Is my memory shot? The Washington Post has a piece today about social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether it was really necessary. This is apparently going to be a key point in tomorrow's congressional hearings featuring Anthony Fauci.
It takes ten paragraphs before the Post provides a straightforward answer: "Experts agree that social distancing saved lives." The question, it turns out, is only about whether six feet was really the right social distance. WHO said that three feet was enough, and Fauci and others have already testified that they don't really know where six feet came from. Apparently it was partly based on our old friend, droplet vs. aerosol emission. Six feet is a safer distance for droplet transmission, so the CDC initially adopted it because they thought COVID was spread via droplets. As we all know by now, that was wrong. COVID is spread mostly by airborne aerosols, and for that six feet doesn't do any more good than three feet.
Fine. I gather that everyone agrees about this now, but members of Congress want to showboat about it some more anyway. Whatever.
But here's where my memory comes into play. You might wonder why anyone cares that much about 3 feet vs. 6 feet, and the answer is that lots of schools were shut down because they didn't have enough space to keep kids separated by six feet.
But is that true? My recollection is that schools were mostly shut down over fear that teachers were in danger of being infected. On the other side of the argument, there was concern that keeping kids at home would expose them to elderly relatives and prevent parents who were caregivers from going to work. Beyond all this, the most common reason provided at the time was, basically, "It's a pandemic! Of course we have to shut the schools."
For example, here's a contemporary list of arguments for and against school closures. There's no mention of six feet. I asked GPT-4 and it produced many reasons, none related to six feet. Announcements at the time mostly just said schools were being shut for safety reasons that were assumed to be obvious. And lots of schools in other countries were shut down even if they were following WHO's three-foot guideline.
What am I missing? I'm well aware of the arguments that we should have opened schools more quickly after the initial panic subsided. Some states did and some didn't, even though classrooms are about the same size everywhere. Was the six-foot guideline really in play here?
All these stupid arguments just make me tired and depressed. That Republicans have chosen to use McCarthyist tactics against public health officials for doing their best to protect Americans from a deadly pandemic, inventing all sorts of grotesque conspiracy narratives in the process, has to be one of the most disgusting chapters in modern political history.
Par for the course for a bunch of tantrum-throwing, emotionally underdeveloped children of privilege. They don't have the intellectual or moral capacity to engage in meaningful governance, so they resort to lowest-common-denominator theatrics, and in the process they bring down not only their institution and their colleagues but the entire country.
They'll wreck the place and then scream and whine and blame other people for it. And their slightly more mature Good
GermanRepublican colleagues and supporters will go along with it.Ladies and Gentlemen, your contemporary Republican Party.
Yes, it's political-- I think a big point of today's Fauci grilling and the coming barrage of accusations and gaslighting is to make Biden the villain of covid.
Yes, most of *us* remember how trump responded and that Fauci was trump's own career official who got vilified by trump, and we remember that Biden's administration did much, much better on covid.
But Biden gave Fauci a high-profile position, which links the two now. And trump and his sycophants as much as accused Fauci of creating the virus as well as botching the response-- they started this a long time ago.
Today they're completing the circle and will end up accusing Biden of creating and spreading the virus to interfere with the 2020 election. And they'll be pounding this BS through to November. A goodly proportion of the public has only a hazy memory of that period and really wants to forget it entirely, so they're receptive ground. (When dealing with republicans, you have to think of the worst, most mendacious thing you can, and then double or triple it.)
Knowingly or not, this Wapo article was an hors d'oeuvre to kick off the feast of bull.
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Wanking. Is 6 inches too close? Yes. Is 60 feet overkill? Yes. So minimum "safe" distance is somewhere in between. If showboating jerkoffs want to spend the next 20 years debating 6' vs 3' well, sorry, I've got other stuff to do.
The problem is that these "showboating jerkoffs" are politicians with power, and they are going to frighten any health professional from doing anything useful in the next pandemic.
Maybe, but most people know to keep their distance from a person with a cold. Common sense.
The last nine years have made it pretty clear that the population at large is generally devoid of common sense.
Do you remember being told we had to "follow the science"?
Now we find out that apparently there was no "science" dictating these rules - they were arbitrary based on guesses.
