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...
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 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
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002185020...
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/