I generally try not to let Twitter beefs contaminate the blog, but at least a few people last night denounced me as an idiot on the subject of airborne aerosol transmission of COVID-19. This seems to have turned into something of a truther jihad, so it's worth running down the history of this.
The whole thing started with a suggestion that perhaps Chinese virologists knew from the start that COVID-19 was transmitted via airborne aerosols while Western scientists insisted it was spread by droplets that were too big to stay suspended in the air for long. One explanation for this disagreement is that the Chinese had learned a lesson from the SARS epidemic of 2003.
But this isn't really so. Here are the basics:
- For reasons outlined a few months ago in Megan Molteni's excellent account in Wired, the epidemiological community has for years believed that aerosol transmission is only likely for particles less than 5 microns in diameter, and since most viruses are enveloped in packages larger than that they can spread only a few feet before falling to the ground. This mistaken belief was caused by a misreading of one particular study followed by inconclusive research over the next few decades. By the 1980s the tide was turning slightly on this, but scientists mostly still believed that aerosol transmission was unlikely with large particles.
- When SARS hit in 2003, epidemiologists in China believed it was mostly spread by droplets, not airborne aerosols. There was one large outbreak in an apartment complex that seemed to implicate airborne transmission, but eventually, after practically tearing the apartment complex apart, scientists concluded that the culprit was droplets spreading through a faulty sewage system. However, other studies disagreed, suggesting that airborne transmission of SARS may have played a modest role in certain kinds of settings.
- Fast forward to late 2019. The initial reporting from Chinese scientists once again suggested droplet transmission, though with some possibility of aerosol transmission. Generally speaking, there was no difference between Chinese and Western scientists on this, and Chinese treatment of COVID-19 outbreaks didn't focus on airborne transmission.
- Over the next few months, evidence for aerosol transmission began to grow. Partly this was due to new studies. Partly it was due to new evidence showing that COVID particles were not always larger than 5 microns. And partly it was due to the intervention of the physics community, which wasn't blinded by the old 5 micron standard and knew that aerosol transmission was perfectly plausible for particles considerably larger than 5 microns. By late summer of 2020, it was pretty well agreed that airborne aerosol transmission was one of the ways COVID-19 spread.
You can decide for yourself how badly this speaks of the epidemiological community. On the one hand, they obviously misjudged the role of aerosol transmission of COVID-19. On the other hand, this was a matter of considerable research in their area of specialty, and that's not something you abandon instantly based on one or two early studies.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, this subject has become something of a jihad among certain people, who are convinced that there was overwhelming evidence of airborne transmission within weeks of the first case, and anyone who denied it was simply stupid. I don't think there's any way of talking them out of this belief, but it really doesn't fit the facts. Epidemiologists clearly made a mistake here, and some of it was indeed based on stubbornness. But it was also based on a laudable desire not to overturn decades of belief overnight until the evidence was clear. There are not really any big villains here.
UPDATE: I mixed up microns and nanometers in the original post. Sorry about that. It's fixed now, along with some more precise language about exactly what it is we're measuring.
> that aerosol transmission was only likely for particles less than 5 microns in diameter
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7224694/ :
> SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus ≈0.1 μm in diameter
Is there confusion about microns vs nanometers? A micron is 1000x larger than a nanometer.
Yes, contrary to what Kevin says (twice) the coronavirus particles are considerably smaller than 5 microns - in fact so small as not to be stopped by many masks. The argument about particle size is complex and anyone really interested in this should read the linked article in Wired. But even that does not cover the way that it was originally recommended to worry about surfaces and not wear masks.
I had the same question. A 5 micron (I can’t do a mu character on my iPad) or 5,000 nm particle is clearly a potential aerosol and big enough for multiple SARS viruses.
Viruses are tiny, but they do not travel as free floating individual viruses. I'm not sure if they could remain intact in that state. Instead, they travel with the droplets and fine mist, aerosols, that comes out of us every time we breath. Particles should refer to the material that carries the virus, not to an individual virus.
The evidence was there by the start of March 2020. Even now there wasn't enough done to fit out every school with a ventilation system that exchanges outside air with inside. You want schools to be open, that's what you need to do.
