Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.... After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m. Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms. “That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill. Everybody came with their own sheet music and avoided direct physical contact. Some members helped set up or remove folding chairs. A few helped themselves to mandarins that had been put out on a table in back.
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer. The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface. But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/corona...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P...
By "everyone" do you mean people around where you live? The CDC was always concerned about mortality rates and never suggested it was just a flu/cold.
In Feb 2020 I recall hearing the president say the flu/cold thing, however the CDC was always trying to say it is serious. They were just not clear on where it had spread yet, and due to a testing screw-up, it was undertracked at the beginning. Also, at that time the CDC was saying healthy people didn't need to wear masks -- because it wasn't yet a pandemic and there still wasn't research indicating that masks protect the wearer.
In mid January we heard there was a new version of a SARS-like virus, and around January 21 China finally acknowledged there was human-to-human transmission.
Taiwan noticed news about isolated cases of an unknown virus on Dec. 31 2019, and had tipped off the WHO of possible human-to-human transmission. I don't think the wider public world knew about it until after January 12 or so, and it wasn't confirmed to transmit among humans until over a week later, despite suspected illness among doctors and nurses. AFAIK China still has not shared details about who was infected during that early period.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/4/17/chinas-wuhan-revise...
This is the most probable explanation for governments around the world saying that masks are “Absolutely useless” (literal quote) until June 2020.
It is lying-as-a-form-of-governance. It’s extremely detrimental to credibility: From that point, anything new a government said can be taken as a probable lie, since they lie as a routine operation of their job, just for practicability, because it’s easier than explaining. The common answer was “Doctors say masks are useless, why don’t you believe science.”
> I wish more people thought critically and had healthy criticism
The Covid response has killed the permission of citizen to doubt science, even though it is widely recognized that “science” had been used to make people do the opposite of what’s in their interest. You can’t both admit they told people not to wear masks at one point AND ask them to believe that they can trust the vaccine. Newspapers had to be in on the lie, social media had to prevent critical thinking for the duration of it: It’s extremely damaging to public health.
I’m surprised that individual governments didn’t even think about “Let’s not participate to a blatant lie, let’s tell people we don’t have masks and they should not buy one to let them available to hospitals, but tell them they should wear anything they have at home.” No government used the pedagogy method. They all opted for lie-as—a-policy, and-pretend-it’s-science.
They probably thought about the decent method, but unfortunately solidarity in most if not all societies has eroded so far that large swaths of the population would have gone and scalped ffp2 masks from wherever they could get them anyway. Case in point: toilet paper crisis.
Governments are in a lose-lose situation and have been for decades now. Appealing to anything involving solidarity with others does not work any more, and yet solidarity is the core of our society model - and there is no (easy) way of fixing this, short of a communist revolution and that won't happen either.
Appeals to solidarity w.r.t. staying at home, wearing masks, getting vaccinated to flatten the curve all worked quite well in my bubble. Projects like Zero Covid would have required insanely high levels of compliance. If you say "anything involving solidarity with others does not work anymore", how high is your bar? What used to work but now doesn't?
(I'd guess that solidarity is lower than it used to be, but if anything I am surprised how much goodwill still exists considering growing inequality, atomization, erosion of public trust and all that.)
If the government is competing for masks with regular citizens, they had already failed years before. And they did, spectacularly.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
“But it was impossible to predict!” that the mask was useful. Well, Pr Raoult did. Many doctors did. Government can’t claim innocence “by being wrongly advised” after implementing nationwide policies without knowing anything correct AND banning criticism on Facebook.
You can’t claim innocence when you perform wilful censorship.
I got back beginning Feb and went WFH while the rest of the office continued to stay at the office due to their boss not allowing WFH.
I'm thankful that my family and I were in Singapore for 2020/2021. Now we are in Taiwan.
That's impossible, unless you're saying after the new year still means around xmas. Taiwan discovered it on Dec. 31 2019 via a Wuhan news report about several cases held in isolation. They forwarded that info to the WHO. [1]
> At 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, Dr. Lo at Taiwan’s CDC woke to an alert on his phone.
