> The who therefore played down the risks of aerosols, issuing guidance via its Twitter and Facebook pages at the end of March 2020 that the general public need not worry. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, adding that any claims to the contrary were “misinformation”.
Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing.
This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy kind that has you making land wars in Asia or creating command economies and seizing private property; but the bureaucratic "we know better than you because we said so" kind. When authority is invested in you, as it has been invested in the WHO, and you abuse that authority to tell independent investigators not on your payroll that they are just flat out wrong and the lines of inquiry they are investigating are dead ends and they should just shut up already, well, maybe you shouldn't have the authority you were vested with.
Fortunately, we also live in a world where the UN and its agencies do not have a monopoly on good information.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
It's important to understand that what CDC & FDA etc say is not "science".
These are federal regulatory agencies whose mission is to enforce regulations. This is part of a political process, and their leaders ultimately serve at the pleasure of the president.
When the prominent scientists who work there speak on issues, they are speaking as employees of that organization, not giving their best scientific estimation.
The WHO is a UN agency that's probably even more politicized, but I don't know much about it.
>The WHO is a UN agency that's probably even more politicized, but I don't know much about it.
Tedros was hand picked by China. He was a communist during his time in Ethiopia. This was a big controversy years before covid. I was wondering why China would possibly care so much, I thought it was just them trying to increase their international clout however possible...
Any source to back up your claim. I read Wikipedia Tedros receive overwhelming majority of the votes.
The problem is WHO is don't have enough power to do it's jobs.
Based on below article. Even US and UK ignored WHO advice.
To be clear, I'm not really saying he has a hidden agenda or anything like that. It's just that it's clear why China would want more influence over the WHO, and why they'd like someone like Tedros or someone like him over someone from the West. Tedros is certainly qualified for the role. It's like a Democratic president appointing liberal judges. Of course they would.
He was absolutely a member of the TPLF though. He was in government in Ethiopia as a member.
If you dig into it a bit, you'll see the claim that Tedros is some sort of manchurian candidate is based on him having given a speech at Peking University and his reiteration of the WHO's support for the One China policy.
This is what the article they cite in support of the One China policy statement actually says:
> In a meeting with Li Bin, minister of China's National Health and Family Planning Commission, Tedros said the UN agency will properly handle the Taiwan-related issues based on the resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making body.
The WHO was destroyed by Margaret Chan. Tedros is just a useful puppet. Margaret is now part of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference of the CCP.
She had 10 years were she hollowed out the WHO from the inside putting in place her insiders.
The whole WHO needs to be burned down and rebuild for it to have any legitimacy in the future. As it stands you should assume anything from the WHO is tainted.
It’s not about having a monopoly on good information. It’s about a monopoly on attention. What use is it if the WHO is wrong and someone else is right, but everybody listens to the WHO?
Not for lack of trying however. Bear in mind the big tech companies all adopted an explicit policy of, "information that disagrees with the WHO is forbidden" and proceeded to ban lots of qualified commentators for trying to present non WHO approved information. They did this with the full approval and encouragement of the WHO itself.
I'm slightly disturbed by the casualness of this thread actually. The WHO is not merely some random organisation, one of many providing information in an open environment. It commands the loyalty of many powerful people who just automatically assume it is correct, and as such has proven basically unkillable. Trump realised it was corrupted and tried to defund it, that lasted right up until Biden rolled everything back. Other countries have also been defunding it which is why the Gates Foundation is now such a large donor. How should society handle an organisation that is so clearly inadequate and even dangerous yet which commands blind adherence from the richest and most powerful people in the world, people who can and do seriously interfere with the flow of information?
I read the narrative a bit differently than you: in the face of misinformation from an international health organization and friends, private society prevailed in figuring out WTF was actually going on, eventually, and WHO critics were able to get their message out.
This is also one of the reasons I have argued vigorously against over-regulating tech companies and their moderation practices: they deserve the chance to shoot themselves in the foot with gusto, and lose or win credibility with their user base dependent upon how they react to societal changes. It is a slow painful process, but society is developing antibodies to their practices and there are no shortcuts, no regulatory equivalent of an mRNA vaccine that won’t just turn a privileged few into quasi-public entities. If we can avoid doing that, social networks will likely go through a cycle of fragmentation over time that will counteract any kind of centralized planning or coordination between a few big giants.
So what do we do about the WHO? You’re asking the wrong question there. Do what you did to protect yourself and your loved ones this time and recognize, as was obvious since at least February 2020, that the WHO isn’t to be taken as the source of truth on anything. It’s an offshoot of a diplomatic forum and acts like it because that is its nature. Even if the rank and file are doing good work, the officers are from countries that don’t trust each other, and have interests other than what their official role is. That doesn’t render it completely useless, but it isn’t completely useful either. You can’t control what allegiances other people have, only account for them.
For what it's worth, I agree with you w.r.t. tech firms. We can observe the unsatisfactory nature of their practices without concluding regulation is the answer.
As for the WHO, I wish I could simply ignore them as easily as I ignore what Facebook do. Facebook's power is limited to doing stuff on their platforms, more or less, and whoever they can influence via that. The WHO directly commands national governments who then command the rest of us. Dysfunction at that level filters down to the whole world.
As far as I have seen the problem with this kind of institutions, and there are many also at the national level of countries is that the community appears to have forgotten that science demands that not everyone agrees on everything. Instead blind adherence has been enforced with dissidents dismissed as loons.
That all sounds like a great idea but inevitably it turns out the purportedly enlightened organizations, like everyone, are not always right.
Perhaps it’s an insight into how life must have been when religious dogma ruled the world.
Historically you could maybe fight back with better speech, except now you're also up against internet platform moderation, and the powerful conspiracy theory heuristic that's been installed into hundreds of millions (billions?) of minds, that is frequently invoked in a (coincidentally) coordinated manner by independent journalism organizations (followed by responsible, scientific thinking citizens) when epistemic normalization is called for.
My recollection was that they banned disagreeing with the WHO[0]. The examples given in that article are fair enough for banning, but they banned scientists who were not quite so crazy[1]. Anyway, that’s based on my memory (which is often faulty), but those links seem to corroborate it.
They are not the only ones at all. Same thing happened to a lot of other people. There was for example a lot of good information from the Italian National Institute of Health that simply listed the number and type of comorbidities in deceased Covid patients. Mentioning these numbers, even with proper citation was cause for being banned/not being approved by moderators. It didn't fit the official narrative.
Like my sibling poster said, it probably triggered the "covid hoax" spidey senses. People are not rational in these times. They're emotional and won't even listen enough or think enough to understand the difference between looking at facts and discussing them vs. calling it a hoax. Covid is very real. I know from multiple close friends affected. I was also told via official channels that anyone obese would dare badly and die. Anecdotal data: Yet some very obese friends made it through without more than a few mild symptoms. Months later new research came out that said being sedentary is much worse than being obese. This friend while being obese is very active. No car, walks everywhere, physical labour job etc. Just telling this story would probably get me banned on certain sites.
1. A situation becomes political, and all kinds of claims are made by demagogues without evidence in order to score points, based on whatever they would like to be true.
2. There is lots of arguing, and subtle points like “we don’t know enough to know the truth yet but X seems practical/probable” get attacked by all sides or used by the people from 1 to show how much they are being silenced or to generate conspiracy theories.
3. Eventually the reality of the situation becomes mostly clear, and the people who happened to jump to the right conclusion without evidence use it to recruit more followers, and the people who were wrong don’t want to give an inch because it benefits the group who were right for the wrong reasons.
In the end most people get more polarized and there is no clear way to short circuit the process.
In my experience, those called "conspiracy theorists" (or any other name for that matter) turned out to be mostly right. The subreddit /r/wuhan_flu was quarantined last February for allegations that the virus may have escaped from a lab and that the virus may be airborne. They did not even claim it was definitely so, but it was just speculation based on multiple papers. That subreddit is still quarantined as of today. That's just one of the thousands of examples I've come across.
