> The coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks.

Emphasis mine.

Honestly there was no way around the mess, thanks to social media amplifying any popular outrage and misunderstanding to 11. And I'm not excusing the WHO, their role has been borderline criminal at the beginning, and their reactions slow, but it's also very difficult to convey complex information in platforms that are designed to destroy anything resembling attention span.

Their mistake was using a questionable dictionary definition to counter fake news (about COVID-19 being mainly airborne, i.e. lingering for hours in the air like measles, which would have made it a doomsday scenario), and it blew back into their face since it's still airborne under certain conditions.

If they said it's indeed airborne, then it would have blown back as it's not really transmissible in the way other airborne diseases are, and would have been seen as overreaching and exaggerated.

As most things, the truth lies in the middle: limited ventilation may let the virus accumulate in the air enough to reach a viral load that can cause an infection, but social media just flattens everything to black and white, because it's what brings engagement and ad revenue.

Then you have tons of nuances: cold humid environments (vs. hot dry) boost droplet transmission as they can travel farther, but hot dry environments make the droplets turn to aerosols faster (and hence, accumulate in a poorly ventialted area more easily) [0]. Note that while this study is from September 2020, this kind of effect is seen in other respiratory viruses and is not unusual at all.

You just can't convey all of that swiftly and in a convincing way between a cat meme and a gif reaction to the latest Trump tweet.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7496593/

> And I'm not excusing the WHO, their role has been borderline criminal at the beginning, and their reactions slow

What do you mean by this? The WHO was practically screaming at the top of its lungs all throughout February 2020 that countries were not taking the new coronavirus seriously enough.

Just take this headline from 21 February 2020: "World must act fast to contain coronavirus: WHO's Tedros."

> “Although the window of opportunity is narrowing to contain the outbreak, we still have a chance to contain it [...] If we don't, if we squander the opportunity, then there will be a serious problem on our hands”

This was before Italy began quarantining towns in Lombardy (22 February 2020). The US was only testing hundreds of samples a day, and political figures from Trump to Pelosi were reassuring the public that everything was under control. Only it wasn't under control, but nobody in the US knew that, because contrary to the WHO's recommendations, the US was not conducting large-scale testing.

Of all the countries and institutions involved in this pandemic, I think the WHO comes out looking pretty good in comparison. If the US and European countries had heeded the WHO warnings and followed its technical advice in February 2020, they could have fared far better in the first wave.

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who-idUSKBN2...

21 Feb is hardly the beginning. Most epidemiologists worldwide were already nervous by early Feb.

By early Feb this was the stance[0].

> World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade”

>China’s delegate took the floor at the WHO Executive Board and denounced measures by “some countries” that have denied entry to people holding passports issued in Hubei province - at the center of the outbreak - and to deny visas and cancel flights.

>“All these measures are seriously against recommendation by the WHO,” said Li Song, who is China’s ambassador for disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva.

Unsurprisingly, the countries that best fared in pandemic terms are those which severely interfered with international travel, ironically including China.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...

The WHO's explicit mandate, given to it by the US and the other countries that wrote the International Health Regulations (2005), is to strongly discourage travel restrictions.

The types of travel restrictions that the US and other countries implemented early on were nearly useless. Plenty of infected people got through, and because the US was not following the WHO's advice to test extensively in order to track the spread of the virus, the US was unaware of the growing outbreaks in places like NY. The US would have done far better if it had followed the WHO's advice, and instead of banning travelers from individual countries, had done everything possible to ramp up testing in January and February 2020.

Travel restrictions can be effective, but only when they are extremely strict and backed up by extensive testing. China and other countries that successfully eliminated the virus did so not just by closing borders, but through a combination of strict lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions.

You can see how important these other measures are by looking at what's happening in Guangdong, in Southern China, right now. Despite the border restrictions, there's a new outbreak, and the authorities are conducting mass testing, doing extensive contact tracing of every known case and imposing local lockdowns to try to quench it.

I explained this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27342556

Isn’t the word aerosol appropriate? A droplet is just that, and an aerosol is a speck that can travel through air under the right conditions.

They could have just pointed everyone to that video made by Japanese researchers that shows how long aerosols can remain airborne and circulate in a room as well as how they are dispersed from the mouth by coughing, sneezing and talking. It was very illustrative and was ready made and waiting for a situation like this.

Unless we're talking of different videos, that's from september/october.

Probably different, the one I’m thinking of was made years ago. I’m looking but it seems they reuploaded it under a different title and the link to the full doc is dead.

I can’t find the video from Toho University but I found some papers that used the same methods

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002185020...

Years later I still run into people not aware of the semantics and the difference between a disease being an aerosol and a disease being airborne. Which smacks of poor communication.

The root cause is that intelligent, educated people misunderestimate the reactionary idea among the masses that their ignorance is just as, or more, valid.

Revolutions are not won by people who are smart at facts but by people who are smart at manipulating ignorance.

Lots of people are bad at listening/reading, sadly.

There's only so much that can be done as a speaker/writer. They could and should have done more here, but there will always be a lossy step when people doing the actual work take the information to "the public".

Airborne: Done or being in the air : being off the ground ... [0]

Aerosol: A suspension of fine solid or liquid particles in gas [1]

Air: The mixture of invisible odorless tasteless gases (such as nitrogen and oxygen) that surrounds the earth. Also : the equivalent mix of gases on another planet [3]

Are people bad at listening or bad at explaining?

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/airborne

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aerosol

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/air

Interesting to look at the replies to the Facebook post from over a year ago.

It was patently clear to everyone back then that the WHO was wrong about this.

No, the WHO was right, and still is, epidemiologically speaking. The problem is that there is a difference in meaning between "this virus is airborne" and "this virus can spread through the air via aerosols".

The former means that the virus itself can survive being exposed to the air, which means it can float for hours and spread easily over large distances.

The latter means that the virus can only survive in the air when encapsulated in a liquid, which means it can not hover in the air for long (due to the weight of the droplet) and thus not spead over large distances.