We can't possibly have enough data, and even enough time since the start of the pandemic to come to this conclusion. To know if something is seasonal, we must first let a couple of years pass and measure and compare the numbers with previous years, no?
Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I believe in science, and its conclusions. All I wanted to know is if there's enough data points to plot a long-term trend.
It’s well into summer in the northern hemisphere and the virus is still spreading as rapidly as ever, so that would be pretty good reason to think it’s not seasonal like the flu, which dies down a lot in the summer.
virus has died down in Europe and Asia, although may be upticking in Europe again.
Seems clear it's not heat related though - In Europe when people socially distanced there were few cases. As people are more blasé about it cases start to tick back up.
In summertime many people can go to their vacation homes with gardens far from the cities, and work remotely, so it's much harder to keep distance in the cold winter.
I expect the winter being worse for the countries that weren't hit that hard in the summer.
You're right, we won't know if this is an nadir or not in the whole thing, but she seems to be warning against the idea that this is the off season and we don't have to worry about it.
I can't figure out who the target audience is for - the people who have written off COVID also seem to have written off the WHO, and those who haven't see that there's still a major ongoing problem.
I don't trust the WHO but I have certainly not written off COVID. I think the WHO has too much China influence but I think they may still have some accurate information.
I don't know if its seasonal or not yet although I could see experts could start making predictions already. To me though it is not one big wave. Watching the numbers in the USA and other countries it appears that as restrictions are lifted cases rise. When they rise we add restrictions and they go down at a much slower rate. Its many smaller waves.
Covid-19 hardly mutates and people who were exposed to SARS 17 years ago have immunity to covid today. So yes, it’s pretty safe to say there won’t be a second wave of any significance. This was known since Februari and I don’t understand why you would think this disease will be seasonal when it isn’t anything like the seasonal viruses we know that mutate and don’t trigger good immune responses.
(It is seasonal in the sense that the R0 is higher in the winter when people are cooped together, but once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless)
> Covid-19 hardly mutates and people who were exposed to SARS 17 years ago have immunity to covid today.
Citation, please. Any credible sources that I could find say that protection correlation with SARS is not clearly established and antibody levels to SARS fall off between 2-3 years after infection.
> there won’t be a second wave of any significance
There will or will not be but certainly not for the reasons you mention. Unlike flu and older coronaviruses, SARS-Cov-2 R_t seems to be driven exclusively by containment measures, not by seasonality, at least not at the present.
> once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless
We are nowhere near the "sufficient exposure" and it is already the most impactful pandemic in the last 100 years.
I think there is enough information/data to be gained from the virus itself to determine if it has the same or similar characteristics of other corona viruses (like influenza) to support seasonality or season-less continuity.
> We can't possibly have enough data, and even enough time since the start of the pandemic to come to this conclusion.
For, Pro, Against, Anti, WHO, CDC, vaccine, masks, orders... etc etc etc... I’ve been thinking this same thing since March. I’m absolutely fine being cautious and doing the right thing, but I think everyone pretends “the science is settled” on these things and it changes weekly - and it should because a lot of it is new - but now that’s used as a weapon by everyone invoked. Kinda sick of it.
It should be totally OK to say “we don’t know, so we won’t guess”.
We don't know, we won't guess, but we have to have a policy, and that policy is based on what we do know. If what we do know changes, we change the policy.
The problem with that is that policy changing every week is not something that western populations can deal with, so policy changes have to be dampened somewhat.
It wasn’t on westerners radars until February in any serious way.
It spread through Winter 2019, Spring 2020, and is spreading during Summer 2020 when trying to “re-open.”
Pretty sure measurable science to support the idea exists. Oh sure that trend may change, but come on, RIGHT NOW it’s literally showing no signs of fading away if we “live normally.”
Why do you need 18 more months of plotting data to decide on what’s literally happening right before your eyes?
It just that we were measuring a lot many more people now. But it is true that in June there were fewer cases than today, but by far the most cases were in the Winter.