The people who spread G5 and chip theories are a very small group compared to the rest of the skeptics, yet they are portrayed by the mass media etc. as one and the same. This is reflected in how many people deal with people who criticize the official story.
We seem to have lost all logic and critical thinking. There is no room for healthy discussions anymore. Instead people are personally attacking each other.
There were always reasonable people questioning the WHO and whether this was a lab leak, the problem is that they were out-shouted by crazies, then got swept up into various blanket bans.
In general this seems to happen to all moderate discourse during highly political events, to the point where I almost feel like it's a strategy part of the time.
my goodness the only thing that I can think of is that people are going to get incredibly angry, if these histories get parsed accurately by the wider public.
I'm not saying the general public, only a wider range of people who are less susceptible to being spun probably is enough of the population to swing the ultimate public views.
Well they were also censoring videos speculating about the lab leak theory. So they were definitely treating any discussion about covid that diverged from what who/cdc were saying as misinformation.
No. They had some contentID-esque automation bumbling around silencing doctors who were trying to communicate their understanding of the situation as well as silencing the crackpots.
That is not true, in the Netherlands a critic had one of his videos pulled by YouTube for claiming COVID-19 spreads through aerosols when this was not the consensus. Yet.
I am not sure if the comment above me was referring to him, but I know back then they called what he was claiming (improving ventilation) misinformation.
No, pretty much anything was banned or throttled including professors sharing graphs of data, or people re-sharing articles critical of the WHO or the COVID response. And it's still happening, by the way. That's not in the past.
> Fortunately, we also live in a world where the UN and its agencies do not have a monopoly on good information.
We live in a world where the UN is basically a formality. I don't see how this organization has been helpful in solving world problems and preventing wars at all.
The ITU (a UN agency) helps solve the world problem of what country code to use to call countries, and coordinates new codes for new countries. If that's not a world problem, and it's not solved by the UN, I don't know what would satisfy you.
There have been very few wars since the UN was formed. Instead, we mostly have armed conflicts and military engagements, preventing many wars.
Well that March 2020 quote is still correct, isn't it? You as a layperson just think that airborne means something it doesn't mean for virologists (aerosol transmission <> airborne virus).
So the tweet certainly was a typical science communication error, i.e. they forgot that words can have different meanings in different milieus, but it wasn't wrong.
Airborne transmission is different from droplet transmission as it refers to the presence of microbes within droplet nuclei, which are generally considered to be particles <5μm in diameter, can remain in the air for long periods of time and be transmitted to others over distances greater than 1 m.
The same article then also goes on to reason why this doesn't seem to be the dominant way of transmission outside special circumstances (like ventilation).
I don't have a background in this topic at all, but apparently actual airborne viruses are really small: Measles is about 200 nm and Influenza about 100 nm in diameter, while Sars-Cov-2 is about 1000 nm, so 5 to 10 times the diameter and thus 100 to 1000 times the mass.
> That was exactly what we were trying to do in DRC so we don't want, as WHO, to go into speculation. Okay, people can have projections. We prefer, what can be done with the equipment or the solutions at hand and do our best to contain it at the source without undermining its gravity, without undermining the serious consequences it may have. That's what we did and that's what we want for this one.
> Of course Ebola and this are not the same. Ebola is lousy. This is airborne, corona is airborne, it's more contagious and you have seen how it went into 24 countries although it's a small number of cases. In terms of potential to wreak havoc the corona is very different from Ebola; corona has more potency, virulence. We take it more seriously but still the position should be instead of speculation really to focus at the source, to do everything at the source, slow the spread, stop the spread, invest more in containment and based on the situation move into other strategies if necessary.
> Meaning we have to be realistic; we have to be calm [?] but we have to take also serious measures.
This was when the WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China, as it would be useless [?!] against fighting the pandemic. Not blaming them too hard, as these were difficult decisions. But somehow this got retconned hard, and we, and the media, let it, not even bringing it up again when debating COVID being airborne or not.
I don't understand why it's not a crime to alter or suppress medical information on political grounds in any circumstances other than possibly a absolute necessity for protecting the [vast] majority by some way eg possibly avoiding panic reactions.
Because in the PRC, the government, legislature and military are all officially subordinate to a political organization. The WHO is a treaty organization, effectively above the laws of nations because it is an offshoot of a diplomatic forum.
Whatever you think of the reasons, these are the reasons.
WHO was not pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. The International Health Regulations (2005),[1] which govern the WHO, and which the US played a key role in drafting, strongly discourage travel restrictions.
The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible, and to only institute travel restrictions if there is clear scientific evidence that they will help. Prior to this pandemic, I think the general view among epidemiologists was that for a highly infectious respiratory disease, all but the strictest possible travel restrictions would be ineffective.[2] This is the reason why the US government's own pandemic influenza response plan downplays travel restrictions - they were only considered a short-term delaying tactic.[3]
If you look at how SARS-CoV-2 initially spread in the US, the WHO was not wrong. The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe. The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks. The actual travel restrictions the US implemented were largely useless. The only travel restrictions that would have helped would have been a complete ban on all international arrivals, coupled with extensive testing to find cases that were already present in the US.
If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing. The WHO stressed the need for testing, in order to both detect and curb the spread of the virus, under the assumption that whatever travel restrictions that countries would implement would be ineffective. What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic? A lack of testing, leaving the country blind to the huge outbreak that was developing.
The US could have taken a much more extreme approach, banning all travel, but absent mass testing, that in itself would not have prevented the cases that were already in the US from spiraling into a major outbreak. And I simply do not believe that the US would have taken such a drastic move in response to such an uncertain situation.
> If you look at how SARS-CoV-2 initially spread in the US, the WHO was not wrong. The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe. The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe.
It’s worth noting that there’s evidence it was already spreading in Seattle in Jan/Feb, following a Chinese import, before the late Feb/March outbreak in New York (which, yes, appears to have begun with European imports).
And in California. One patient died of CoVID-19 in California as early as 6 February 2020, though that only came to light months later. The patient had no recent travel history, so there was community spread in California in January 2020, at the latest.
I referred to the NY outbreak as the first "major outbreak" in the US, because it was much larger than the outbreaks in Seattle and California.
However, the fact that there were these early cases in the US just underscores how ineffective a policy of closing borders and then failing to test is (or worse yet, only banning travel from some countries and then failing to test). Even China, which has extremely strict travel restrictions (it takes multiple rounds of PCR testing and two weeks of quarantine to get into the country), has occasional imported cases. Without constant surveillance, those few cases would quickly develop into a full-blown outbreak.
Yes, but at that time this was not actionable anecdotal evidence as the CDC insisted to reinvent their own flavor of PCR tests, failed and did not mitigate properly by e.g. asking for help. It allowed everyone to close eyes and hope for the best for some crucial months.
The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.
> The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible
The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
> The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe.
So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective? Or that Italy should have also banned Chinese tourists, for the US ban to be effective?
> The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks.
From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)
> If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing.
Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing! China shows us the way how to contain this. They are the role model of virus control.
The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.
> What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic?
Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.
China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.
If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112
> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China
As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005). The US was intimately involved in the drafting of that document. The WHO was following the mandate it had been given.
> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization.
If you look at the WHO's history and read through the International Health Regulations, you'll find that the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy. Whatever measures it recommends are supposed to be in line with the IHR, and backed by the best available scientific evidence. The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks. This is one of the reasons why the IHR discourage travel restrictions.
> Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
It's not defeatist. It's rational. Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless. If there are already sick people inside your country, your first priority has to be finding them, isolating them, and quarantining their contacts. By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.
> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?
Neither hard enough nor early enough. By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal, there were probably already people with the virus inside the US. The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.
> Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019. The virus may have already been spreading around the world by then, but it had not yet been identified as a novel virus.
> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse.
What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening. If you start testing early enough in an outbreak and if you put enough resources into contact tracing, you can significantly slow - or even reverse - the spread of the virus. If you're not quick enough, you can at least figure out that you have to start implementing lockdowns. But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.