If scientists want us the follow their advice because they are scientists then they need to base their advice on real science.
Sometimes you don't have all the answers yet and you make educated guesses, but I suppose you can armchair quarterback that years later all you want. Here's an article on the topic from Sept. 2020:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/exactly-how-far-should-you-distance-others-avoid-covid-19-180975870/
There's a lot of good info about what's known and what was chosen, if you care to read it and uh follow the science. This paragraph especially seems important: An earlier study of the first SARS coronavirus infection on an airplane had found that people three rows away from the index patient (7.5 feet) were at risk. And the CDC referenced a paper by Wells that specified that droplets traveled about 6.6 feet down (though it was not clear about how far out). Several studies in the early 2000s suggested the large droplets landed about 3 to 5 feet away.
Then you say that - "We don't know but we think this is a reasonable guess given the tradeoffs and the following evidence."
In actual fact, we were told we had to "follow the science" and that those who disagreed with the recommendations were anti science know nothings. None of the people behind this recommendation are willing to stand behind it. From the Wash Post article:
"It’s still not clear who at the CDC settled on the six-foot distance; the agency has repeatedly declined to specify the authors of the guidance,"
No accountability means no credibility.
Probably no single person was the author. It's a question that would have been kicked around among a number of people before the six foot consensus eventually emerged.
So this policy magically emerged from consensus with no polling on 3 feet, 6 feet, or 10 feet?
A written policy recommendation came out. Its authors should have been listed.
The "follow the science" bullshit came from both the left and the right — mostly from people who had various policy axes to grind and to avoid dealing with evidence that they didn't agree with. But if you want to know the origin of the 6 foot rule...
Early in Feb 2020, the National Public Health Commission of China urged that people use masks keep a 2- to 3-meter distance from other people in public spaces. Unlike the WHO or the CDC, the Chinese recognized immediately that the atypical pneumonias they were seeing were spread by an air-borne pathogen. The distancing recommendation was based on studies of aerosol dispersion. They didn't explain all the details that informed their recommendation, but I suspect whoever was on the PHC assumed — as some other virologists did at the time — that the chances of being infected increased with the number of virions (virus particles) inhaled. I.e. it requires inhaling hundreds or thousands of virions for a person to be infected, and the odds of infection increased when more virions (floating in saliva aerosols) were inhaled. Later on, for the Alpha variant, other researchers were able to quantify the average number of virions exhaled (by an average infected person) in an aerosol-sized "droplet" and they were able to estimate that it took between 1.5k and 3k virus particles to infect another person. But that data wasn't available when the Chinese PHC made their recommendations. They assumed that masks would help filter out a significant percentage of the aerosols, and dispersion would lower the density further the farther away people were from each other.
The WHO point blank ignored the Chinese recommendations because they didn't believe that (a) people expelled aerosols when they exhaled or talked; that (b) droplets from coughs *might* carry the virus, but the 60 year old studies they were relying on, indicated that droplets fell out the air a couple of feet away from mouth; and (c) the primary transmission vector was fomites (viruses clinging to the surfaces of materials).
The CDC (and Dr Fauci) followed the WHO recommendations. However, the public health officers of Santa Clara County CA and Kings County WA recommended six feet distancing and masking as soon as the first COVID cases started showing up in critical care facilties. They didn't mention the Chinese PHC recommendations, but their initial recommendations were distancing 6-10 feet (2-3 meters) and to wear masks (and they said any mask was better than nothing, because of the sudden mysterious shortage of N95 masks). They also recommended people work from home and that public events be actively discouraged. Although California and Washington State had some of the earliest cases of COVID-19, The difference in mortality rates with NYC (where Mayor Deblasio urged everyone to carry on normally) became apparent within 2 or 3 weeks. Fauci said we in CA and WA were overreacting.
On April 3rd of 2020 was a teleconference with WHO officials which some aerosol scientists attended. The WHO scientists refused to believe that virus was airborne (and it took them over two years to finally admit that it was). The CDC and Fauci followed the lead of the WHO. But eventually Fauci came around to the aerosol vector hypothesis and started recommending masks and distancing 6 feet.