How else would be in the situation where 10% of population is already seropostive and at least as many don't develop antibodies since their symptoms are mild, thus we are probably over 20% of people having had the disease.
It's depressing to see rational voices saying they don't trust the WHO or tending to conspiratorial thoughts. The WHO has first-hand details about the pandemic and they update their views and adjust their recommendations accordingly even if we have the feeling they are acting slowly or back-and-forth (e.g. when there was a critical and global shortage of materials for masks to give to health workers and only months later started saying wearing masks was the ideal and people simply bought the "they changed their mind so they must have been wrong all the time" idea). Without WHO the world would effectively be a much worse place for a good chunk of the world population and many contagious diseases would be around right next to some rich nations's borders. If they say it's one big wave it's because this is what the current data and analysis suggest. Can it be seasonal after all? Nobody freaking knows, but this is the best line of thought we have so far so let's act accordingly and not let the guard down please.
This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak:
I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out.
A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political.
To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.
And yet, three months after getting its first case in this epidemic, the PRC has handled it orders of magnitude better than the US.
You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country.
Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO.
Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were?
And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.
The WHO didn't praise the PRC because they believed in them, they did it because they needed the PRC's cooperation to have any information about what's happening in Wuhan. They obviously kowtowed to the PRC in repeating their propaganda, so you should take their pro-Beijing messaging with a grain of salt, but expediency during the Wuhan outbreak doesn't make them puppets either.
The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.
An organization that puts out a tweet (on immunity) that was, in the form it was written, totally void of any biological sense, doesn't rank much on my scale of worthiness.
On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other.
Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago.
I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".
There can be multiple waves without the virus itself being seasonal, just due to human behaviour.
In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.
By no means am I on the side of the WHO, but I'll try and play devil's advocate here.
How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty.
Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.
What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.
If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.
Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April.
The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price.
The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals.
[Edit:]
Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed:
> [Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.
> He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
> [...]
> “We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded.
> If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations
You seem certain of this.
Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public.
This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit.
We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease.
It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.
> How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.
I'm having trouble unpacking this statement.
Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO?
Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed?
I used to have your opinion, but the behaviour I witnessed from the WHO during this pandemic does not align with the behaviour of a rationally behaving, unbiased, independent entity. I listened to several of their conferences and it was very obvious their behaviour is heavily conditioned with political matters. In one of the early conferences, Tedros spent much more time and energy on praising China than on talking about the actual disease, using flowery language I cannot describe as anything other than propagandist.
With all the debacles from WHO including the most disastrous one of trusting Chinese authorities and declaring there is no human to human transmission till January, I think I can be forgiven for not taking anything WHO says seriously anymore.
WHO needs a leadership change at the least for getting back any sort of the authority they used to have.
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
I’m in the “WHO is ineffective at best” camp, but I agree with you here.
They have been conservative in their statements. I don’t recall them ever saying “it doesn’t spread person-to-person” - I do recall them saying “there is no conclusive evidence of person-to-person transmission”. At the time, given the evidence they had, that was true. From their perspective saying that it did in fact spread person-to-person and later concluding it didn’t would have been much worse; I assume they take this approach to protect their reputation of being certain before making a public statement.
The problem seems to be that lay people seem to expect WHO to be on the bleeding edge and providing comprehensive information on the latest investigation and data. That’s not what they do. They report the findings, and that’s very different.
Respectfully, Could you link to the documents you were referring to?
I feel like a trend I see is folks say to go out on their own to find some document that proves their point. There are several statements by the WHO on those dates, and I do not know which one you mean.
I have unfortunately seen the trend also where someone does link a source that is very lengthy and same thing. In one case, the source actually contradicted the person citing it.
I am not accusing you of that, merely it makes your argument much more credible when it is easy to see where you cited your sources.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
> declaring there is no human to human transmission till January
It was first diagnosed in late December and the earliest the WHO became aware was 30th/31st December (depending on timezone). WHO issued a statement saying there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on Jan 14th.
We have to stop this narrative that we aren't going to listen to people until they are infallible. That's not how crisis management works. Or war, football, basketball, card games...