By the way, the blog you linked to is full of false claims. Right off the bat, it claims that in late January 2020,
> China, intentionally or otherwise, was able to lockdown its cities unknown to the world.
Probably every newspaper, news radio station and TV news show around the world covered the lockdown of Chinese cities in late January 2020. It was the #1 story worldwide.
> As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005).
General recommendations! Not a playbook from 2005 you pull out for dealing with an upcoming pandemic!
> the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy.
It is also not supposed to underreact and tank the world economy. What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?
Probably a lot different from the world economy now: All Western countries show decline, and just China showed economic growth in 2020.
> The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks.
Instead, China simply lied and hid their outbreak. And they got a compliment for it. Weird tactic if everyone recognizes this.
> Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless.
This is a barn with over a billion horses, not a single horse. Close that damn door!
> By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.
Yes, it is not waterproof, but shields against the rain. And if you say economic concerns play a major role in deciding travel restrictions, then this measure should also be judged accordingly. China was pushing for travel from a political/economical interest. US pushed back from a political/economical interest.
> By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal
The WHO had to learn about this pandemic from open source information gathering! The Chinese government tried to save face, and lost control. By the time the rest of the world was notified, it was already months too late to act.
Some scientists have actually put a human life number on this delay. By the time people in power knew, efforts were started to cover it up.
> The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.
It can be both. Political pushback against China playing politics. It had some practical effect, and it is completely in line with common sense and science that travel bans help curb outbreaks.
> This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019.
According to you this is false. You seem to be following the official timelines. According to my timeline, the first doctors fell ill early December. Wuhan expats were told by Chinese doctors in the middle of December, that their hospitalizations in November were due to viral pneumonia SARS. But officially, many of those doctors, patients, and expats, dissapeared.
> What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening.
CDC and intelligence agencies know what's happening without the need for tests. You throw tests at the problem and find 10k people in New York, instead of "projections of multiple community spreads". How your tactics change with this news? How does the public reacts to those numbers?
We know the barn is on fire! Testing only shows where. What would have helped would have been neighbor China warning about a starting fire.
> put enough resources into contact tracing
By then it was already way too late for contact tracing efforts. Like you said it was already community spreading. Contact tracing would only have been an option if China had shared early information.
> But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.
The CDC was well aware of the outbreaks. The hospitals were already planning for 450k deaths with 5 cases. They don't need tests for that. They have OSINT solutions for that, and can hook into US government data collection too. Like said, it is how the WHO was notified about COVID. They had to find out by mining social networks in China, and polling hospital admittance.
> What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?
In late January 2020, China:
* Announced there was human-to-human transmission.
* Completely sealed off Hubei province (population: 60 million).
* Implemented lockdowns in cities throughout China.
Yet most countries did next to nothing for a month or more. It wasn't until hospitals in Lombardy, Italy started filling up that people in Europe and the US started to take the virus seriously. So my prediction: better information from China (which the Chinese government itself did not necessarily have anyways) and more dire warnings from the WHO would have had no effect. Following WHO recommendations would already have been a massive improvement over what European countries and the US did.
> Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.”
> But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found.
To actually praise China for announcing human-to-human in late Januray 2020, while blaming most countries for doing next to nothing, is extremely ugly to me. I won't attack that (common) viewpoint, as it riles me up too much.
After China announced there was human-to-human transmission, European countries did almost nothing for another month. The US took even longer to take any serious actions. Do you really think things would have been different if China had announced human-to-human transmission 5-10 days earlier?
> After China announced there was human-to-human transmission, European countries did almost nothing for another month.
No, they started procuring masks and other PPE, but found that China had already conquered that market, before their announcement.
They could have told the US and European countries that the possibility of a modified virus lab-leak cannot be ruled out. Instead they started destroying samples, muzzle scientists, and had all their embassies push that WIV was a conspiracy theory, before any scientific investigation had even looked at it.
> The US took even longer to take any serious actions.
Yes. Was terrible to see. Can't even muster the mood to defend that.
> Do you really think things would have been different if China had announced human-to-human transmission 5-10 days earlier?
Yes. And a major moral difference. 5-50 days of valuable time. 5-50 more WHO meetings where Tedros says the window to act is getting smaller before Achilles will overtake the Tortoise.
> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...
Maybe research a bit more into WHO guideline on banning air travel from a particular country?
The following link is from WHO statement on H1N1 back in 2009, stating:
"The Director-General recommended not to close borders and not to restrict international travel. It was considered prudent for people who are ill to delay international travel and for people developing symptoms following international travel to seek medical attention."
They have not changed their position on this, not for H1N1, not for COVID-19. And banning travel from China ONLY is just not effective, and a political posture at best. It doesn't stop people re-routing flight, nor did it stop the further spread of COVID-19 into the US, which has been found a majority to be cases from Europe.
> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
No, "already Chinese tourists there" is never the reason behind their recommendation.
It 1) Doesn't stop people from re-routing flight;
2) Postures as an effort taken to curb spread, while in actuality does little;
and most importantly, 3) The majority of cases that came to US was from Europe, not China.
> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?
Not sure hard enough is the right word, but an international ban could work better. Still, the best method of restricting travel with forced manual quarantine period for ALL incoming travelers was never prevalent in the US.
> From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
> From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)
No comment.
> Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing!
> The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.
Interesting, why describe the situation like "a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family"?
> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.
You must be jesting, no? Testing makes the problem formally worse?
So, a country should not make raising testing and laboratory capability to accurately gauge the situation and how transmissible the disease, but should instead wait for WHO to spoon-feed information. But the problem is, WHO provide statements and guidelines from statistics and reports of individual countries.
For the other "accusations", I hope you do realize that the lack of (method-wise and quantity-wise) relevant and specific testing at the beginning of the pandemic was the biggest reason why data were hard to collect, why evidence of H2H transmission were delayed in confirmation, and why CFR, R+, and other stats were not correctly estimated.
> China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.
Not sure where the evidence is for that, but it's easily explained: more time enabled further study on the virus, and it's found to survive supply chains of frozen products. You do realize that we are dealing with a new virus and scientist can make discovery about the new virus that could cause related policy to shift a 180.
> If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112
Not sure what's your point? Again, travel restriction against a single country were not helping, nor going to help. What's more, COVID-19 is different from previous epidemics in that the majority of cases are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, that it spreads before symptoms if there will be symptoms.
The WHO was put under tremendous pressure and suffered information-blackout by China. As a result of this blackout, not long-standing policy, the WHO suggested there was no proof of human to human transmission. As a result of this pressure the WHO re-iterated time and time again that banning flights from China would do nothing to curb the outbreak.
> a political posture at best
Even if it was encoded in policy (I will simply acede), it remains a policy based on politics and economic concerns, not a recommendation a scientist would ever give: an aerosolized h2h virus is out there, but it is has no effect to restrict travel from there.
It is weird to me that the opposition seems to be: banning flights is just playing politics. However, saying to not ban flights is science and based on sane protocol.
COVID was once in a 100 years. Not really apt to combat with political policies written in "peace time".
> No, "already Chinese tourists there" is never the reason behind their recommendation.
If the WHO is correct: China did extremely well with virus containment, and set a standard for the rest of the world. And Xi is correct: People fleeing from Wuhan are to be nailed on the pillars of shame for all of eternity. And you are correct: restricting travel is just political and does not nothing to help curb spread.
Then what is this inconsistent reality?
> No comment.
Then no links to ease your search for a truth.
> Interesting, why describe the situation like "a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family"?
This pandemic showed that for maximum security for you and your loved ones, you have to rely on yourself and your own fact-finding. Health generals were telling you not to buy masks as these were not protective. Senators were saying that banning flights would be useless to help curb SARS (in response to Trump, not in response to fact-finding).
You listened, then you took your family to China Town without masks in early March 2020. You listened to the CDC, you were without toilet paper or medical supplies. You listened to China, and you would not prepare.