So there you go.
Worth reading to understand the WHO screwup...
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
"Polling"? Where's the science in that? I just posted good solid reasons that chose 6 feet. Why this sudden focus on "who did this?!" That's not science either.
No. It is good administration. People responsible for decisions must be accountable. And here "polling" refers to polling the committee - asking each person his position and noting it in minutes, not opinion polls.
You're a dishonest troll.
I was aware at the time that there hadn’t been time to do the necessary large studies and replicate them which is what is required to have solid scientific proof. Common sense should have told us that but there were also some reports about how the 6’ estimate was made.
those who disagreed with the recommendations were anti science know nothings.
In many cases that was and remains a valid characterization.
Despite the fact that even WHO only recommended 3 foot distancing? Were WHO's scientists anti-science know-nothings?
You also have to know how science works: you draw the best conclusions you can based on the best evidence you have at the time. Yes, sometimes those conclusions get refined, or even changed, later. That's called "falsifiability", which is a key part of the scientific method.
In issues of health, there is also the concept of "an abundance of caution." Faced with a new and largely unknown virus that is killing thousands of people a day, you begin with precautions that would slow the spread from *any* of the possible transmission methods. As you learn more, you narrow down to the best practices against this particular virus.
(Or, you could just take horse dewormer.)
It seems that the evidence for ivermectin was more substantial than that for six foot social distancing.
There is zero evidence that ivermectin was useful in treating or preventing covid. There was, and is, strong evidence for distancing, and very weak evidence for any particular distance.
Well, that is just plainly untrue. For example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149291821002010.
This is apparently one more study than we had supporting six foot social distancing.
You're an ignoramus. You'd be more at home somewhere like the New York Post.
Numerous studies have found social distancing helps prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. None was available in early 2020 for the reason obvious to anyone but a fool, namely that there hadn't been time to conduct any. Nevertheless experience with other viruses informed the best scientific advice.
That is not what we were told by those promoting social distancing.
Meanwhile, there were actual studies providing evidence that ivermectin worked - I just cited one - and we still had idiots arguing "You are not a horse!"
So nitpick. It's not zero evidence, it's negligible evidence.
Which is apparently more than we had for 6 foot distancing.
Said without knowing -- or caring -- what "real science" is.
If you're going to comment about science, develop something more than a child's cartoon conception of it.
Science is not absolute. It is based on probabilities and convergence of many lines of evidence.
People who want 100 percent truth usually turn to God for it. But how well did God fare in dealing with the pandemic? Well, if it hadn't been for those human inventions of public health measures and vaccines, many millions more would have died and would probably be dying still. That's the God - 100 percent truth - way. We've seen in previous plagues like the Black Death how well God's approach works.
I'll take science, thank you very much, even if it is sometimes based on educated estimations of probabilities rather than 100 percent truth.
Then you say you are acting based on educated estimations and you don't tell "file the science" at those who disagree with your educated estimation.
It's clear that you are getting upset struggling with the technical and colloquial definitions of science. Just go eat some more horse paste--I'm sure that will make you feel all better.
Because the people who "disagree" usually haven't done the work or crunched the numbers. They are just talking out of their rear ends.
That is why we designate respected, experienced professional scientists to make these calls. Same reason we let generals fight wars, instead of some guy who "disagrees."
"Science" is a process, not an answer. Go back to your old testament and reassure yourself that genocide is gawd's commandment to certain peoples.
Can we stop feeding this troll?
Done and done, I shouldn't have bothered responding, but then I scrolled down and saw.
Real science says that when something is dangerous and you are unsure of just how dangerous, err on the side of caution. If something might explode but probably won't, you don't set off the first shot in your hand. Science is about working with what you know, and sometimes you don't know everything. Saying we should have applied what we know now, four years later to decisions we had to make four years ago is an example of 2020 hindsight.
Actually science says nothing about whether or not you err on the side of caution. That is a social and political choice that scientists have no more or less valid opinions about than anyone else.
Scientists are human beings. They pretty much all follow the precautionary principle because they don't want their own research to kill them.
That is their choice. However, there is no scientific argument for this. Others can make different choices.