[TL;DR Kevin's chronology is the one I remember; next time somebody bangs on about masks and aerosol and Fauci was wroonnnnnng!1!1!!, I'll cite this post]
You're right that the evidence was there. But the way science works is, that evidence confirming a current consensus is weighted heavier than evidence that contradicts. The latter evidence is more likely to be omitted as an outlier, too. It takes the accumulation of a good bit of that "contradictory evidence" before the current consensus starts to shift. And why? B/c *typically* the consensus has a lot of evidence on its side, accumulated over years. In *this* case, that wasn't true: in fact, as Kevin describes, the "evidence" for "aerosols must be <5nm in size" was sketchy and mostly came down to (IIRC) one study from the 1930s. But "received wisdom" is a thing, and scientists are just people.
Kevin's chronology is the one I remember, too: applied physicists did simulation, modeling, and even some experiments, to show that the then-current consensus was wrong.
It's a pity that it had to happen literally at the leading-edge of a global respiratory virus pandemic, but this is a great example of how science works, if only the world public were able to understand it.
Zeynep responds to KD jaw dropping idiocy here:
https://mobile.twitter.com/zeynep/status/1435292260153892881
"Oh my goodness, that account he has is so wrong. It's chronologically, factually and substantially wrong. But anyway, whatever."
KD had some good posts on Afghanistan. He should have declared the win and taken the rest of the month off. He's been on some kind of roll this week.
Nothing to see there but unsubstantiated claims disguised in mockery.
Twitter is of all platforms the last anybody should use for complex scientific problems. I for one will be convinced only with a proper set of at least a few paragraphs of normal language.
Until then I think Kevin is right.
"It’s just not true that there was no real evidence or science on airborne transmission and we then caught up."
'It takes the accumulation of a good bit of that "contradictory evidence" before the current consensus starts to shift. "
And this is as it should be. Otherwise you spend all your time diving down rabbit holes. Remember cold fusion?
I think that part of the problem is that people aren't used to watching science working in real time. The version we get in school is vastly tidied up, usually omitting the false starts down garden paths. Worse, on the few occasions when we are told about these false starts, the story often is cast as a hero (Darwin) and a villain (Lemarck). These false starts are normal and unavoidable, but to people used to the edited version told later on, it can be confusing and off-putting.
The preprint version of the Guangzhao restaurant study (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) was posted April 22, and not long after there was info on the Washington choir superspreader event (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm). That's when I learned that aerosol was a major means of covid spread. Before May I don't think it was at all clear.
The study on Guangshou says "the most likely cause of this outbreak was droplet transmission" and the one on the choir practice says "Choir practice attendees had multiple opportunities for droplet transmission ... Members had an intense and prolonged exposure, singing while sitting 6–10 inches from one another"
This doesn't seem to provide strong evidence for the importance of aerosols although it certainly does not rule it out.
For sure, the choir outbreak wasn't "proof". But the pattern of infection -- that the closer you were to the infected, the more likely you'd get it, was strong evidence that aerosols were involved. And that's how many of us took it at the time. Not as proof. Just as an indication that maybe we oughta be a whole heckuva lot more careful, b/c it could be in the air we breathe.
"the closer you were to the infected, the more likely you'd get it"
This should be true for both droplets and aerosols but more so for droplets. The argument of Kevin's post isn't about whether it is in the air, but about the size of the particles.
Air versus surface transmission was a separate argument initially, and the CDC got that badly wrong, telling people not to wear masks and sterilize all surfaces.
That's not really how aerosols work (which is where ventilation comes in), but is the case for droplets.
There was that early study of an outbreak in a Korean call center. Sure looked like aerosols were a likely risk factor to me based on the pattern and number of transmissions, and I acted accordingly by focusing more on air flow and the amount of space around me (I'd rather be 3 feet from someone outside than 6 feet from someone in a walk-in closet).
This kerfluffle is related to something that happens fairly often in science: lit reviews that dont go back far enough. Sometimes it is a deadly mistake: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Johns-Hopkins-Tragedy-Could-Librarians-Have-Prevented-a-Death-17534.asp
Score one for the physicists! That said, if the epidemiology community was indeed “blinded” that does not speak well of them at all.
Take away - development of clear data and conclusions in real world science (and engineering) is rather more complex and difficult than what Hollywood movies present, but regrettably 90% of humanity gets its understanding of these subjects from Hollywood movies which are too impatient to convey properly... (with some few exceptions, Contagion notably)
This. And I think also the demand -- which in many cases, particularly among the authoritarian right, is a pathological craving -- for certainty and finality causes both false expectations for science and false understanding of its results.