> His colleagues in the media monitoring unit had detected social media posts about a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan. The original posts in China were quickly removed, but screenshots had been reposted on PTT, a popular online forum in Taiwan. Some commenters feared a resurgence of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which had killed 774 people in 2002 and 2003, mostly in Asia.
https://time.com/5826025/taiwan-who-trump-coronavirus-covid1...
Information was floating around in China and Taiwan before that. Cases in China date back to October/November 2019. The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
That's not true, as the Time report clearly states. Cases have been dated back to October/November by analysis, not by news reports.
It's also worth noting that the WHO's own website does not mention that Taiwan told them about the Wuhan news report [1],
> WHO’s Country Office in the People’s Republic of China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China.
They received word about that "media statement" from Taiwan. The "media statement" was later deleted, but not before it was screenshotted and distributed on PTT, a Taiwanese social network.
> The Wuhan Doctor referred to it as a 'sars like virus'.
China did not allow these statements to be made public until around January 20 when they finally stated human-to-human transmission was confirmed. At first they detained doctors who tried to speak out.
Taiwan was the first to publicly call it SARS. In early January they sent a team to visit Wuhan, then came back and said "this is SARS".
That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
Huh? Taiwan did make the WHO aware.
> That there is absolutely no remote possibility that prior to the 30th, anyone could possibly be talking about 'sars' in december, sorry 'atypical pneumonia', because it's not reported by the Times report or the WHO.
There is no public record about this novel coronavirus, later called Covid-19, prior to Dec 31 2019. China kept it under wraps. Wuhan doctors knew but they were not allowed to speak out. When they tried, they were detained and threatened with arrest.
Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
From The facts regarding Taiwan’s email to alert WHO to possible danger of COVID-19, [1]
> To be prudent, in the email we took pains to refer to atypical pneumonia, and specifically noted that patients had been isolated for treatment. Public health professionals could discern from this wording that there was a real possibility of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
The email text is in this Taipei Times article [2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...
[2] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/04/12/2...
> Every report on the timeline of Covid-19 marks Dec 31 2019 as the start, because that's when news about it breached China's wall. Obviously the virus itself existed prior to that. The question is, what was known when, and who knew it. Elements of China knew prior to Dec 31 2019. It only became public after that as a result of Taiwan informing the WHO.
So you don't believe it's possible, at all, for rumours to have been running around prior to the 31st, that there was a possible sars outbreak, prior to Taiwan getting some sort of evidence to submit to the WHO to request information about what's going on.
We seem to have miscommunicated. When you wrote "We heard about 'sars outbreak in china' around xmas of 2019" I thought you meant you had heard about a confirmed outbreak reported by some reliable news source, not rumors.
What I meant to underscore was that this knowledge did not become public prior to Taiwan notifying the WHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
By 'we' I meant my family and I. My wife is Taiwanese and her family said to be careful because people are saying there was a possible sars outbreak.
It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
I guess that's possible as a rumor. I had taken the other comment to mean there was publicly verified information at that time. Perhaps we just miscommunicated.
Certainly Dr. Li Wenliang of Wuhan, who later died of covid, had told friends in a private messaging group [1] to take precautions because something SARS-like was back.
> It was known in Asia far before it'd been reported in western media.
Parts of China, maybe. I wouldn't say "in Asia" as if all of Japan, Taiwan, SE Asia knew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang#Role_in_COVID-19_p...
That turned out to be a surprisingly small minority.
Way too many people took “exponential growth” way to literally, causing panic and mayhem.
I've had some relatives die, I've spent large portions of the pandemic cooped up inside with kids, I've missed funerals, etc - and I think earlier in the pandemic, I was probably about as emotionally engaged as you are, except, in the other direction. Now, I don't really have much of an opinion about it. Why do you continue to care?