Every post you make is just repeating the same talking points, you're not actually engaging with anyone else and your intellectual dishonesty has been noted.
Indeed. MF is a biscuit away from arguing that since science is simply a process of testing hypotheses via empirical experiment therefore public health recommendations are not "science" but instead science-adjacent, and thus "follow the science" is--to the hyper-technical pedant with an axe to grind like MF--an inaccurate turn of phrase!
MF is the sort of tiresome ass who guffaws about how "organic" actually means carbon-based so all produce is of course "organic" and that therefore recommendations that people ingest fewer pesticides are immediately suspect and to be vigorously debated.
The science says that distance matters, despite Kevin's post. It increases the amount of air around each person by more than twice, more than square, but by a cubic amount.
That space is more time, more dispersion; the virus doesn't like being airborne, it's at risk for drying out and being killed by heat or UV. And lower the density of people in a space means less viral load for air moving and filtering systems to deal with.
Droplets versus aerosols is a pointless argument here; six feet is better than three either way.
My recollection was that schools did not meet current IAQ rules via ASHRAE or otherwise had mitigation to address insufficient air circulation including the availability of N95-level masks but also spacing.
Don't forget school buses.
And if a kid did get COVID, which might be asymptomatic, they could go home and infect parents and grandparents who could get sick and possibly die. Schools are hotbeds of all kinds of communicable diseases.
The media seems to forget that possibility but families didn’t. The media kept harping on how bad remote learning was for minority/low income kids. However when my urban school district decided to give parents a choice between remote and in person school the families that were most likely to stay remote were families from minority communities. I would guess that a lot of them had older relatives or people with health issues in their homes.
I never once saw an article about the serious psychological harm it would do to a child who had infected a grandparent who then died. I know my grandkids were terrified of doing that to us.
Amnd what is your scientific evidence that covid-19 is not primarily spread by droplets?
This does not seem to match the choir practice example:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm
Actively coughing sneezing, singing, etc. — anything that involves forcefully expelling breath — favors the production of droplets. Since they are larger, they can contain more virions. Most of the time, though, we’re just breathing normally, producing few droplets but lots of aerosolized particles (that’s why you can fog a mirror). Being smaller, the particles can contain fewer virions, but they are produced in greater numbers. Droplets fall to ground fairly quickly; hence distancing reduces droplet transmission.
By the way, KD makes a mistake in implying that distance doesn’t matter for aerosols (“six feet doesn't do any more good than three feet”). Aerosols don’t settle, but they do diffuse, so the greater the distance from the source, the greater the volume of diluting air ….
So both droplets and weasels can spread covid-19.
Actually as I understand the evolving science, the distinction is no longer as rigid as this and we are now talkiag about particles of varying sizes:
I any event discounting what we had generally thought of as droplet transmission does not seem to be supported by the science.
True, droplet or aerosol, they are aggregates of water molecules with occasional other contents, and occur on a continuum of sizes. Below some size threshold, particles become aerosolized, remaining airborne ‘indefinitely’.
...But the virus can't survive in the air indefinitely. It's being bombarded with air molecules, its water is being slowly evaporated away, and heat and UV are damaging the chemical bindings in the virus itself.
So the more air it's exposed to, more of the virions die or damaged and have more trouble infecting.
Ban weasels!
"COVID is spread mostly by airborne aerosols, and for that six feet doesn't do any more good than three feet."
Wrong.
KenShulz is on the right track. To put it into numbers, the concentration of a contaminant, including an aerosol, diminishes per the *cube* of the distance from the source. So the concentration of an aerosol at 6 feet away from the source is *eight* times lower than it is at 3 feet from the source.
It's not exactly eight, since it doesn't disperse evenly, but it's still more than double!
Fogging a mirror is mostly the result of vapor condensation, not aerosols.
Some commenter here taught me the sorites paradox. Water molecules are polar, which enables weak bonding among them which is why surface tension is a thing. So, how many water molecules need to aggregate before vapor becomes vapor with aerosols?
Clearly some aerosolized CoVid-19 virions can exist in normal exhalations, else there would not be asymptomatic transmission.