Unlike the cheaper brands of religion, science never yields finality and only approaches -- often slowly -- a degree of confidence short of certainty.
But as you observe, given the Hollywood caricature, plus the really terrible state of science education in public schools, it's little wonder the public are unprepared to understand scientific processes and results. This is where politicians should step up, but alas, they're generally no better equipped that the public to understand.
Yep, the Monday morning quarterbacks are always coming up with perfect passing ratings...
And what folks say next reveals who the jihadists are. Normal folks will say, "Wow, that was a colossal error. We learned a hard lesson." Jihadists will say something like, "And this PROVES my point that it's a conspiracy!"
+1. Science is never 'right' in the mathematical sense (huh, maybe that's why I went into math instead of science); it only becomes progressively 'less wrong'. I don't think the public gets that. In fact, I'm sure the public doesn't get that.
Except by the first week of February in 2020 the National Health Commission of China was recommending people wear masks, keep a distance of 3 meters (~10 feet), wash their hands or use hand sanitizer regularly, and to avoid crowded public places. Having some facility with Chinese I read it (though I had to use Google translate for parts of it). It may be that the NHC didn't know for sure that masks worked but at least they didn't see any downside to recommending them. But it sure sounds like they were aware of the positive benefit of wearing masks...
1. Authorities in Wuhan required people to start wearing masks in public places on January 24th 2020.
2. Starting in February China ramped up its production of face masks. On March 2nd 2020 the XinHua news agency wrote that "China's daily output of face masks reached 116 million units as of Saturday, 12 times the figure reported on Feb. 1, as production expansion moves into top gear..."
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/02/c_138835152.htm
3. And in an interview in Science magazine, in the March 27th 2020 issue, George Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said it was a big mistake for Western countries not to promote mask wearing...
-----------
Q: What mistakes are other countries making?
A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren't wearing masks. This virus is transmitted by droplets and close contact. Droplets play a very important role—you've got to wear a mask, because when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth. Many people have asymptomatic or presymptomatic infections. If they are wearing face masks, it can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others.
----------
https://www.science.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-protect-against-coronavirus-big-mistake-top-chinese-scientist-says
bingo
Does this not also mean epidemiologists have been wrong about almost all airborne virus transmission?
It seems a pretty big miss.
Let me second the above. It is transmitted by both droplets and aerosols. One of the reasons masks work since they are especially good at catching droplets.
Steve
Very true. The either/or nature of the argument really misses the point.
More evidence: According to Woodward's book, "Rage", that former guy was telling Bob in February (maybe January; it's been awhile since I read it) that COVID was spread "in the air." I doubt that either of them would comprehend any difference between airborne and aerosol particles, though.
It's fairly easy to observe that dust particles and water droplets big enough to see with the naked eye can remain airborne for a considerable period of time. I haven't put a set of calipers on a dust mote, but my guess is that if you can see it it's not much smaller than a tenth of a millimeter, which is 100 microns.
The distinction between droplets and aerosols is of interest to researchers. To those of us at risk of catching the disease, it doesn't particularly matter if the person sneezing in our general direction is generating virus laden droplets or virus laden aerosols. In either case, they're putting viruses into the air where they will remain for long enough for other people to inhale them.
Who are the "thruthers" who are making an issue of this - i.e. some sort of cover up of aerosolization? Personally I have read many sites that are sceptical of covid restrictions and policy but I have not heard that criticism yet.
What I have heard is a criticism that made proponents refused to discuss or consider that the increasing evidence that aerosolization is the biggest factor meant that the expectation of mask effectiveness should be refused. And I agree with that.
But re masking and aerosolization vs droplets, I want to point out that the evidence does not show that droplet spread is not a factor at all, just not the primary one.
And not enough discussion about the fact that droplets evaporating in the air can become aerosolized.
So for direct droplet spread , masks should be fairly effective for both the wearer and others. For direct aerosolization , masks are generally ineffective for both wearer and others. It is for aerosolization by droplet that masks are ineffective for the wearer but protect others.
And I will also throw out again a thought I have had that have seen nowhere else. Seems that outdoors, aerosolization would be greatly reduced as a threat compared to indoors. But would droplet spread be reduced much outdoors on a non windy day? Do not see why?
So, at least for the wearer protection, I would think there might be not a big difference in mask effectiveness for outdoors vs indoors. Would it not be correct that masks might reduce absolute risk more indoors ( as it starts far higher) but reduce relative risk more outdoors?