The officials first botched the response, heavily politicized it, then attacked the "misinformation pandemic" so your aunts facebook post on turmeric would be blocked for promoting false cures, and your uncles facebook post on the WIV would be blocked for racist conspiracy.
Or maybe you had an oxymeter, supplies of vitamins, masks, gloves, glasses, rubbing alcohol, vaporizer, routes to hospitals with occupancy, and 2 weeks of canned food. Maybe you informed your nearest ones, when doctors and virologists on TV were comparing COVID to heart attacks.
> You must be jesting, no?
A bit. I knew it would be perceived as a Trumpian: Just don't test, then we won't know, and what we won't know can't be a problem. But maybe you can re-read in the most favorable manner you can muster and take more from it than a joke: By the time we were bickering about tests, their availability, and effectiveness, there was already wide local community spread in the major cities. This stage demanded a different approach. Contact tracing resulting from a positive test would be a drop in a bucket. Test, say, 95%, and now you have exact numbers of something you already know in general to be true. Now what? Personalized quarantine efforts costing billions, while 5% goes on their merry way?
Italy dumped all their tests in a week to get an overview of their situation. Result: Formally, the problem got worse (they know the extend exactly), and a shortage of tests followed where doctors had to sail blind and just assume it was COVID for everyone with pneumonia.
> relevant and specific testing at the beginning of the pandemic was the biggest reason why data were hard to collect, why evidence of H2H transmission were delayed in confirmation, and why CFR, R+, and other stats were not correctly estimated.
It was a reason, I'll give you that. The biggest reason was China not being clear with information sharing. The WHO supporting that, because "now is not the time to point fingers", and countries either underestimating, or forced to overestimate (like the UK was forced to treat this very severely).
> more time enabled further study on the virus, and it's found to survive supply chains of frozen products.
No we already knew by then that coronavirus could survive on plastics for days. That active SARS was known to survive in sewage system for weeks, and demanded extra chlorination.
But there was more time to allow for a cover-up and produce an alternative story.
> You do realize that we are dealing with a new virus and scientist can make discovery about the new virus that could cause related policy to shift a 180.
No. It was extremely useful, and still is, to treat this virus as SARS-1. SARS-2 is unlikely to be constructively different, no matter if epistemic science takes years to validate a hypothesis.
Ask yourself why an initial policy was 180 different from a policy that would be sane for a precursor disease?
> Not sure what's your point? Again, travel restriction against a single country were not helping, nor going to help.
The point is that curbing travel from a country that is suffering an outbreak is effective against fighting that outbreak. Not 100%, but nobody is claiming that. There is water on the floor, you close the tap before you start mopping.
Banning travel from China helped, it would have helped a lot more if done earlier, and doing it the next time is going to help combat spread.
Asymptomatic spread is only a reason for travel bans (which target everyone from the epicenter, not just visibly ill people, who are "strongly advised" to not travel). Not a reason for throwing your hands in the air and going: Now it won't help at all!
> It was a reason, I'll give you that. The biggest reason was China not being clear with information sharing. The WHO supporting that, because "now is not the time to point fingers", and countries either underestimating, or forced to overestimate (like the UK was forced to treat this very severely).
I just don't buy the "China not being clear with information sharing" part that much. I mean, a week after the preliminary report China locked-down a city of 11 mil, how much serious would China have to get?
China also release guidelines on diagnoses and treatment, and update quite rapidly on their guidelines (as expected for a novel virus).
China did not stop Chinese researchers from release papers on findings about COVID-19, from research on the virus itself to various treatment results on patients and even better practices for patients.
In other words, China is responsible for China, just like US is responsible for US, and UK is responsible for UK. Each country's CDC need to do their own research, evaluate their country's resources, and make their own guidelines, and educate their populace.
> No we already knew by then that coronavirus could survive on plastics for days. That active SARS was known to survive in sewage system for weeks, and demanded extra chlorination.
> But there was more time to allow for a cover-up and produce an alternative story.
> No. It was extremely useful, and still is, to treat this virus as SARS-1. SARS-2 is unlikely to be constructively different, no matter if epistemic science takes years to validate a hypothesis.
> Ask yourself why an initial policy was 180 different from a policy that would be sane for a precursor disease?
You do realize that most of the carrier and spreader for SARS-COV-2 are pre-symptomatic (some asymptomatic), and it spreads before symptoms (if there will be symptoms)? That's vastly different from SARS-COV-1, which exhibited much lower rate of asymptomatic spread (I don't think there were research of pre-symptomatic transmission, such was not observed), only around 3-8%. But pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-COV-2 account for multiple times that, and depending on different research papers 8-20x (3x20 -- 8x8 -- 10x8).
This makes detection and quarantine day and night vs SARS-COV-1, which spreads after symptoms. So temperature scanning etc. which were effective for SARS-COV-1 turns out to not be even closely effective for SARS-COV-2, and need PCR testing and lab works to ascertain.
> The point is that curbing travel from a country that is suffering an outbreak is effective against fighting that outbreak. Not 100%, but nobody is claiming that. There is water on the floor, you close the tap before you start mopping.
> Banning travel from China helped, it would have helped a lot more if done earlier, and doing it the next time is going to help combat spread.
> Asymptomatic spread is only a reason for travel bans (which target everyone from the epicenter, not just visibly ill people, who are "strongly advised" to not travel). Not a reason for throwing your hands in the air and going: Now it won't help at all!
I don't know. Banning a single country while allowing rerouting to other countries is more hassle, but I doubt how many will be dissuaded by that. I mean, if UK banned India and Russia did not, and rich Indian Business men have assets in UK, what's stopping them from buy tickets that stop at Russia? So basically do more than just banning a single country, you need to trace tickets and origins and whatnots to be effective enough.
> The WHO was put under tremendous pressure and suffered information-blackout by China. As a result of this blackout, not long-standing policy, the WHO suggested there was no proof of human to human transmission. As a result of this pressure the WHO re-iterated time and time again that banning flights from China would do nothing to curb the outbreak.
1) It's not a result of an information-blackout. Please do realize that this is a novel virus we are talking about, that got reported as such on Dec. 31st 2019, and per WHO's tweet on Jan. 14th 2020 (merely 2 weeks!),
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel"
Note the words "Preliminary", "no clear evidence", THIS IS NEW, CHINA and WHO DON'T KNOW MUCH, THEY NEED TIME
In comparison, the alpha COVID-19 variant discovered in UK was back in "Late September" back in 2020, and publicized in BMJ in Dec. 16th 2020.
That's 2.5 - 3 month. And what of this variant?
"
Does this variant spread more quickly?
Matt Hancock told the House of Commons on 14 December that initial analysis showed that the new variant “may be associated” with the recent rise in cases in southeast England. However, this is not the same as saying that it is causing the rise.
Loman explained, “This variant is strongly associated with where we are seeing increasing rates of covid-19. It’s a correlation, but we can’t say it is causation. But there is striking growth in this variant, which is why we are worried, and it needs urgent follow-up and investigation.”
"Is the new variant more dangerous?
We don’t know yet. Mutations that make viruses more infectious don’t necessarily make them more dangerous. "
"
So instead of 2 weeks, UK had 10 - 12 weeks, but they still don't know much about the alpha variant. Why? It takes time, time to collect testing results, compile and aggregate them, make hypothesis, make models, test models, etc.
Why do people expect China to be magnitudes better, and if not, it's China's fault? I mean, it's not like the US or UK didn't down play the pandemic at the beginning, and only after Italy or New York did they speed up. Why evaluate with double standards?
2) Like what my previous comment said, recommendation to not ban flights or restrict on international travel has been WHO's standing since H1N1 back in 2009,
The following link is from WHO statement on H1N1 back in 2009, stating: "The Director-General recommended not to close borders and not to restrict international travel. It was considered prudent for people who are ill to delay international travel and for people developing symptoms following international travel to seek medical attention."