When my kid's middle school first opened back up, they had kids come just one day a week, so classrooms could have a fraction of the normal number of kids to maintain distancing. I don't think they said 6 ft, but distancing was obviously the point.
North Carolina's guidance for reopening schools in fall 2021 was explicitly based on the 6-foot rule:
"Limit density of people in school facilities and transportation vehicles to no greater than 50% maximum occupancy to ensure social distancing of at least 6 feet apart between people."
The 50% limit was later dropped, though various alternating attendance plans continued until about October, to keep schools below full capacity. Even after schools were fully reopened in most of the state, kids within 6 feet of each other were required to wear masks.
https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/education/83-4da75bde-5032-42a0-a244-d77a829a8ccf
My sister worked at a school that opened up. But kids exposed to Covid and their cohort in school would have to attend from home (online). The school ended up going online only within a month (or two) since most of the kids were only online.
We’re a country that accepts thousands of gun deaths without doing what every other industrialized nation has done to control the slaughter. Because, you know, “freedom.:
We’re a country in which almost, maybe more than half the people say that the 1 million and more people who died of COVID and those suffering from long COVID really didn’t happen and anyway most were just old people…… and, you know, freedom.
We’re a country in which a significant group of people, including one political party think immunizations which needs something like 90% of people immunized to be completely effective should not be required. Those who die or become paralyzed from breakthrough infections, like the over a million dead from COVID, and all the gun deaths, are just collateral damage because we are so so very “free”:
So the six foot rule, masks, and social isolation all of which saved lives before the COVID vaccines was just another attack by those socialists medical people on our ….. freedom.
I like to imagine how different the politics of COVID might have played out if the primary victims of the virus had been school-aged children rather than oldsters. Maybe we'll find out in the next pandemic.
+1
I thought it was six feet because not enough folks would grok two meters …
Most people don’t grok grok. They don’t grok tharn either but I use that word often.
Everyone I know groks grok. It's completely part of the english language. Thanks Heinlein. Tharn, on the other hand, is an obsolete middle english verb. Despite Adams best attempts to revive the word. (See the OED for both words. Also, Google ngrams.)
Heh! I had thought to point out that, in Europe and the UK, distancing guidelines were 2m, which was better than six imperial feet. Thanks for getting there first!
In the Yukon, the distance recommendation was two Husky lengths.
We had a clown who refused to be a leader and help manage the pandemic
It was more like a daily nationwide, all-network campaign ad, and did about as much "good." I looked forward to our local, statewide broadcasts in which the governor had groups of various experts and cabinet heads giving the latest info and answering questions from the media.
Governors Ned Lamont of Connecticut and Phil Murphy of New Jersey also did notably well, taking the same approach.
We also had both a political party & apparently millions of poorly-educated people who had never heard of, or understood, the concept of "public health" laws.
But most of them had presumably been vaccinated as a requirement to attend schools, even if none had an education about Typhoid Mary & actual legal consequences for breaking public-health laws. Sine our freedoms have been said to not extend to others' space, violations that endanger others should not be considered anyone's "freedom."
It's also amazing to consider that, had Trump proven minimally competent and to have a fraction of the charisma and stage presence people are always attributing to him, he would have easily cruised to reelection.
Think back to how popular even dullard governors became when they went on TV, said reassuring platitudes about how we're all in this together and we'll get through this etc., and then gave the floor for some basic gov/public health data to be delivered by some public health bureaucrats. Trump could have done just *that*, and people would have loved it.
But he was incapable of getting past the idea that covid was an opportunity for him to hold stupid interminably long and pointless press conferences where he could enjoy teevee cameras hanging on his every word. So, he looked like an irresponsible and blithering idiot unaware of how much everybody was suffering, and instead of reassuring the nation demonstrated how much of an ignoramous he actually was, talking about UV light "inside the body" and disinfecting lungs the way you would a dirty sink.
I don't think that it was worth the excess deaths his bungling caused, but the glare of covid helped us avoid his reelection.
The WaPo article was just an inferior piece of journalism; I stopped reading part way through when it became clear the writer was in way over his head.
I’m all in favor of ‘lessons learned’ retrospective studies — the one the U.S. needs is, why did many other countries, mostly in the Asia/Pacific region, do so much better?