Wearing masks is mainly meant to stop you from infecting others by catching virus loaded particles you breath out. Indoors, that reduces the viral load in the air, which helps lower the odds that one will get infected. Outdoors, effective viral load drops to zero with infinite dilution. Of course, if you're right next to someone, their breath is not being infinitely diluted before it reaches you.
As for masks protecting you--it's not that you need a mask that has a pore size smaller than 1 micron, but you need a mask that can stop a 1 micron particle. Typically they are absorbed or adsorbed to the mask material.
You can get infected if you are talking to someone close by and a small droplet of their saliva gets exhaled or sneezed out to you and you breath it in . That is a normal mode of transmission for viruses . And a mask will certainly help protect you the wearer from that sort of infection. Although my understanding is that cloth masks are much less effective there as they are porous enough that you can easily breath in the virus from the droplet that lands on your mask as it evaporates while surgical masks work pretty well there.
And I think it also matters how long you wear the mask and also if you are constantly touching it. If an infectious particular lands on your mask and you remove it carefully soon after , likely the virus will not infect you. If you keep the mask on for hours after with that droplet full of viruses evaporating, you give it more chance to get through the mask. And touching the outside with the virus on it and then later wiping your face with that hand - well that is just dumb and we see politicians do that all the time.
I tend to think maybe covid can infect by droplets and surfaces maybe just as well as the flu - but it is the extra aerosolized spread that makes its R so high.
Note all the restrictions and masking really seemed to make little difference. Have to believe they helped just by theory. But not enough to be demonstrated with certainty in studies.
But boy it sure killed the flu . Almost wiped it out. That is the difference between reducing R from maybe 5 to 4 and reducing it from 1.5 to .9. If R0 is 4 ,still going to spread until you get to herd immunity. If you get R0 to .9 , it is going nowhere.
This is very much an argument about points on a continuum. Droplets will infect you. And aerosols will too. A 10 micron particle carrying the virus can cause disease whether or not it is called a droplet or an aerosol. And masks can help block them.
One of the early issues was how to deal with infected people. There are rules based on the nature of transmission. If a virus is designated as carried by aerosols, then the protocol for handling patients is much stricter than if it was designated are carried by droplets. This was treated as major flu outbreak, because we know how to do that and can scale that response. That sort of worked in the sense that our medical workers did not drop like flies due to infection. However, we really should have set up quarantine hotels to minimize spread in families.
The Chinese did that, but in some cases it required relocating people coercively. Given the reaction in this country to something as simple as wearing masks, I doubt that would have been possible.
Even among the mask-willing subset of the population.
The Chinese did that, but in some cases it required relocating people coercively. Given the reaction in this country to something as simple as wearing masks, I doubt that would have been possible.
I'm sure you're right. But that's mainly because of lack of political will. Not lack of a legal basis. Certainly mandatory quarantine and isolation are standard public health strategies in the wake of epidemics, and have been used before in the United States.
We started both masking, gloving, and surface cleaning protocols as soon as word came out that COVID-19 was spreading very rapidly. My wife and I are old enough and have paid enough attention to medical issues to know how rapidly things could shift as the CDC, WHO, other medical researchers found out more - and we both got a clear message early on that one of the reasons for not emphasizing masks at the very start was to avoid a run on PPE needed by medical personnel.
And, with pretty fast disruption in the medical supply chain, there were critical shortages in both medical (or even any) grade masks, nitrile gloves, and surface and hand cleaners PDQ. All our local hardware stores cleaned their stocks out and donated them to clinics and hospitals. Several of the local distilleries started turning out grain alcohol and supplying hand sanitizing and surface cleaning solutions.
As lawnorder wrote, we're now down to keeping masked up in any indoor or crowded outdoor situation. Don't care about aerosol or droplet - somebody coughs, there will probably be plenty of both.
We've relaxed on gloves and surfaces but still do more frequent washing and sanitizing when we bring things into our house and will be keeping that up for some time to come...
This is why there is also a heavy emphasis on INDOOR VENTILATION. I jumped all over that at a preschool I have a hand in, and I think it's proven out. Masks too, of course, and yes cleaning of surfaces and materials, but fans and windows have been a big part of it.
"But boy it sure killed the flu ."