> Even if it was encoded in policy (I will simply acede), it remains a policy based on politics and economic concerns, not a recommendation a scientist would ever give: an aerosolized h2h virus is out there, but it is has no effect to restrict travel from there.
> It is weird to me that the opposition seems to be: banning flights is just playing politics. However, saying to not ban flights is science and based on sane protocol.
> COVID was once in a 100 years. Not really apt to combat with political policies written in "peace time".
No, what "posturing" meant to say is it's ineffective, and has prove to be ineffective. I'm saying he did not do enough, either he banned all flights (which I don't think would be possible back then), or enforce mandatory quarantine (which hadn't happen even now, much less likely then).
And such "posturing" only hurts effort to better protect, just like hygienic theater of temperature monitoring and deep cleaning in late 2020 doesn't help too little, but take away resources from measures that can help.
> If the WHO is correct: China did extremely well with virus containment, and set a standard for the rest of the world. And Xi is correct: People fleeing from Wuhan are to be nailed on the pillars of shame for all of eternity. And you are correct: restricting travel is just political and does not nothing to help curb spread.
> Then what is this inconsistent reality?
This reality is consistent:
1) China did do quite well for its size and amount of people. You can argue that their number is not accurate (I would say that any country's number will not be inaccurate at the beginning, when testings are much rarer)
2) I wouldn't say nailed on the pillars of shame, but they did divert a lot of potential medical resources to better monitor spread outside of Wuhan, instead of putting more medical personnel and resources in Wuhan.
3) Restricting travel does not curb spread if you half-ass the restriction.
You need to do mandatory quarantine for incoming personnel, restrict contact and movement for the duration of the quarantine, and multiple tests during quarantine. And the precursory policy would be mandatory quarantine for at least 21 days, and people with symptoms are not to stay with their family, but to separate quarantine rooms.
> Then no links to ease your search for a truth.
No comment.
> This pandemic showed that for maximum security for you and your loved ones, you have to rely on yourself and your own fact-finding. Health generals were telling you not to buy masks as these were not protective. Senators were saying that banning flights would be useless to help curb SARS (in response to Trump, not in response to fact-finding).
> You listened, then you took your family to China Town without masks in early March 2020. You listened to the CDC, you were without toilet paper or medical supplies. You listened to China, and you would not prepare.
> The officials first botched the response, heavily politicized it, then attacked the "misinformation pandemic" so your aunts facebook post on turmeric would be blocked for promoting false cures, and your uncles facebook post on the WIV would be blocked for racist conspiracy.
> Or maybe you had an oxymeter, supplies of vitamins, masks, gloves, glasses, rubbing alcohol, vaporizer, routes to hospitals with occupancy, and 2 weeks of canned food. Maybe you informed your nearest ones, when doctors and virologists on TV were comparing COVID to heart attacks.
I do agree that to best protect one and one's closed ones, reliance on others were and are not the best option.
> A bit. I knew it would be perceived as a Trumpian: Just don't test, then we won't know, and what we won't know can't be a problem. But maybe you can re-read in the most favorable manner you can muster and take more from it than a joke: By the time we were bickering about tests, their availability, and effectiveness, there was already wide local community spread in the major cities. This stage demanded a different approach. Contact tracing resulting from a positive test would be a drop in a bucket. Test, say, 95%, and now you have exact numbers of something you already know in general to be true. Now what? Personalized quarantine efforts costing billions, while 5% goes on their merry way?
> Italy dumped all their tests in a week to get an overview of their situation. Result: Formally, the problem got worse (they know the extend exactly), and a shortage of tests followed where doctors had to sail blind and just assume it was COVID for everyone with pneumonia.
Lock-down and quarantine, testing, contact tracing, these go hand-in-hand. Only do some and not all will cause back lashes.
You lock down first for at least 1 month, quarantine the incoming personnel, quarantine those that have symptoms to individual rooms, quarantine those that had close contact with people that showed symptoms, suggest self quarantine to those that came in close.
Lock down buys some time, and in that time you need to scale production for testing, and test the heck out of the population. Priority would be people who traveled outside of the country, those that came close to travelers (airport/port workers, taxi drivers, etc.), then frontline medical personnel and staff, and down the line. Testing results gives a better presentation of the severity, and what's more, where to pool resources and personnel to prevent a collapse of the hospital system.
Contact tracing is to further track weaknesses in the lock down, quarantine, and testing. It also help to better pinpoint clusters and super-spreader events, to provide evidence to implement policy prohibiting such events.
Yes, health authorities can be wrong, but if you want to prevent, stop, or aliemoriate a pandemic, you need cooperation. You can't just have Joe Sixpack decided to not quarantine himself or not wear masks.
Yes, the authority figures can be wrong. Fauci can be wrong. People can die when health authorities make mistakes, whether through indecision or decision. I myself keep wearing masks after the CDC says I don't need to. I suspect historians are going to analyze the pandemic and list a litany of mistakes health authorities made in trying to stop the pandemic.
At the end of the day, who are you going to trust more? That schmuck in a random youtube video, or the doctors that run the CDC?
I think the prudent thing is neither fork of your dilemma, but instead a synthesis of prevailing opinions that is skewed as conservatively (in life preservation terms) as afforded by my personal capacity to save lives by sacrificing leisure.
For Instance, I have been treating covid like an airborne pathogen since the /first/ time the CDC didn't recommend masking, based upon an epidemiologists take on early cruise ship data.
Of course I risked being wrong the whole time, but the cost of my leisure and convenience and income turned out to be worthwhile.
I don't know, who purposefully lied to the people treating it like sheep to be shepherded with confident lies and half-truths?
These organizations have burned through a tremendous amount of credibility by virtue of not being honest about what they did and didn't know. And Joe Sixpack, on the other hand, gained a lot. What are they going to be able to do when he starts using that to peddle dangerous products or make even worse recommendations but now with so much more influence?
There's no fastest way to erode the usefulness of a government than making negligent use of its credibility.
The CDC's own learnings from SARS-COV1 concluded 'probable airborne spread' and the low efficacy of hand washing as an intervention, but somehow SARS-COV2 was totally different.
I feel it is punching down to attribute not wanting to quarantine or wear masks to a 'Joe Sixpack' caricature. The ultra-wealthy and powerful didn't want to quarantine or wear masks either - except they had the luxury of boarding a private plane and fleeing the country, or sailing around on a yacht, etc.
At some point... yes. Otherwise, what's your idea for dealing with people who know they're sick but still go into crowded places? We've had examples of people who knew they were infected trying to board planes for example. If not coercion, then what?
My town's school system is all in on healthy buildings -- they got parent MD/PhDs to read the literature and invite outside experts to advise, then they set minimum air change per hour and minimum filtration criteria (something like, classrooms may reopen iff they have 5 air changes per hour with outdoor or MERV 13+ filtered air). They did a bunch of HVAC work to support this goal and have reopened okay.
The town's other public buildings as far as I can have ignored this and I think the libraries are just gonna reopen and hope for the best.
Advocates of healthy buildings have been telling us about the risks of low airflow (focusing mostly on cognitive effects of high CO2 vs the disease impacts). It sucks but the pandemic is their once in a generation opportunity to push change in indoor air quality -- I hope some of it sticks.
> the pandemic is their once in a generation opportunity to push change in indoor air quality
in the recent years many offices, especially new and deeply remodeled got "green" certified, and decreased ventilation flow has been among the ways to achieve the energy saving for the certification. I don't hope they would turn the ventilation/AC back on to good levels - instead i think there would spring a cottage industry of "virus filters" to be installed on top of those "green" systems.
Additionally these new/remodeled offices have those hip open ceilings with no noise blocking what classic office ceiling provided - as a result any meaningful flow increase causes very uncomfortable low frequency noise from those uncovered ventilation ducts.
I've seen the opposite problem. My apartment which just completed construction at the end of 2020 is very insulated, but has very aggressive air exchange through the HVAC system to compensate. My poor humidifier can't keep up, so the indoor air humidity is at the mercy of whatever the dew point is outside. It was consistently below 10% throughout February. I wonder which situation is worse for your health.