The WaPo has had a noticeable decline in quality. Like most other outlets, they're writing for clicks these days. So much for democracy and darkness.
The WaPo is going to change even more, and not necessarily for the better:
https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/112550089034015647
Our school didn't have the space to distance kids by 6 feet, so they just changed the requirement in their COVID plan to be 3 feet, or "As close to 6 feet as is possible" or something like that. It wasn't terribly reassuring, but they did point out at the time that 6 feet isn't a magic number. Some schools may have closed over the distance thing, but it was a rather complicated process for how schools developed their COVID protocols, and there was a good deal of pressure (particularly outside cities) to keep schools open.
There was a big concern that kids would spread it to teachers, but there was also concern that kids would provide a new vector to spread it from family to family, and kids would bring it home from school. It was...complicated.
Kids would provide a *known* vector, one of the main vectors for spreading viruses.
When treating a novel airborne virus, follow the standard flu guidelines until you know more. The really scary thing about Covid was that people could be infectious and not show symptoms. You had the case of the worker at a nursing home going room to room making them Covid ready, only to feel under the weather at the end of his shift. And that led to a major outbreak at that nursing home.
That was a big problem with fighting COVID, it was infectious before becoming symptomatic. Ebola, for example, is barely contagious except when the patient is experiencing a high fever and sweating a lot. Republicans shat their pants when a few ebola cases showed up.
And what case was that?
The major nursing home outbreaks were primarily in blue states where nursing homes were prohibited from refusing to accept COVID patients who were still infectious.
Noted, you're just straight up lying about outbreaks in nursing homes, which happened everywhere.
And no, they weren't just because nursing homes weren't allowed to kick out residents who had been or were sick.
You're just sick, here.
With even self-professed wonks like Kevin questioning public health officials’ motives and knowledge with absolutely no evidence that they were purposefully trying to mislead or trick us and actually were just trying to do the best they could with the limited info they had at the time, we’ll be lucky to have any qualified people working at the CDC or NIH or federal and state health departments in a few years. If I were a highly trained virologist, I certainly would think twice about taking a job at any public health agency in the US. It seems like no upside and all downside: you’ll have your methodologies and recommendations second-guessed over and over again by people with far fewer or no qualifications whatsoever, and everything you do in your private life will be scrutinized to make sure you’re not a hypocrite, a liar, a fame seeker or a huckster. Yeah, no thanks, Virologist Austin will take a job in [any other advanced nation on earth] instead.
A lot of the criticism seems like a childish game of the Beard argument, where a guideline will say something like "you must wash your hands for 30 seconds" and the child will demand to know why it can't be 29 seconds, or 45.
The simple logic is that in preventing the spread of aerosolized particles, there is just a graduated set of steps on increasing efficacy; Turning your head to sneeze is better than not, sneezing into your crooked arm is better, sneezing into a handkerchief better still, going outside to sneeze even better, and so on.
Of course all rules are arbitrary but the underlying logic is rigorous.
Totally agree re: how childish/pointless all this rehashing of “did public health officials do everything 100% correctly?” is.
But I’m sure the situation will be vastly improved for COVID 2: The Recovidening when President Ivanka Trump is hiring the people who barely passed their grad school exams, television witchdoctors and other flakes to run the nation’s public health apparatus. Kevin won’t have to worry about whether the 3ft vs 6ft rule was justifiable in hindsight, because we’ll all be hunkered down in a Mad Max hellscape scrambling for food and water while trying not to die from our fellow armed citizens doing the same. “Social distancing” will take on a whole new meaning then.
If the child is running to catch the school bus you will say "Skip washing your hands of necessary." but we rigidity enforced the six foot rule instead of, say, three feet, even though it prevented millions of children from going to school for months.
DNFTT.
Citation not included, from the troll who last week was cheering the murder of a pedestrian who confronted a man who drove his car into a crowded crosswalk after professing the desire to... run his car into a crosswalk and kill people.
The simple logic is that in preventing the spread of aerosolized particles, there is just a graduated set of steps on increasing efficacy; Turning your head to sneeze is better than not, sneezing into your crooked arm is better, sneezing into a handkerchief better still, going outside to sneeze even better, and so on.