Not just the flu but also RSV. Texas Children has had its ICU at capacity and turning people away for a while now. A lot is Covid but it is also RSV. Had almost none last year.
Steve
Yes. And with rsv, early summer it came back with a vengeance many places with far more cases than normal ( especially for summer). There was some bad reporting earlier about oh my pediatric wards in hospitals were getting crowded by children's covid cases . But the reporters had failed to check and find out it was rsv and not covid.
I think we learned one thing re rsv. It seems it is an endemic virus that is kept under control only by constant refreshing of natural immunity through mild reinfections among kids. They are getting reinfected all the time when they still have some natural immunity to keep from getting sick. But you kill it off for a year and natural immunity wanes more than usual, it can become a more serious disease.
Hopefully that will not be the same with the flu.
Just seeing what some here think re my masking policy in situations where not mandated. As a vaccinated 60 -65 y.o with some medical issues but not ones that have a high covid risk. And as someone who is quite careful so real low risk of catching and being infectious.
Plus note I have n95 masks and had from the start ( had bought a supply for smoke from fires pre pandemic). Per doctor, OK to reuse after it sits in sun for a week.
If indoors and will be in a crowded unventilated room near others, I am definitely wearing my mask to protect myself and I avoid that situation anyway .
If indoors and far away from others ( behind droplet range ) and others not wearing a mask , I will not either. If others are, will do so mainly out of courtesy.
If outdoors near others unmasked for more than a brief pass by , I will wear a mask .
By the start of summer 2020, ASHRAE was already noting that it was likely airborne as aerosol when it came out with recommendations for schools, including the use of inline UV-C in HVAC systems.
You keep doubling down on being wrong. Please stop.
Takes a while for that message to get across, which is part of the point. Some suspected aerosols earlier than others (I heard these folks), none had proved it. And honestly ASHRAE has a commercial incentive here as well.
If you are responding to me, what in your post do you think is contradicted by anything I said in my posts ? I am not sure what you are disagreeing with.
Speaking to Kevin's comments on the lay public's understanding of science and how science is done, I think he has it exactly right. The public expects either Eureka! or going from noticing something is off to instantly making deep-seated deductions to the formulation of a brilliant new theory that their peers could only marvel at in gape-mouthed wonder.
Uh-huh. As most of us know, science is done by teams, not lone geniuses (I'm going with the correct cognates, I hope.) Hence the Fauci this and Fauci that for the most part, with occasional references to the villainous scum manning the CDC. Note also that the lone genius more often than not doesn't really have to invest years of thought and study before announcing their conclusions. It's more often 'a flash of insight. Why even the common man can do that!
Building up good datasets, Bayesian inferences on priors? That stuff is boring. We are not well served by our media. Or the movies 🙁
Also, I think you should be uncomfortable with using specific words that have long been used passive-aggressively to reinforce biases against Muslims.
Actually, about the only event I can recall where events evolved in accordance with public perception would be the discovery of the fourth quantum number, spin. Apocryphally, or perhaps not so apocryphally, the son of a physicist (either Uhlenbeck or Goudsmit, I forget which one) noticed not one band of interference, but two bands spaced very close together, so close that only a young pair of eyes could see it unaided. I think they went from first observation to published paper in what? Two weeks or so?
If anybody has another example of a modern (please, not the ur-legend) scientific discovery proceeding in just this manner, I'd certainly like to hear it.
Let's be clear. In the initial months when COVID was spreading, and when the CDC et al *DID NOT KNOW HOW IT WAS TRANSMITTED*, they nonetheless advised hand washing and distancing. Why?
And why not also include masking and aerosol transmission mitigation (e.g. ventilation)?
The (brief) discouragement of masking was done to fool the public so that surgical & N95 masks would be available for health care professionals. I consider that bad public policy, to lie for the greater good, but others disagree.
It's true they wanted to protect the mask supply, considering the mask issues and the bleak immediate supply picture, and that can be debated but in the name of public health can be defended (and criticized from other perspectives), but doesn't really have anything to do with aerosol mitigation, no need to confuse these things together.
The paramount idea was preventing hospital and emergency medical care overwhelming, so protecting these folks doing this was also paramount.
But it backfired.
First , not many people, at least based on those I talked to , believed what fauci was saying in the first place. It just never made sense - we really need these masks in the hospitals but they are completely worthless in protecting the public. If they are so utterly worthless for the public, how can they be so valuable in hospitals? People sort of felt that they were being lied to- but they still did not rush out and buy up the supply. People are much more considerate of the community than the establishment elite thinks .