I believe Home Automation needs to start with proper climate control (not with iKettles) because just bringing fresh air from outside probably isn't enough, it depends on many things.
There's so much wasted heat, varying humidity, overabundance of co2 and particulate matter due to pollution in some places - keeping it all at optimal levels throughout the year is no small task.
Everyone knows about air conditioning, but barely anyone knows about recuperators/heat exchangers or has an air quality monitor in their house or at work. If you don't have proper ventilation then most of those air conditioners just recirculate stale air, change its temperature and mess with humidity.
In Northern Europe and (slightly slower) parts of North America heat recovery ventilators are becoming standard on new buildings. In my country all new homes need to come with a unit that is at least 90% efficient. Retrofitting such systems isn't that hard, especially if you already have ducted AC. If you don't there are units that can ventilate a single room, they just need a 15cm hole in the wall.
You mention home automation, but it's actually interesting with newer houses that are built smarter, there is less to automate:
- The ventilation system needs to be sized for the house, then it can be left running all the time (you could turn it off or down when nobody is home, but these systems often consume under 100W of electricity - it's just two fans).
- With low temperature hydronic underfloor heating in a concrete floor, it takes so long for the system to heat up or cool down that turning it off when nobody is home will barely affect the temperature. If the system is balanced correctly, taking into account how much energy from the sun each room receives, you can do without individual temperature controllers in each room. Once it's setup the only adjustment needed is to turn it on in the autumn and off in the spring.
Not everyone lives suburban houses, some live in apartment buildings with central heating that you have little control over. It's a problem for people all around the world in different environments.
FYI my experience of these things is in an apartment building. Of course retrofitting old buildings is hard and landlords aren't incentivized to make changes which save energy (after all, the tenants are paying the bills), but new buildings can be built a lot smarter than what has been done previously.
The whole building technology topic is very interesting, as even today in many parts of the developed world (southern US seems to be a big offender here) they still build residential buildings the same as they were done 70+ years ago.
Totally agreed. Smart homes seem to lack focus in that area - this seems to be by far the lowest hanging fruit in terms of improving quality of life / health, that smart homes could tackle. Central heating & air, heat exchangers, good isolation, sensors in every room for CO2, humidity, temperature, pollution and maybe O2. A small LCD per room with some warning & error lights (and otherwise no background lighting) if anything goes outside set parameters. In countries like the US where smoke detectors are already mandatory, maybe they could just be replaced with a new generation that offers these capabilities.
Easy to scoff at an obvious headline, but SARS-CoV-2 may very well be endemic now. Going forward pandemic preparedness will no longer be reserved for the Fortune 5s or 50s.
New construction for a while at least will hopefully consider biosecurity and pandemic preparedness as concrete a threat as natural disasters.
I wonder how many countries and ideological groups have the ability to do GoF research. The US and China obviously do. I'm assuming all of the G7 plus Russia do. Maybe India too? The problem is that the pandemic has shown just how impactful this type of research can be and what it can create. Most countries don't want to create bioweapons that are going to have blowback on them but ideological groups within those countries may very well be willing to accept losing some members in exchange for bringing the current world order to a halt. Security, both physical and social, will indeed need a healthy increase.
There is a lot of low hanging fruit in this area being ignored. Here in Ireland, the pandemic is still raging and they are reopening stores – okay, that's a tradeoff on which reasonable people can disagree. But then there's no air circulating in the stores. Ventilation could be significantly improved by such a trivial measure as keeping the front door propped open, but they don't bother. Why not?
I find it odd that it's still news that improved ventilation helps prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission. I've been reading articles and studies that point this out since at least April 2020. This is not news. Yet it seems that a significant portion of people are still not informed about it.
Yeah, it's incredible how useless governments still are (this is criticizing them from the point of view of they need to do more, not from the doubter's point of view "that it's just a flu"), they're still just blabbing on about 6 feet distancing and handwashing despite all the new (and old!) facts.
I suggested this as an alternative to mask enforcement months ago and was ridiculed on hacker news. I'm happy to see the idea come up again as it has a lot of solid science behind it.
I certainly don't think you should be ridiculed for the notion, although I think my counter thought would be why should it be one or the other, and how confident are we in the engineering side of the solution at a wide scale.
To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts.
The building ventilation side to me seems more like a long term solution, with lots of details to implement. How can we be confident that someone did the retrofit correctly, and tested the air pathways to make sure there isn't droplets being pushed from one table to another in a restaurant. Can we be confident that small changes to dampers, rearrangement of the dining room, other changes don't affect the conditions and are maintained over time. Building HVAC systems are hard enough to maintain as is.
This seems like a great addition to building codes, or if some standard can be developed for inspection, maintenance, testing, etc. And how can we be sure that businesses don't just try and cheat, would they be liable, can this be inspected, would the liability be collectable, etc, etc.
I think as a society we should be looking at this problem holistically, I think part of the solution is masks, and part is vaccines, and part should probably be building codes and HVAC systems in public indoor spaces to reduce a variety of airborne pathogens.
> And how can we be sure that businesses don't just try and cheat
As someone who knows an HVAC inspector, they WILL cheat.
He has appalling stories.
The most appalling was him having to hold up opening a memory care facility because the HVAC was all shared when it was all supposed to be isolated. This was completely on the HVAC contractor as the plans were quite explicit about what needed to be done--which means that contractor did this before and got away with it.
People who come into these kinds of facilities are not well, and get sick with things all the time. Many of them are immune compromised. But, nope, everybody wanted the facility open and banking money--this included the local politicians, the local community, the "oversight" committee, etc.--nobody gave a damn about the fact that the HVAC would KILL PEOPLE.
> To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts.
1) This isn't really true. There's not a lot of correlation between what nations/states did, and where they ended up. You can find observational papers on both sides of every question (for example, specific to masks, recently: [1]).
2) What else did nations with mask adoption do that could also explain the outcomes? Most places did many things at once, so we're going to be doing post-hoc analysis of this for years. Unfortunately, because nobody thought it appropriate to conduct actual clinical trials, we'll probably never know the answer. There are too many intermingled factors at play so we have to use models, and the modeling work so far has largely been garbage that reflects the assumptions used to create them [2].
(and before anyone says it: yes, it's entirely possible to have conducted clinical trials of masks. A cluster randomized trial, for example, could have been used to establish efficacy early in the pandemic. That we didn't even consider doing these "because it's a pandemic" is one of the biggest scientific lost opportunities of our lifetime.)
I'm not sure if I should interpret this as masks are an ineffective tool, or more narrowly that combined with other efforts it's unclear what the impact was since there's a large degree of opinion on the matter compared to data with a higher standard of a peer reviewed double blind study.
With masks being such a hot topic in certain regions, it would seem unreasonable to conclude that there is only correlation available.
There appear to be a number of smaller studies available as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_masks_during_the_COVID-19... which if cloth masks are effective it would seem to me to be reasonable to extend this to rate of adoption and a contributing factor.
Note that I've edited my comment to better reflect my thoughts (probably since you wrote this).
I don't think you should take this one paper as some kind of definitive rebuttal on masks. You should interpret it as a reasonable summary of current evidence, as well as a not-terrible analysis of US states that poses some serious challenges to the effectiveness of mask mandates.
That said, an editorial/letter in science daily is not a rebuttal, and wikipedia is useless for politically sensitive questions. There are many papers on both sides of the issue, and it's easy to cherry-pick a set that support any particular position.
Is it the end of the discussion? No. But It's not as cut-and-dried as people make it seem. The evidence base for masks is very low-quality. The issue became political, and as with all things political today, nuance and reason were tossed out the window.
> Regions with an early interest in face masks had milder COVID-19 epidemics, according to a new letter-to-the-editor published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. (the source of the Science Daily article: https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1164/rccm.202004-1188...)
I don't see how this is much less scientific than the non-peer-reviewed paper you posted.
