WHO advised the world to perform as many tests as possible. And that was an excellent advice, only it was ignored and not taken seriously. That's an example where the WHO is not the problem but its enforcement capability (just the same problem with UN decisions on war zones, which can never be enforced).

To solve that, a reform is needed. But absolutely not by cutting its funds, which is silly.

Thanks, I hadn't known about that. It looks like this advice about tests was given on March 16? My city had already shut down by then due to outbreak.

Yes, unfortunately, as all UN parts, the WHO is a consensus organ, at the barycenter of individual countries' participating scientists... meanwhile, in countries or cities better connected with their experts, or just with better experts, the reaction is better and faster.

The exact quote was: "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test."

This doesn't sound like a good advice. It's not actionable. We don't have enough capacity to test more. If we could test a billion people tomorrow, we would already do it.

My fav useless tweet from WHO is "there's no evidence human human transmission". I mean, if you don't know for sure, then let's not announce it.

I don't think it was ignored, it just wasn't possible in most places.

As far as I know, most countries are ramping their testing facilities as fast as possible, some are just more effective or had a head start.

'As many tests as possible' is useless advice. Imagine if GDPR said companies should make data as secure as possible or NHTSA said make cars as safe as possible.

No it's a good advice. Because then that would have raised soon an acute awareness about asymptomatic bearers (e.g. through testing a representative sample of the general population), and thus awareness of the necessity of early lockdown.

Also, being able to test anybody who asks it would have dismissed arbitrary criteria that are pushed by governments around the world to minimize the illness. For example in the country where I am, it was until recently difficult to get tested unlike there was an established contact with a tested positive person.

I agree tests are useful, however the advice was not specific enough. The WHO should have specified how many tests are needed for various outcomes, offered early modeling, and facilitated information exchange to improve those models. Instead they simply played politics and offered very generalized and non-specific advice which overwhelmingly downplayed the risk.

Maybe a country has 1000 tests on hand, they test that first 1k people and can say they followed the WHO's advice. That's all that was possible given their immediate stock.

> Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?

You do realize you linked to a January 14th tweet by the WHO stating:

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.

What exactly did they do?

>What exactly did they do?

I think that was the point. They didn't do anything of real substance, so was it better than doing nothing?

To me, it appears equivalent to doing nothing, and that's not better than doing nothing...

So their wrongdoing was to tweet their current status?

Yes easily misinterpreted short-phrased tweets are bad. Thanks to US president, we learned that.

I don't think they did anything necessarily wrong with that tweet. Just that it wasn't substantial.

It was leading people to think that human transmission was unlikely.

The equivalent yet still factually correct statement is "covid maybe transmits between humans". When you add uncertainty to a statement, it becomes factually correct.

In this case, doing nothing would have been better.

But does it justify to cut their funds?

They published a status of non-knowledge, easily misinterpreted. And sometimes later they published more alarmist statuses. It is quite normal to be wrong sometimes, even in science-related establishments.

Well if you want my opinion, I don't think they're particularly at fault for others inability to interpret what they meant by that tweet. I find that tweet to be pretty clear, but also nothing noteworthy. Don't see how we're better off than had they simply not tweeted it. Again, I don't think we're necessarily worse off, just not better off.

I was just responding to the comment above mine, which asked "what did they do", and tried to show that was probably the point the poster above that was making.

As to the main topic? I mostly think this is just more petty distraction, deflection, and pointing fingers. But, I do think it's worth considering what the WHO's purpose is and whether or not it's serving that purpose sufficiently. As to how I feel about cutting funds, I'm not sure yet...

In this case, the situation is that they communicate a lot and most of their communications are frankly beneficial to the world. Some of their publications are not, as we saw here. Considering the whole, it is better than nothing.

> Trump and his supporters have focused on a 14 January WHO tweet reporting the findings of preliminary Chinese studies suggesting “no clear evidence” of human-to-human transmission.

> While the WHO was obliged to report on the latest findings of a member state at the source of the outbreak, its officials told their counterparts in technical briefings on 10 and 11 January, and briefed the press on 14 January, that human-to-human transmission was still a strong possibility given the experience of past coronavirus epidemics and urged suitable precautions.

> [Gavin Yamey, the director of Duke University’s center for policy impact in global health] said it was ridiculous to point to a single tweet early in the pandemic as the fixed position of the WHO. “The whole point of science is that we have initial hypotheses and initial ideas, and we update those ideas as more and more data emerges,” he said.

(From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/trump-turns-...)

If orgs/people are punishable due to single tweets, how do you rate Trump's performance? He has several tweets that contributed to 25K deaths..

> He has several tweets that contributed to 25K deaths..

Cut his funding!

> Was https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=19 better than nothing?

It was certainly better than Trump calling the disease a hoax concocted by the his political opponents including the media, so whatever problems WHO may have on COVID-19 response, Donald Trump is in no position to criticize.