And that lie really hurt fauci's credibility with a large part of the public so they did not believe him about later stuff. Two other things seemed to also be noticed and damaged his credibility.
And worse of all, if you are going to lie and mislead, why do you then later have to go out and basically brag about it and basically be perceived as gloating that you tricked all the peasants? Just say you really did not think that masks would work for the public for the decent reasons he initially gave? Put your ego on hold for once and just say you were wrong.
And then later he brags again about lying on a different issue. What an idiot.
I don't believe a word of any of this.
This is simply something a lot of people latched onto after the fact to justify their native stupidity or that they were swallowing wingnut horsecrap, in order to obscure their dissociated anxiety.
When anyone points out they're just sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting they do it even louder.
Both of you are wrong. I don't think Fauci is that important. Something are little meatball(with a bit of Beber) doesn't understand either in Florida.
I don't believe a word of any of this.
You're right not to. I don't think many of the people screaming about Fauci's "lies" have actually taken the time to head to Youtube and view the infamous 60 Minutes interview. Claiming Fauci lied is about the least charitable interpretation imaginable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI&ab_channel=60Minutes
i) Fauci is asked point blank by the journalist about prioritizing masks and other PPE for healthcare workers. He candidly admits — right there on camera — this is an important consideration. Zero attempt at obfuscation.
ii) Even if you think Fauci is a lying SOB, the "lie" lasted all of three weeks or so. CDC officially changed its public guidance on masking in early April.
iii) Fauci claims another part of the reasoning for the initial downplaying of masks was that the epidemiological community discounted the possibility of transmission via asymptomatic carriers (presumably if you're sick enough to transmit, according to this reasoning, you're not going to be wondering around Walmart). I'm not sure why people find this so hard to believe: WHO was saying the same thing.
iv) WHO, by the way, didn't change its recommendation on masking until June! So, if you want to slag Fauci on this, at minimum please note he was a full two months ahead of WHO.
v) I was in the SF Bay Area at the time, and the several stores I was shopping at — Trader Joe's, Safeway, Walgreens, CVS, one or two locals — all required patrons to mask up. These are large, national or regional chains, so I doubt my observation was locally anecdotal. In other words, the three week soft-pedaling of masking, whatever one thinks of the motivation, didn't seem to have much effect in any event.
Fauci and the country's public health apparatus haven't been perfect. But the lion's share of the blame for the country's disastrous response to covid lies with the Donald Trump administration and sundry Republican governors. That's a painful truth many people don't want to face. So they seek to shift blame. End of story.
Jasper, nope on Republicans. A disease with a 98% recovery rate(deaths or long term symptoms being the other 2%) simply doesn't require excessive lockdowns nor did they work. Why the Democratic party refused to follow science, is a shame. They lucked out by stupid Republicans just wanting to play politics. Which imo is slowly eating that party away.
What Trump Administration did or didn't do wasn't going to effect the long term trend of this viral outbreak.
Something are little meatball(with a bit of Beber) doesn't understand either in Florida.
This will be my go-to retort for the day.
But by the first week of March 2020, out here in the SF Bay Area, all nine of the Bay Area counties were recommending that people wear masks in public. Realizing that there was already a shortage of masks, they posted ways to make multilayer masks at home. The philosophy was that any mask was better than nothing. And I remember being pissed off when in late March Dr Fauci (errr, I mean Saint Dr Fauci) told us we were all overreacting. It's kind of interesting that the popular narrative has forgotten this Fauci faux pas.
And at this point, we should give proper credit to Dr Wu Lien Teh, who as part of his work to control the 1910 Manchurian Plague, designed the cloth mask that ended up being used by most of the world in the early 20th century. Wu's experiments showed that multi-layer cotton mask was effective at stopping the airborne transmission disease among patients and among health care workers. .
Fauci thought it was a problem but overblown. My guess he still does. But he found out he was also in a political position.
A few points
1) I have said before and do suspect that maybe fauci really was not lying in the first place. He sounded more sincere in those first interviews.
And perhaps he and the cdc did simply change their minds as new evidence came in. One of which was the increasing concern re asymptomatic spread. But another was that in the first few weeks there was some hope that maybe we would be able to get it under control.