What is still a shame is that no ventilation standards have been raised by law because of lobbying. It would make a lot of difference probably of what I read by experts.
Certainly, after the outbreak escaped China, the only thing I remember finding surprising about the pandemic was how badly the West handled it. A lot of people had exactly the same takeaway.
Most countries were already in the process of announcing health restrictions by February 2020. Taiwan had already been screaming for 2 months that it was airborne, and had limited airline travel and started mask mandates.
Not in the UK, the situation in Italy was all over our news.
Probably the biggest criticism I have of the UK media was their overemphasis on young people succumbing. The stats said that young people were unlikely to die but we were presented with cases of that almost daily.
Old people in most countries in europe are rather lonely, whereas in Italy they crowd the streets of every town in the evenings. I could imagine in such an enviroment, a low-deadliness-fast-spreading disease could cause a very rapid collapse in a hospital system.
I would wager that is something no one from the CDC ever said, wrote, or implied.
They told people they would not benefit from using N95 masks, which was damaging enough.
The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly
The US and other countries faced a mask shortage at the beginning of the pandemic. Masks don't provide absolute protection, but they do reduce viral load exposure (apologies if I got the terminology wrong here), which influences how bad the infection can become.
So, what you want is for the available masks to go to the people most likely to be exposed to high viral loads, i.e. health care workers.
The message the CDC and others attempted to get out was more or less 1. masks don't provide complete protection (which they don't), 2. they do reduce load exposure, so 3. please stop panic buying/hoarding masks until supply chain issues are worked out.
What people actually heard was 1. masks don't work (at completely preventing an infection), which many of them simplified to "masks don't work". It also didn't help that the US Surgeon General at the time went on television before getting his talking points figured out.
I'm from Norway. Here a quote from one of the largest news outlets[1] mid February 2020 (my translation):
Face masks have little effect on preventing infection among the population and can in some cases contribute to increasing the risk of infection, says Hanne-Merete Eriksen-Volle, section leader at the National Institute of Public Health.
So not only did they say masks don't work they went one further and said masks can be bad. They harped the same message for several months until they did a 180 and said everyone should wear masks.
To me, this was a huge failure in communication which highlighted a severe lack of ability to communicate with the public in our health sector.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/fhi_-munnbind-gir-falsk-trygghet...
Probably as intended. Governments are not above outright lying about these matters when it suits them. Several years before covid the German government tried to push a flu vaccine (was it pig or bird flu?), politicians across the board vouched for its safety, some even got theirs on camera. It didn't take long for someone to leak the orders and distribution plans that clearly showed that politicians would not get the cheap, mass produced vaccine which was rushed out and stretched with various questionable additives to scale that everyone was worried about. Every single politician that made a show of getting vaccinated got a vaccine reserved for critical government positions as its production could not be scaled to cover the population. I think in response politicians started to blame the press for sabotaging the vaccination effort, when they could have avoided the whole issue by just taking the normal vaccine like everyone else, not a single one of these assholes was in any way "critical" to the day to day operation of the nation but they had to conspire to give the impression that the normal vaccine wasn't good enough for them.
It's actually 0.3 micrometer particles that are most difficult to filter. Smaller than that, particles start to dance around and not move smoothly, because of Brownian motion, so they get stuck in the filtering fibers better.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-filter-efficienc...
[1] https://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/documen...
No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened.
Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been polluted by terrible and invalid post-facto rationalization studies). Fauci/CDC/the entire public health community knew this and were saying so explicitly in private emails to each other, as well as in public. This wasn't just a US thing, every country was doing the same thing. UK public health officials were also saying masks didn't work for example.
This was not because they were worried about a shortage, as their private emails made clear. It was because there was genuinely no evidence they could point at to support masking everyone. The moment they realized nobody in power cared about evidence anymore and they could do whatever they wanted, suddenly the masks came in. How to explain their previous stance? Oh, it was a noble lie for the greater good.
