How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

Re:How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate by jacquesm on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @03:34AM (#34146634)

An important consideration that I have not seen mentioned yet is that masks have a 'best before date', this is because they are infused with a static charge that aims to attract particles to the mask material and this charge doesn't last forever. You can 'recharge' masks but that's a lot of work and usually not in the normal path for such supplies. So stockpiles that were present were not going to be effective against viruses (which are very small particles). Add to that that this was before there was positive confirmation the virus was airborne (though there were plenty of people suggesting that none had proof) to make the chaos complete. I don't think that even with hindsight there was a set of decisions that would not have left something to be disputed.

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Re:How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate by ravel-bar-foo on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @04:08AM (#34146885)

Other countries got it right. When the CDC was dithering about whether masks work and whether the virus was airborne (which should have been clear by early February with all the case evidence we had from Asia), their South Korean counterparts ordered Samsung to purchase tons of meltblown fibers, because making the masks themselves is not hard.

Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week.

This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized.

The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.

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Re:How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate by jacquesm on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @05:13AM (#34147315)

I wonder how much of the damage to South Korea was due to that one group of people that went around infecting others on purpose, if not for that they may well have done much better still.

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Re:How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate by philliphaydon on Tuesday December 27, 2022 @08:57AM (#34148660)

> and whether the virus was airborne

The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be.

The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda.

(We knew it was airborne in December 2019)

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Re:How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate by ravel-bar-foo on Thursday December 29, 2022 @02:13AM (#34170311)

Interesting. That's also the route our hospital took for Monkeypox: negative pressure isolation wards until proven not airborne. I'm quite satisfied that Korean public health authorities understand the precautionary principle.

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