Hedging your bets is the act of wasting resources constructively, so that if your worst case scenario happens, you aren't doomed. Faulting people for hedging their bets is going to get us all killed.
It's been happening to scientists (first climate, now everybody) for years, and 'getting us all killed' was more figurative. Now we're doing it to doctors, and people are in fact dying. Of Covid (655k so far). Of measles (140k in 2018).
Do you want a dark age? Because this is how you get a dark age.
I don't agree with your statement. The matter has become so polarized that both sides are actually lying about the data.
Just a few weeks ago, the Guardian quoted a study on Nature saying that asymptomatics were more infectious than symptomatic people. Except that the paper did not state anything like that, and even warned against using the results for policy reasons.
On the same camp, a Wired article saying that "the press must watch on science" to avoid pushing untested vaccines on the population, yet omitting the fact that some side effects of the Moderna vaccine were on a dose no longer used for trials.
And on the other side, we have conspiracy theorists and "skeptics" which only quote part of the studies which benefit their agenda, such as reporting only the more optimistic bound for the infection fatality rate. Or those who only quote negative bits about vaccines.
And scientists (I'm one of them) are to blame, too. A lot of those reporting to the media gave predictions, talked in absolutes (at least speaking for my country). Few actually said "we don't know". I'm not aware of anyone saying "we got something wrong".
"People are still thinking about seasons. What we all need
to get our heads around is this is a new virus and...this one is behaving differently [...] This virus likes all weather."
I think the word "seasonal" is used here as a reference to weather rather than as a recurring time period.
Readit News
Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I believe in science, and its conclusions. All I wanted to know is if there's enough data points to plot a long-term trend.
Seems clear it's not heat related though - In Europe when people socially distanced there were few cases. As people are more blasé about it cases start to tick back up.
I expect the winter being worse for the countries that weren't hit that hard in the summer.
I can't figure out who the target audience is for - the people who have written off COVID also seem to have written off the WHO, and those who haven't see that there's still a major ongoing problem.
I don't know if its seasonal or not yet although I could see experts could start making predictions already. To me though it is not one big wave. Watching the numbers in the USA and other countries it appears that as restrictions are lifted cases rise. When they rise we add restrictions and they go down at a much slower rate. Its many smaller waves.
Deleted Comment
(It is seasonal in the sense that the R0 is higher in the winter when people are cooped together, but once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless)
Citation, please. Any credible sources that I could find say that protection correlation with SARS is not clearly established and antibody levels to SARS fall off between 2-3 years after infection.
> there won’t be a second wave of any significance
There will or will not be but certainly not for the reasons you mention. Unlike flu and older coronaviruses, SARS-Cov-2 R_t seems to be driven exclusively by containment measures, not by seasonality, at least not at the present.
> once you've got sufficient exposure in the community a second wave won't happen regardless
We are nowhere near the "sufficient exposure" and it is already the most impactful pandemic in the last 100 years.
Deleted Comment
For, Pro, Against, Anti, WHO, CDC, vaccine, masks, orders... etc etc etc... I’ve been thinking this same thing since March. I’m absolutely fine being cautious and doing the right thing, but I think everyone pretends “the science is settled” on these things and it changes weekly - and it should because a lot of it is new - but now that’s used as a weapon by everyone invoked. Kinda sick of it.
It should be totally OK to say “we don’t know, so we won’t guess”.
The problem with that is that policy changing every week is not something that western populations can deal with, so policy changes have to be dampened somewhat.
It spread through Winter 2019, Spring 2020, and is spreading during Summer 2020 when trying to “re-open.”
Pretty sure measurable science to support the idea exists. Oh sure that trend may change, but come on, RIGHT NOW it’s literally showing no signs of fading away if we “live normally.”
Why do you need 18 more months of plotting data to decide on what’s literally happening right before your eyes?
The modeling from IMHE claims that in March the number of daily new infections were above 250K whereas today are about 120K.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
see the tab called Infections and Testing
It just that we were measuring a lot many more people now. But it is true that in June there were fewer cases than today, but by far the most cases were in the Winter.