Problem is, it wasn't - the idea of the noble lie is itself the lie. Very confusing, admittedly. But also, it should really be obvious that it's a lie:
1. It's very easy for governments to control imports and distributions of masks (they were virtually all imported from Asia back then). If you actually believe health care workers should be prioritized, lying to people for months in the hope they believe you and then reversing your position is the absolute worst way to do things. Imposing customs controls at the ports is the best way.
2. Anyone who paid attention to case graphs can immediately see that they don't change even a tiny bit when mask mandates are added or removed. See [1] for a few examples but there are hundreds more.
[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
This would be absolutely shredded in a scientific paper, which is why it's a blog post rather than part of the literature.
How much impact can we see at the time of introduction and removal? Zero. In all those graphs the curve continues exactly on its previous trend line.
Your point would be valid if there was a visible impact and we were trying to establish how much of that came from masks. But we aren't trying to disentangle cause and effect here, because there's no effect to establish a cause for. If there's no effect then masks cannot be the cause, can they?
If they truly worked to a level that justified their use, I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics. Thus far, I see no evidence of that. You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
No, not in the slightest. The evidence wasn't perfect, but you have to operate using the best working evidence you have. It's logical that face coverings reduce spread of a virus spread primarily through respiratory droplets. The experimental evidence also supports it.
The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed. The disturbing thing is that we did not initially err on the side of caution.
> I’d expect it to have made a massive impact on important metrics.
It doesn't have to have a massive impact to be useful.
> You can compare the trajectory of various geographic regions and they all follow the same basic shape in the same ball park regardless of policies in place.
"Same basic shape". What, you mean up then down, as new variants emerged, and seasonal effects were encountered? How are you assessing that they are the same shape? Have you done an analysis against all countries with reliable data or are you eyeballing the graphs from a few cherry-picked regions by a blogger?
You're making two mistakes here, that mask advocates frequently make:
1. At the time this decision was made there was no evidence that masks would have any effect. That's why public health officials around the world were saying they'd have no effect. It wasn't a noble lie, they were actually telling the truth about masks at the start and we can see that by simply searching the literature for evidence masks are effective that predate March 2020. Thus there is no justification for this policy given evidence based decision making.
2. Your claim about what's logical is predicated on the belief that COVID spreads through large droplets of water. This isn't how it works. COVID spreads like a gas, against which masks are useless.
> The downside, of people being mildly inconvenienced by wearing a cloth over their face, is tiny compared the risks of your health systems getting overwhelmed
If masks don't work then the risk of health systems being overwhelmed is irrelevant. And they don't work, that's the point you keep trying to avoid.
But equally as important: the downsides of the policy are far, far greater than "minor inconvenience". If you really believe that's the only downside you have no business forming opinions on health matters at all.
Firstly: wearing masks is unnatural and not surprisingly, doing that for too long breaks things. Things like children.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1592670/covid-news-babies-...
The UK education regulator has just issued a report about delays in babies development and struggles with responding to basic facial expressions. They say “Children turning two years old will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”
There are certainly many other problems, think of the enormous trash problem it creates too.
Secondly, the policy is incredibly destructive in other ways. The entire population spent the last two years being forced to go along with an obviously incorrect and pointless rule, along with absurd caveats like restaurant physics. It's utterly destructive to people's confidence in public health and the ability of governments to make rational decisions. If anyone ever needs any reason to doubt public health ever again, about anything, masks is all the justification they'll ever need.
Nonsense. The virus spreads primarily through salivary droplets. Please don't peddle this rubbish.
There is some aerosol transmission, but most infections happen at short range. Masks aren't perfectly effective but they do help, and that has saved lives.
If you don't even understand the basic science then educate yourself before commenting.
If you want more evidence, try:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16696450/
SARS-1 spread through an apartment building by using drain pipes. No droplet transmission is capable of that. For SARS-CoV-2 the same thing happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty. This was very early evidence the spread-through-droplets theory couldn't be correct, but was ignored by public health.
Again, absolute nonsense.
