What would you do differently for the next pandemic?

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Reply

Really? I thought pretty early on, the science was converging on airborne transmission, mostly in enclosed spaces, and that fomites weren’t a big deal.

This is what the WHO was posting:

Very nearly the opposite of the truth, confidently made.

Quoting an earlier post I made on the subject:

@Dr.Strangelove

The WHO screwed up quite badly. It took them two years to admit COVID was airborne–well past the time where the evidence was incontrovertible. A few months can be blamed on early uncertainty. Not years. This tweet aged quite badly:

The reason is a 60-year-old dogma they held that there were basically just two categories of non-contact transmission: droplets larger than 5 microns that fall out of the air rapidly, and small particles that can hang around for hours. But not only is reality not that binary, the 5-micron figure is just flat-out wrong, conflating two different figures from an ancient paper (the droplet threshold was supposed to be 100 microns).

In spite of all the obvious evidence, both empirical and theoretical, it took the WHO immense pressure to cave. And even at that, it was only in April of this year that the WHO actually redefined airborne transmission to be evidence-based. They could have done this decades earlier had they been more receptive to earlier reports that the dogma had been violated.

It’s true that communication was also bad. That’s not a scientific failure like with the WHO but communication is a key part of their job.

And public policy was also way behind, banning outdoor gatherings even when it was clear they weren’t a large threat, and so on.

Thanks for the birthday wishes.