How else would be in the situation where 10% of population is already seropostive and at least as many don't develop antibodies since their symptoms are mild, thus we are probably over 20% of people having had the disease.
I'm no scientist but that was the end of Winter and there were very few people with it at the time.
Isn't it possible that it is indeed seasonal and it's now in its "weak phase"?
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/sars-gives-china-lesson-...
This is where the saying "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice same on me" comes into play. The below source shows the PRC covering up the COVID-19 outbreak:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
I peronsally feel like the WHO should have been a lot more suspicious of the PRC and how they were reporting. However, it appeared like they took information from the PRC at face value in January, where containment could have spared much of this pandemic. Was it political? Much like someone else pointed out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
A senior WHO offical praises the PRC, even after it is come out the the PRC covered up the initial outbreak. It is very hard to not view that is political.
To me, a lot of the mistrust of the WHO based on these sources are well founded.
You can only blame the PRC's poor response in January and February for some of our failures. Everything that we did wrong in mid-March and onward is squarely on our heads. Unsurprisingly, this failure gets politicized, by the people responsible deflecting their failures on another country.
Vietnam and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand somehow managed to get the epidemic more or less under control - probably because they were actually busy solving the problem, instead of pointing fingers at China and the WHO.
Why were they not dependent on the PRC and the WHO in making the correct response, but we were?
And before someone mentions that Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are islands (Well... Maybe not Vietnam!), I would also like to point out that Hawaii is an island, and currently has 400 times the per-capita cases of Vietnam... And 4 times the per-capita cases of South Korea - despite us knowing a lot more about how to stop the virus when it had its first case.
The WHO is funded primarily by the United States (despite Trump's recent threats), the United Kingdom, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. China contributes less than a tenth of what the US does. The idea that WHO is permanently beholden to China just doesn't add up. Now that China is no longer the center of the outbreak, WHO's praise of the PRC has (as far as I can tell) completely stopped.
On the seasonality: at a seminar on the epidemiology of this disease at my institution right today, the evidence on the impact of experimental factors was described as "inconsistent" but not enough to rule out one possibility or the other.
Ironically, a WHO staffer in Italy actually made a claim (or so the media said) about a "second wave" just two weeks ago.
I really don't understand why it is hard for many (not necessarily just the WHO) to say "we don't know".
In particular, if we close everything down, get infections down to a nice low level, then declare victory and throw away all our masks and precautions, you better bet there'll be a "second wave" that has nothing to do with the weather.
How will most people interpret "we don't know"? You and I might understand the wisdom behind admitting to not having enough information, but the average person won't, and the media can easily mock this form of honesty.
Being knowingly wrong or inconsistent seems to be a better strategy since the attention span of the average person is rather short, and appeal to authority is a pretty effective mind trick.
What's depressing is how politicized the virus has become. How someone feels about the job the WHO has done is probably tied more to their political beliefs than to reality.
If we can't say that the WHO dropped the ball with their mask recommendations then we really can't say anything at all.
Not cloth, but melt-blown (and to some extent spun-bond) non-woven polypropylene. This is the fabric used to make surgical masks, surgical gowns, bouffant caps, and disposable bedding for hospitals. All of these things were in shortage in March and April.
The shortage of melt-blown non-woven fabric itself is now mostly over. Still in shortage are N95 respirators, which use melt-blown electret non-wovens — material given an electrostatic charge so that it attracts particles in the air. International N95-equivalent respirators are available to the public at inflated prices, but genuine (American standard) N95 masks are still difficult to find at any price.
The WHO guidance against mask-wearing was a desperate attempt to mitigate N95 shortages. Even when all major health authorities were telling the public not to use masks of any kind, N95 respirators were widely purchased by people who had no idea how to use them. (I've been in NYC throughout the pandemic. It's extremely common to see N95's worn with facial hair, with un-pinched nose strips, or even with the lower head-strap dangling. N95's have little value if not properly sealed.) The WHO believed advising the public to wear any mask at all would exacerbate N95 hoarding and ultimately cost lives by making them unavailable to hospitals.