My point is that both a preprint and a letter to the editors have not gone through a rigorous review. Preprints might be submitted for peer-review but that's no guarantee that it will be published in a reputable venue.
Equating a pre-print with a letter because they have both not gone through a review is like equating a skateboard with a car because they both have wheels.
Yes, both are text, written in the english language, shown on a webpage. Beyond that, they share no similarities.
If you think a pre-print is a better source than an academic letter (published in a reputable scientific journal, which implies at least editorial review), then lets agree to disagree.
A pre-print from legitimate researchers is a much higher standard of evidence than a letter. It's not really a matter of opinion.
If you cannot reliably judge the legitimacy of a pre-print in an area, then you aren't qualified to judge the legitimacy of any scientific comment in that area.
You keep calling it a "letter" but it is not just a "letter" in the sense that I can write a letter to you, it's a letter written by experts in the field to a top ranked scientific journal that has been editorially reviewed (by experts).
> If you cannot reliably judge the legitimacy of a pre-print in an area, then you aren't qualified to judge the legitimacy of any scientific comment in that area.
I agree, but now we are moving into the content and not just judging the book by its cover.
Trials on masks universally fail to take into account the field results. And that’s where they fall down. Mask effectiveness relies on purity - everybody doing things with military (or medical) precision.
The short of it is that people don’t stick rigidly to the effectiveness requirement. Hence why states and countries that stop compulsion don’t see any deviation in the rate of change.
Like HCQ it works in the lab, but not in real life.
What’s disturbing is why so many people still believe they do - and why they desperately want them to work - which moves into the political and religious (“I’m pure - it’s everybody else that isn’t”) rather than the scientific.
At this stage it’s become like carrying posies to ward off the Black Death.
> (and before anyone says it: yes, it's entirely possible to have conducted clinical trials of masks. a cluster randomized trial, for example, could have been used to establish efficacy early in the pandemic. That we didn't even consider doing these "because it's a pandemic" is one of the biggest scientific lost opportunities of our lifetime.)
There were studies done; all the way back in March 2020 there was an infographic making the rounds showing a rough estimate of percentage of particles filtered/let through by different types of cloth masks and N95/etc. If I remember right, all the cloth masks let through >50% of particles.
There have been a number of laboratory studies performed that show varying levels of effectiveness for different kinds of masks and materials (where "effectiveness" is defined in all sorts of different ways that may or may not be relevant). Prior to Covid-19, there was a low-quality evidence base that didn't provide much signal either way:
Strapping a mask on a mannequin or to a nozzle is, of course, very different than asking people to wear them everywhere. For evidence of real-world effectiveness of a medical intervention, you do a controlled trial. We could have done some, but we did not. It is notable -- but not at all perfect -- that the only RCT conducted with masks and Covid-19 in 2020 found no significant personal protective effect:
It is a well-done study, and certainly limits the claims that can be made for masks, but doesn't answer every question. A good cluster RCT might have been able to address the question of whether or not masks protect others, for example.
In this paper they demonstrated an intervention in Bangladesh that increased mask usage by 30 percentage points (from ~10% to ~40%). In the follow-up paper they are doing random antibody testing between the two groups.
It probably won't be as satisfying for you, but in the US mask-wearing got split along political lines. You can compare red areas (haven't worn masks for months to a year) to blue areas (were still mostly wearing them up to this month when the CDC guidelines changed). Overall, no noticeable effect.
There are confounders though that make such data not useful (I'm not sure how much statistics can find data in the noise or not though - but it won't be trivial). Red areas are in general more rural and spread out, while blue areas are denser population. Thus blue areas are naturally a different risk level. Also masks and political stance are not a perfect correlation. I personally know democrats who don't wears masks and republicans who do.
I have almost never even seen a business' window or door propped open where it was normally closed before. I have never seen an air purifier in a public area of a business. If HVAC systems were modified or upgraded, I wouldn't have any way of knowing that, but I bet not many were. A lot of businesses won't do things for their patrons' safety unless they're forced to. Could you imagine what fire safety would be like if there were no laws or regulations about it?
I find it strange governors didn't tell bar/srestaurants that if they had mitigation in place they could remain open. Lockdowns hurt those the most, and good ventilation/filtration would be cheap and easy. It would probably make enough of a difference as to be worth it.
On the other hand, once a building is done right you don't have to worry about it again (other than replacing filters and the like on schedule), while masks are too easy to wear wrong, lose, or take off (particularly when eating)
Consider that during the pandemic, the good N95 masks were not even available for any price, so people were wearing flimsy cotton things that only block 20% of particulates. Opening a window with a fan works far better if you do it right and uses materials we still had in supply.
Typical "this is the obvious solution" thinking without stopping to think about why it doesn't work like that in the majority of situations.
Most office buildings are giant rectangular blobs. The vast majority of people are not near a window. Most skyscrapers don't even have windows that can be opened.
Most manufacturing, processing, distribution jobs etc are in large warehouses. No windows near anybody. Same with a huge number of other blue-collar jobs like groceries and retail.
Even in buildings where windows can be opened, you're throwing potentially thousands of dollars worth of heating out the window half the year, and thousands of dollars in cooling the other half.
So don't just look around your own room, see the window, and say "hey, there's an obvious $20 solution to this, why didn't all these ventilation experts ask me?"
Dismissing a cheap and obvious solution that can work for a lot of cases because it's not perfect in every case is leaving a lot on the table!
Did you realize that we're in a pandemic that's killing millions of people? We need to get R0 down in any way that we can. Masks aren't perfect. Vaccines aren't perfect. We need to use everything we've got.
That's not practical in most parts of the country in the winter, when the virus was at its worst. What's the cost after including increased heating and A/C usage?
Your comment just made me wonder if that's part of why the viruses are always worst in winter. Sure, there are likely other factors, like vitamin D, but...
Seems unlikely. If you had made your comment in 1950 when the idea of air conditioning in summer was unheard of you would have a point. However these days any house or building has cooling in summer. People are outside a bit more in summer, but not enough to make a difference.
Same here-- not on HN, but in real life. It seemed so obvious from the start that this was airborne and we can stop it with ventilation and masks. I actually helped start a mask distribution non-profit. But it became an uphill battle to educate people against the political warfare that happened.
Ditto for me. But rather than say it was airborne, I took the approach that the so called experts hadn't proven yet that it wasn't - so one should take precautions as if it was, until we could get more of a handle on this new domain.
I looked at it as a novel tech stack. Sure one could be an expert in twenty year old X, but if thrown into a brand new emergent tech Y, any engineer worth their salt would approach it with a certain degree of humility.
I did not see that happen at least in terms of what medical professionals the politicians and media brought to the fore early on.
We still haven't got functioning HVAC systems in all our hotel quarantine facilities in Australia... it seems insanely hard to grok, for some reason.
This shouldn't be seen as a replacement for masks but as a realization that viruses easily form infectious particles. The initial response was insanity and driven largely by hospital's desire to avoid expensive PPE use.
February 2020 when I first heard this line it contradicted all the "experts" that I should be able to trust on a topic that as someone not trained in biology I need trust worthy experts. By now it has become clear that those experts were using their position of authority to say things that were not true instead of admitting they didn't know.
Once a few experts broke and started saying the truth that others still haven't really embraced changing science is a reflection on those experts that is morally criminal (probably not legally)
I've been reading stuff like this for some time now, I actually had our ventilation redone, albeit for non-Covid reasons because we had too much dust due to leaky vents causing asthma issues and it makes things a lot better even without worrying about Covid.
I never could find any easy/good way to add UV to the mix without having to redo everything again, though. I wonder if anyone knows any easy/simple add-ons like the one we got to add a bidet to the toilet to deal with the TP shortages.
If you have forced air, you can get a UV bulb that all air passes by for $200-300 - just requires drilling some holes and an AC plug. Also helps with killing mold and bacteria as an added benefit (and some of the original intention for the devices, e.g., OdorStop).