Exactly. It's a continuum.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I remember a short Twilight Zone type story that I can’t recall who wrote it or what it was called, but the plot consisted of a doctor (or perhaps a veterinarian or dentist or whatever) being shipwrecked (or plane crashed, lost while hiking in the mountains, whatever) and stumbling across a primitive society of people. He’s surprised they speak rudimentary English but goes about helping all of them with their medical problems in exchange for them graciously housing and feeding him. And he does his job so well that he ascends in social status among the group. And then he stumbles across a medical book (or a stethoscope, a syringe, whatever) and realizes: this society used to be much more medically advanced but the doctor at that time was killed (sacrificed to the gods, run out of town, whatever) because he couldn't solve 100% of their problems or was a heretic in some way.
Oh now I see why this tale is on my mind: it’s America’s future if we continue to trash all the qualified people who step up to serve the public. Eventually the qualified people will learn to keep their heads down and not rock the boat at all and/or take their knowledge and talents elsewhere, and unqualified people will step up to take their lucrative salaries and powerful positions, to the detriment of all but (maybe) the wealthiest among us.
I’m not touching this thread with a 10 foot pole
lol!
There seems to be some coordination today between the Washington Post and the NYT to help support the Republican narrative that will be espoused at the hearings. Specifically, I got this in my e-mail this morning from the NYT:
"For the past four years, Alina Chan, a molecular biologist, has been a brave and independent voice, willing to say in public what many scientists only whisper behind closed doors: As the evidence continues to mount, she argues in a guest essay for Times Opinion, it looks increasingly likely that the pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident — one that was at least partly enabled by U.S. government funding and research collaboration."
WTF? Seriously? Going further in this e-mail:
"In her essay, Chan uses graphics and maps to clearly lay out, in five important points, the key evidence that shows why the coronavirus probably escaped from a lab.
If you haven’t been keeping up with all the latest Covid-19 document releases under the Freedom of Information Act, government leaks and email dumps, what she has to say might surprise you."
We. Are. Fucked.
I would be all for a sober, non-partisan inquiry into "lessons learned", covering the whole gamut from research practices to public health response, but this ain't it.
By the way, the e-mail is written by Jeremy Ashkenas -- Graphics Director for the Opinion assessment. Yeah, that gives him the background to meaninfully comment on the evidence ...
Sounds like a deep fake to me. Are you using gmail? If not, consider switching. If so, stop reading your spam and start reporting it.
It seems genuine:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
Both the Opinion piece, and the e-mail advertising it, are 100% genuine and from the NYT.
Yes, this does sound like something from the NYT Pitchbot Twitter/X account. But the brilliant thing about the Pitchbot is no matter how hard he tries to parody the NYT, the real NYT always manage to outdo him. (A couple months back when OJ died, the e-mail the NYT sent out started with: "He ran to football fame on the field and made fortunes in movies. But his world was ruined after he was charged with killing his former wife and her friend.")
The Washington Post today also has an article about a Republican and Democratic doctor on the House panel, with the D doctor lamenting that he'd much rather be having hearings on how to improve ventilation systems in schools before the next pandemic. That's buried very deep in the article, and the D doctor gets maybe 10% of the space as the R's on the panel. The R doctor leading the panel is a podiatrist surgeon, so yeah, if the next pandemic is Athlete's Foot, we're good.
"By the way, the e-mail is written by Jeremy Ashkenas -- Graphics Director for the Opinion assessment. Yeah, that gives him the background to meaninfully comment on the evidence ..."
Hey, Jeremy explained that Chan used "graphics and maps," which is a subject he is (apparently) an expert in as a Graphics Director, so his assessment that the graphics and maps are like, super-persuasive, is rock-solid.
Not that we shouldn’t review lab-safety protocols, but natural origins will still occur. The important lessons to be learned must include public-health response, which will be needed however the next pandemic originates. And in that, it is clear to me that the nations that faced the SARS outbreak and consequently developed measures and ‘playbooks’ for public-health response to novel contagious diseases, performed far better during the CoVid-19 pandemic. We need to focus more on that issue. Unfortunately, it has also been politicized; the Obama administration developed protocols which the Trump administration apparently defunded. I haven’t seen a thorough investigation into what extent those protocols were or were not followed, and how they might be improved and sustained against future outbreaks.