But then later fauci " admits " that he was just saying that to get people to not use masks to preserve the supply for hospitals. So either lying before or lying about lying. Maybe lying about lying to try to discount his prior reasons not to mask.
But, whether you were lying at first or not, why not just say you were wrong before?
2) don't bring up WHO as a defense . They have been horrible all pandemic. If you need to say " but better than WHO" , you did pretty poorly yourself.
3) so you only lied for three weeks? What difference does that make in public perception? What is remembered is that he was willing to lie to try to manipulate you into an action instead of just telling the public the truth.
Maybe if I am ever charged with perjury, I will try the " I only lied for that one day in court" defense.
4) and if fauci had just lied that once , might have blown over a but.
But no, he also says he estimated herd immunity goal at one level and then increased it later because he thought he could push up the vaccination level ( once he saw we could get to the initial goal). So he is saying what he thinks we need for herd immunity based on manipulating the public rather than an honest assessment ?
And , in that case, there really was a strong explanation of why we should move the herd immunity goal as we saw the variants were more contagious. His initial estimate and later one seemed reasonable to me based on changing facts as his honest assessment at the time.
So why oh why does he later say he changed it to get more vaccinations as he saw they were going well? Is that just ego showing how smart he is to trick people?
And the refusal to ever even consider natural immunity as part of herd immunity is flatly dishonest.
5) are some conservative Republicans using fauci lies just as an excuse for vaccine resistance and opposition to restrictions?
Maybe in a way. But I do not think it is just a made up excuse- they honestly do not trust him for good reason. But it is true that it is not likely that factor is a crucial one. Even if fauci never lied, they might have near the same opposition.
But have also heard the distrust of fauci among democratic African Americans and Hispanics ( somewhat to my surprise) and they do mention the masking lie . For them, it might have been more important as to their eventual feelings.
For Republicans also, the fact that fauci did not condemn large blm protests as potential superspreader events while complaining about similar conservative events is often mentioned. Unsurprisingly, not by African Americans.
6) and his manner and personality plays a role.
He comes across as someone who thinks he is smarter and knows better than you do about what is best for you and so feels entitled to manipulate all the idiots out there.
When he did say he lied, he did not sheepishly apologize and seemed to feel bad about it - seemed more bragging about it.
That infuriates people.
He comes across as someone who thinks he is smarter and knows better than you do about what is best for you
In most cases he does "know better than you do." What percentage of the population is a trained epidemiologist? What percentage of the population is even passingly familiar with the basics of virology and medicine?
Millions of Americans are injecting cattle medication. Get real.
But what does this mean for epidemiology Nobellists Loq Qabin Nate Silver & John Mc Cain White House Press Secretary Jon Stewart's contention that the Rona is an intentional bioweaponized Chinesse Lableak?
I would say the more important issue is why the people in the know were or were not pushing for better ventilation, which could have been done by spring/summer 2021, and why the political folks didn't listen to those people, but of course we were all taking a victory lap in the spring that we would vaccinate everyone and be done with this, which didn't happen because of all the holdouts plus Delta variant of course.
Now we know what to do, whether or not Joe gets his $3.5 trillion, we still need another emergency $100 billion at least to upgrade school ventilation in all 50 states, so we can avoid this same groundhog day next year if that's how things play out, will be a synergistic investment that will likely improve several contagious disease situations, and also put a hell of a lot of people to work on some essential infrastructure!
Who's going to oppose this funding to protect our children, while synergistically helping our elderly and grandfolk?
Isn't this distinction too clever by half in the first place. Droplets and aerosols are essentially the same things with different droplet sizes (resulting in different spreading patterns). And the "border" between droplets and aerosol is by definition arbitrary as the whole thing is really a continuum.
Right. There's absolutely no difference between, say, flying at 10 mph slower than the speed of sound and flying 10 mph faster. Substitute 'light' for 'sound' if that's not obvious enough. The point is, it is often the case that small quantitative changes can cause large qualitative changes. That being said, there seems to be some authority behind your contention.
I get your point re virus sizes and think you are right there.
But really bad example of flying just less than or just more than speed of sound. There is a big difference there and it is not just a continum. Sonic boom for example.
Am presuming you were responding to a different post than mine, which made a point about ventilation.
Biden didn't ask for 3.5 trllion.
Immaterial pragmatically to my post.
oc43 was likely the same. The last variant to go global.
