing heavily right into his face and breathing in a small office. There wasn’t a single case in the entire office (at least a dozen staff total) the entire pandemic. That’s phenomenal to me. The only two conclusions I can draw are:
1) COVID transmission is dramatically less likely they I believe it to be from other data points
2) N95s work a lot better then the masks other people wear
I haven’t read the literature but if you consider viral load then masks can reduce severity of the cases even if they don’t block 100% of the viral particles.
We never needed a magic bullet, just a few common sense strategies that each reduce r0 by 20-30%.
Any study that claims masks have zero effectiveness should be viewed with considerable suspicion given the strengh of priors in the other direction.
If you cough into your hand/sleeve, or even turn your face to the side first, you are subconsciously agreeing that physical barriers have some effect.
My guess is that if you have prolonged exposure to an indoor environment, especially with poor ventilation, that masks are indeed worthless.
For instance, I doubt that the average mask people wear would protect them if they shared a small room with an infected person for over an hour. Yet people treated the situation like it did, and such an attitude was likely counter productive compared to no mask wearing and simply avoiding such situations.
At most masks prevent relatively quick transmission by high viral load actions such as coughing, sneezing, or heavy breathing. Though in many cases the oxygen restriction of the masks causes heavy breathing in and off itself depending on the activity.
I’ve found that even among economists, who might normally be interested in randomly controlled studies, very few seem to be.
This conclusion is from a study that was published in a CDC journal May 2020:
” In pooled analysis [of ten face mask studies], we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks ”
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
It’s interesting that none of the studies on the effectiveness of masks (most in healthcare settings) found them to be effective in reducing the incidence of influenza and other viruses.
Masks do have some efficacy in prolonging the viral load over a period time. The medical grade N95 masks that work in wet conditions are good for personnel doing procedures likely to cause the patient to emit spittle. But that is time limited, then disposed of using decomm procedures.
None of the studies look into the aerosolizing of virus by subsequent breaths through the mask that captures droplets. There is a study and supposedly a patent for coating masks with salt, sugar or other mixture because the crystalline molecules desiccate the virus inactivating it. Yet, those never appeared on the market?
It was very obvious that more people would’ve been killed quickly if a disease this deadly was spread on surfaces and it’s very disheartening that our supposed experts were so scared to acknowledge it