The reason you shut down the schools is because it does such a good job of increasing the transmission of viruses. The population density is greater than it is in the workplace.
So how exactly were kids going to be kept to either three or six feet of separation? Distancing of any kind in confined spaces where large numbers of people are is difficult if not impossible. If the people are spaced exactly at the minimum, how do they move? What if somebody in the middle has to go to the bathroom? How are the people going to be trained to line up properly, file in and file out of rooms, etc. while maintaining distance?
The danger that had to anticipated was having relatively large numbers of people in confined spaces, period - classrooms, churches, bars, etc. As it turned out the infection rate among the young was very low, but it would have been extremely foolish to assume this before hand - and it will be foolish to assume that the next pandemic will be similar in this respect.
The media have been irresponsible in publishing analyses and interpretations that are based on things that were not known at the time. Of course Republicans are not looking at all for the best ways of proceeding in a pandemic, they are just playing a blame game. The media get caught up in what are some difficult technical questions while ignoring the gross incompetence of the Trump administration.
So how exactly do you control how far apart desks and lines are?
Gee, I dunno, it's not like kids in schools can be instructed or given marks on the ground or spread out through emptier buildings or given more time outside or,,,
Speak language which communicates information and ideas!
Secret Service Agents Bringing in McDonalds for Donald Trump,
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1d6ufy7/secret_service_agents_bringing_mcdonalds_in_for/
He's probably re-selling this crap to his numbskulls, 'one genuine cheeseburger with one bite taken out of it by President McBarksalot'.
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If bird flu successfully jumps the species boundary with virulence intact, I am ALL for ignoring public health concerns. Yeah! Let the bozos die a terrible hacking death from triumphantly goose-stepping around with one another.
You do realize if the virulence is intact it will be worse than the Black Death yeah? Civilization will collapse and you'll die too.
Probably so, but somehow the Earth needs to be pruned of most human beings, and this would be quick and effective. The greatest negative side-effect will be that the innocent Vultures will get flu from the unburied corpses.
Technology needs people to make it run.
That's from the play and movie written by John Guare. I'm willing to believe that if Guare had said "five degrees of separation" instead, we'd have had a different popular meme, a different measure for connecting actors to Kevin Bacon, and a different standard for social distancing during the pandemic.
Six feet was not a precise distance that was rigorously tested by the scientific community as an optimal safety measure. It was a rough estimate to use for guidance based on educated guesswork of public health officials during a worldwide emergency. That's good enough for me. Second guessers can go jump in a lake.
Meanwhile, I'd like to take issue with this:
"...lots of schools were shut down..."
Where were schools shut down? Most schools remained OPEN through the pandemic. In some cases, schools continued with on-campus learning with barely an interruption. In many cases, schools shifted from on-campus learning to remote learning. But either way, lessons were taught, tests were administered, and grades were assigned.
You might argue that remote learning was less than optimal. A lot of managers might say working from home was less than optimal for the workforce too, but we don't say their companies were shut down. Why do people readily agree that schools were shut down? That's using the language of anti-public safety rogues who want to paint reasonable pandemic measures as the height of authoritarianism.
Many things were shut down. Restaurants and theaters, for example. But just as work from home allowed many businesses to stay OPEN, remote learning allowed schools to stay OPEN.
Enough of this "lots of schools were shut down." It's not true.
Agree 100%. In Los Angeles, schools were close for one week, then it was spring break, then we opened online learning. Was it as good? No, but we were there and working every day.
The schools went to online learning because nobody was certain what was happening. In the week prior to school closing, attendance in my classes dropped significantly each day. Some students who did attend were wearing masks. After the schools shifted to online, a very large majority of parents said they did not want their students to return to classes until there was a vaccine. Even after the vaccine, when classes were opened again in April 2021, only a handful of students showed up.
And even then most businesses moved to a takeout or delivery system. First essential businesses, then restaurants, then other stores. Here, they placed either a limit on people in the store, or a table at the door where they'd do the transaction outside.