Defending the science establishment by saying it's not their fault that they got stuck in 1930's science? This part of why a lot of people don't trust "the science". Isn't one of the complaints of researchers who can't get published that they have to support the current wisdom in order to get published? How are people who see something new and important going to get around peer review when those peers are the ones who've made a living on the current wisdom? Too many examples of paradigm shift to blow this off as okay.
In this case it seems even weirder that they were stuck in those views, since there was so little to base it on.
No, the problem is jumping to conclusions. There just isn't one "science", but many sciences.
"On the other hand, this was a matter of considerable research in their area of specialty, and that's not something you abandon instantly based on one or two early studies."
"And partly it was due to the intervention of the physics community, which wasn't blinded by the old 5 micron standard and knew that aerosol transmission was perfectly plausible for particles considerably larger than 5 microns. "
The issue is not "research" and "specialty", the issue is that some techniques for knowledge acquisition are a lot better than others.
The techniques used by physicists are especially good.
The techniques used by epidemiologists are especially bad (cf 50+ yrs of food research and we still don't actually know what's going on, what an optimal diet would look like).
And (BTW) most of the techniques used in biology that work well come from the physicists or their cousins, the chemists (cf eg Max Delbruck).
And yet the way this is treated by most people is to complain of "physics imperialism" and to mock physicists whenever they try to help a field. People don't want to be told that something is better understood by using a non-intuitive level of abstraction, and extremely complex mathematics, rather than more or less intuitive folk understanding augmented with cargo cult statistics.
So yeah, not as willing to give the epidemiologists a pass as Kevin. Epidemiology's techniques (massive surveys with the hope that you can extract something via [often lousy, and never noncontroversial] statistical methods) just DON'T WORK WELL. If alternative techniques (basic experiments, fluid mechanics theory, computational simulation) work better, the epidemiologists should damn well embrace the results as more reliable evidence.
Oh, for a different example (non-controversial, at least politically, at least for now) look at the response of the linguists to Murray Gell-Mann:
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-physicist-teams-anthropologist-ancient-linguistic.html
Or the economists to complex systems theory:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/physicists-simple-spanks-economists-complex-in-economic-growth-forecasts/
Two comments, two separate posts.
1) Masks, and the red herring discussion of exhaled water particle size (ie. droplets vs aerosols).
Too many people are forgetting that masks do more than "filter" (ie. trap) particles. They also significantly affect the direction and amount of dispersion of the exhalation.
The highest risk for transmission is two people conversing at 3 ft. or less distance, fairly normal social practice. Without masks, the "plume" created when one exhales or speaks goes straight out, creating a kind of ovoid could, from about 8" to 24" out and maybe 16" wide. (I'm speaking roughly, you get the idea.) Two people in conversation unmasked are basically trading particles. Period.
Now put a mask on. Your "plume" takes an entirely different shape and has a different composition. a) it doesn't extend as far forward because the mask reduces the velocity; b) the plume does not contain the larger particles, which can each hold a higher number of viruses; c) the mask diverts the exhalation so that less of it goes straight forward and instead some of it goes more sideways; d) even with the aerosols, I suspect that passing through the mask material causes turbulence and more dispersion (this one is my own thinking, the others are from studies).
Masks work. They reduce risk of transmission from one person to another, and the debate about particle size does not change that.
2) 98% recovery rate is terrible.
a) The population of the US is about 330 million. 2% of that is 66 million people who don't "recover". Don't try to tell me that a disease with 98% survival rate is no big deal.
I see this argument from a friend of mine who is against all "government" restrictions. I am age 70, and I think he's about 45. Here's the cumulative mortality (that's death only) as of January 2021 in my state:
Age Group Mortality
Ages 0-9 0.01%
Ages 10-19 0.00%
Ages 20-29 0.02%
Ages 30-39 0.10%
Ages 40-49 0.30%
Ages 50-59 0.90%
Ages 60-69 3.48%
Ages 70-79 11.00%
Ages 80+ 27.77%
so...
Doesn't this disease look a little different depending on your age? *duh*
So my "friend" doesn't give a hoot if I die pre-maturely, so long as he doesn't have to spend more than a few days in bed with a fever and body aches. Great!
Want to talk about how this disease has exacerbated social divisions in our country? This disease is caused by a mindless virus that has no intelligence or will. But it can benefit greatly in its "war" against homo sapiens if we are busy arguing with each other. What would our society's response to this pandemic look like if the mortality % was the same across the entire spectrum of ages?