I totally believe that UV light is great at killing pathogens and that UV belongs in ventilation systems, but we presumably need to know how much UV light is needed.
The UV doses needed also seem to depend on a lot on the type of pathogen. For example, viruses require a higher dose than bacteria. In
I’ve bought the Coway AP-1512AH which filters air, and is extremely silent, and I have a separate CO2-PM10-PM2.5 measurer. It does wonders against asthma. PMs go from 25microgram/m3 to 1 in half an hour, which I trust because the measurement tool is separate. I never succeeded to have less than 10 before the Coway.
Before that, I would sneeze first thing in the morning, then sneeze by rows of 10 times in Spring, 30 times a day, nose bleeding from too much sneezing. I would also have an irritated bronchitis which gave me slight asthma (but enough to make me abandon intensive sports). Now I still have risk of asthma, but at least when I want relief, I close the windows, switch on the Coway, and breathe fresh air. I live in a city center of average density.
However, CO2 fills up quickly. I wish I could find some portable air exchanger: Taking air from outside, exchanging temperature, and filtering. I’ve lodged a bit for a house which has that, I’m hoping I’m selected.
I would love to find a portable air exchanger too—opening windows helps with CO2 levels but it’s inefficient for most of the year in much of the United States. Built-in air exchangers with heat recovery are available but are a non-starter for anyone in a rented place. Unfortunately, no good solution exists so far
Yeah, I live in a place where, well, let's just say that opening the window for much of the year simply isn't done. I don't think some of my windows will even can be opened any longer due to having been closed for so many years.
I actually got one of those for the bedroom after reading someone mentioning it during another HN thread. It does seem to make the bedroom better, though I don't think it's quite enough for the whole house.
I don't have any measuring devices to see the impact directly, though.
I chose it because someone mentioned it on HN, and said it was:
- silent
- HEPA
- non-AI/IoT
I was afraid it was a paid sponsored comment, but after comparing versions and prices, I tried it and was satisfied. It’s ugly though, looks straight out of the 60ies with its rounded corners.
Off topic: See, this is what happens when enough people try to use a mild word for something bad they’re doing in order to try to hide the badness: other people who see this usage alter their perceived meaning of the mild word to represent what they see as prevalent usage. The mild word comes to mean the bad thing.
In this example, “sponsored”. A more accurate term in this case would have been something like “paid dishonest shill”, but the constant use of “sponsored” by paid shills (esp. on YouTube) has altered our perception of the word “sponsored”. I would not be surprised if soon many companies would like to move away from that word and not be “sponsors” anymore, and instead be “supporters”, etc.
It’s the reverse of the euphemism treadmill, really.
I don’t use it because I’ve heard it releases Ozone indeed. I don’t see the point. I have hard times trusting stuff made by others, so I’m just seeing 2 filters and a fan, that was just what I wanted ;)
The AP-1512HH sounds like a great buy for most cases, although if you're particularly concerned about VOCs including exhaust fumes (we are - we live in a dense city, close to a main road), the Austin Air HealthMate HM400 is probably what you want. Used by "FEMA and the Red Cross ... for deployment at Ground Zero and the surrounding areas in the aftermath of 9/11", apparently.
The best place to get started on that is with Corbett Lunsford's books/videos/podcasts. His book, "Home Performance Diagnostics", is the ultimate resource [1].
He also has a YouTube channel [2] that has a ton of useful information on proper ventilation, humidification, and environmental safety, along with podcasts [3]. You can also check out his main site, Building Performance Workshop [4].
Alternatively, there are books on the subject of "building performance" that you may want to check out.
UV will kill covid, ionic species such as ozone will kill covid, and electrostatic filtration will adsorb particles based on electrical charge rather than mechanical porousity, keep them in place and let the UV+ Ozone do its job.
Well it’s nice to think driving school buses with the windows down this past winter may have significantly helped to avoid transmissions between households.
Depends on how much you curb it. Just a little and it delays things. Do it enough and it will end sooner. Vaccines are the best way to do the latter, the US is close to the end and could be done with the pandemic if just a "few" million more got their vaccine.
Even the "just a little" delay is a good thing though. It gives doctors time to find better treatments.
No government I’m aware of has yet committing to fund renovation of every indoor business in their country.
Nothing smaller than a government is prepared for the renovation cost of retrofitting every single business in the world for disease-preventing air exchange standards.
If I were a small business owner, I wouldn’t want to simultaneously scare or anger customers, especially if there’s nothing I can do to afford massive HVAC renovation to a building I probably don’t even own. I would earn the fear of patrons and the ire of other tenants, and might end up evicted by my landlord for junk reasons like epidemic fear-mongering or wasting heating and cooling on an open door.
If I were a landlord, I would have no incentive to upgrade HVAC on any building I own, because doing one would compel them all to do it, and start an arms race with my competitors that would cost my dearly without being able to raise the rent to maintain my profits, since my tenants are already underwater.
Fancy businesses with exclusively rich patrons have probably already upgraded their HVAC while we were all arguing about whether to wear masks or not, because unlike the rest of us, they aren’t constrained by the cost of remaining diligent at protecting their customers. But I bet they only improved their HVAC filtration, and added UV lights somewhere, rather than actually implementing real and serious air exchange protocols.
No bank is going to offer a landlord a low-interest HVAC upgrade loan for their building, because to do so for any one business would begin a run on the bank by every landlord and business in the world, who would demand that same loan be extended to them, while simultaneously spiking the risk of their entire portfolio of commercial property mortgages, forcing them to recapitalize or go bust.
Changing building codes will only affect new buildings, which is worthless for stopping this winter’s annual pandemic (whether it’s covid or flu or both). It’s a fine thing to do, but existing buildings will be given an exception.
Everyone’s acting in self-interest to the exclusion of others, and the only thing that’s going to be enough to break that cycle is for governments to invest GDP directly into HVAC renovation, for every single building in the world.
This isn’t a flashy solution, and there really isn’t much tech can do to help here. We simply need boots on the ground in every building in the world, and the supply chains and government funding necessary to deliver that.
But maybe we, HN readers and founders, can help. If one of you can write a tool that shows us how much renovations will truly cost, and you can reduce your estimate to a simple set of inputs^ then you have a chance to make it possible. Today we make up numbers and have no idea what it truly costs to upgrade air exchange for the cities of New York, Atherton, or Barcelona. We don’t have any idea at all. Build a tool that tells us, so that we can convince the world to prevent the next Covid.
^ For example, using these four inputs — number of rooms, number of floors, number of stairwells, number of elevators — you could offer a calculator that lets anyone punch in a building’s data from blueprints and permits, offer permalinks that store the building data, and offer to subscribe them to cost updates when the algorithm is improved.
It isn't possible to upgrade every HVAC system in the country in one year. there are not enough HVAC people in any country to do it.
What is possible is a 30 year plan. Between new buildings getting the new codes, and remodeling for best practices we can get 75% of all buildings to updated HVAC over 30 years, and we have reason to believe that will make a big difference to colds and flus.
> There are better ways to spend our resources than on redoing the world's HVAC
Before we had vaccines, ventilation improvements likely prevented a significant amount of transmission. If ventilation can reduce the transmission of other illnesses, and prevent the next COVID, it's pretty hard to argue that it's a bad use of resources.
> climate change
Yes, that's important. But it's not a zero sum game where investing in public health somehow takes away from investing in environmentally friendly technology.
Not quite the money quote, but on reading this I wanted to point out one little thing.
This is also a form of authoritarianism, not the splashy kind that has you making land wars in Asia or creating command economies and seizing private property; but the bureaucratic "we know better than you because we said so" kind. When authority is invested in you, as it has been invested in the WHO, and you abuse that authority to tell independent investigators not on your payroll that they are just flat out wrong and the lines of inquiry they are investigating are dead ends and they should just shut up already, well, maybe you shouldn't have the authority you were vested with.
Fortunately, we also live in a world where the UN and its agencies do not have a monopoly on good information.