World Health Organisation:
"Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at a conversational distance. The virus can spread from an infected person’s mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing or breathe."[0]
> People were locked in their cabins, yet, the virus still spread through the ship without difficulty.
No one is disputing that the virus spreads through aerosol distribution. The majority of spread is through salivary droplets. Is your argument seriously that because there is some aerosol spread, that somehow disproves the model that spread is mainly through salivary droplets?
If you are unable to understand the argument I don't see how we can continue the conversation.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/cor...
People have already wrote a lot about this, but one of my biggest frustrations was with how slow the CDC was to recommend masks in general. Waiting on what should have been an obvious recommendation was a large contributor.
Once the r0 was released it was clear it was going to be a sh*tshow for anyone who understands exponential math.
The way I remember this but of recent history, initial r0 values were seem as a strong indication of absence of aerial transmission, because all the known airborn viruses are have an r0 so much higher than the observed values in the low single-digit range. Those just don't ever encounter a population that isn't already quite immunized since childhood. The reasoning went "if it was airborne, we'd see an r0 many times bigger". What they did not consider was that perhaps it was airborne, just not very good at infecting humans. Recent mutations certainly are, and if those had appeared from the start there wouldn't have been any doubts about the airborne nature of the virus.
("Exponential" kicks in even at an r0 of 1.001, but then of course hard immunity would be quickly achieved because it would not take many to push r(eff) below 1)
The percentage of the population who looked at the video coming out of China and concluded "Shit, this could get bad, I'd better do something" was tiny.
Without government leadership, most populations default to a kind of bovine "I'll just carry on because I don't like change" inactivity, with a strong "How dare you tell me what to do!" tendency among the Dark Triad fringes.
In fact we're still there even after millions of dead.
The tragedy is that a no compromise planetary policy of short full lockdowns, a total ban on non-essential international travel, and aggressive testing/tracing could have ended Covid within 3-6 months.
But our economic systems aren't designed to handle that contingency, so we're dealing with much higher levels of personal and economic harm instead.
It's not just racism, objectively wasteful car cultures should be considerably less at risk than high density Asian cities, but I can't claim that those lines were not blurry, they definitely were.
To simplify all of this, if covid didn't exist, and you somehow found out that by going out of the house you have a 1.17% chance of dying, but if you stay inside, that chance is 0.002% (average chance of dying on any given day in US), would you still go outside or would you stay inside?
That 1.17% is a 585x increase over the usual 0.002%, and when I thought about how large that increase is, for me, it was very clearly not worth the risk.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Here’s an article with some quotes from people who were young during polio pandemics describing the countermeasures: https://cvm.msu.edu/news/perspectives-magazine/perspectives-...
You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.
We didn’t have anything like that.
The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.
1. Virus is not airborne (as initially claimed). I thought the water droplets claims were true for a while until I saw how fast it spread. It didn't make sense to me that a virus that is dragged onto the ground by water droplets would spread with such speed.
2. CDC (I believe) was claiming that N95 masks won't help as much as other masks. Later it turned out they just didn't want to create scarcity for N95 masks because hospitals need them.
The only bullshit I wasn't able to capitalize on was SPX crashing. I calculated that it should have fallen to less than $1000/share (closer to $500), based on past panic sell patterns, which was obviously not a guarantee, but the government stepped in and I missed out on quite a bit of money. I still think bailing out rich people's money in the stock market was complete bullshit on behalf of the government (but what do I know?).
I know it's all in retrospect now, so it seems like I'm tooting my own horn here, but at the time, it wasn't easy to be the guy who said "see ya guys, I'm going to hide from a virus that's going to turn into a global pandemic and you should all be doing the same because it's the logical thing to do based on the known facts". Even my manager (who approved my request to WFH) looked at me like I'm the token crazy guy from sci-fi movies holding "the end is nigh" sign.
I wish more people thought critically and had healthy skepticism towards all the information they receive, not just the part they disagree with. I was never a fan of blindly trusting anything. I trust, but I verify.