[Edit:]
Not sure why I'm getting downvotes for this. This isn't controversial information. Dr. Fauci has given this same explanation for why mask guidance changed:
> [Fauci] also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE.
> He explained that public health experts "were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply.”
> [...]
> “We wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected,” Fauci concluded.
See: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
You seem certain of this.
Please post a link to the high quality evidence that you think WHO should have used to recommend mask wearing in the general public.
This should be either a meta-analysis or RCT that shows a clear benefit.
We have plenty of RCTs of masks to prevent spread of respiratory disease.
It should be very easy to find one -- you're so certain you must have already read the research, and if the effect is so clear it'd be obvious to people doing the research.
I'm having trouble unpacking this statement.
Are you saying that a person's political ideology influences their judgment about what's objectively true regarding the WHO?
Or are you saying that even when two persons agree on the objective details of WHO's behavior, their different political ideologies lead them to different sentiments regarding how well WHO performed?
Or something else?
Deleted Comment
WHO needs a leadership change at the least for getting back any sort of the authority they used to have.
They have been conservative in their statements. I don’t recall them ever saying “it doesn’t spread person-to-person” - I do recall them saying “there is no conclusive evidence of person-to-person transmission”. At the time, given the evidence they had, that was true. From their perspective saying that it did in fact spread person-to-person and later concluding it didn’t would have been much worse; I assume they take this approach to protect their reputation of being certain before making a public statement.
The problem seems to be that lay people seem to expect WHO to be on the bleeding edge and providing comprehensive information on the latest investigation and data. That’s not what they do. They report the findings, and that’s very different.
I feel like a trend I see is folks say to go out on their own to find some document that proves their point. There are several statements by the WHO on those dates, and I do not know which one you mean.
I have unfortunately seen the trend also where someone does link a source that is very lengthy and same thing. In one case, the source actually contradicted the person citing it.
I am not accusing you of that, merely it makes your argument much more credible when it is easy to see where you cited your sources.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
0. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
Here's what it looks in action, with senior leadership at WHO following the orders from China (video interview)
https://twitter.com/ezracheungtoto/status/124386977441046937...?
https://youtu.be/UlCYFh8U2xM?t=35
It was first diagnosed in late December and the earliest the WHO became aware was 30th/31st December (depending on timezone). WHO issued a statement saying there had been limited human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus on Jan 14th.
COVID-19 is pretty clearly not subsiding in any meaningful way.
For US data and projection based on models for each state: https://cv19.report/
We have to stop this narrative that we aren't going to listen to people until they are infallible. That's not how crisis management works. Or war, football, basketball, card games...
Hedging your bets is the act of wasting resources constructively, so that if your worst case scenario happens, you aren't doomed. Faulting people for hedging their bets is going to get us all killed.
It's been happening to scientists (first climate, now everybody) for years, and 'getting us all killed' was more figurative. Now we're doing it to doctors, and people are in fact dying. Of Covid (655k so far). Of measles (140k in 2018).
Do you want a dark age? Because this is how you get a dark age.
Just a few weeks ago, the Guardian quoted a study on Nature saying that asymptomatics were more infectious than symptomatic people. Except that the paper did not state anything like that, and even warned against using the results for policy reasons.
On the same camp, a Wired article saying that "the press must watch on science" to avoid pushing untested vaccines on the population, yet omitting the fact that some side effects of the Moderna vaccine were on a dose no longer used for trials.
And on the other side, we have conspiracy theorists and "skeptics" which only quote part of the studies which benefit their agenda, such as reporting only the more optimistic bound for the infection fatality rate. Or those who only quote negative bits about vaccines.
And scientists (I'm one of them) are to blame, too. A lot of those reporting to the media gave predictions, talked in absolutes (at least speaking for my country). Few actually said "we don't know". I'm not aware of anyone saying "we got something wrong".
Dead Comment
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