Are you referring to the Boing Boing post or the linked article?
ON FRIDAY, APRIL 30, the WHO quietly updated a page on its website. In a section on how the coronavirus gets transmitted, the text now states that the virus can spread via aerosols as well as larger droplets.
I was referring to the Boing Boing post.
It’s sad that this will be used as another excuse to mistrust scientists. Of course, they get things wrong, and even perpetuate wrong things. How long did it take for people to realize that women had the same number of ribs as men? Bad information can result from bad experimental error, scientific fraud, mistakes like aerosol/droplet confusion, and so on. But the important thing about science is that it is about the only human discipline that is generally
SELF-CORRECTING.
Unfortunately in this case, there was a deadly pandemic going on that needed correct information immediately. Self-correction can take time. Science doesn’t care if a couple million people die. And let’s not forget that vaccines were developed in an incredibly short time – due to the onward march of science, to coin a phrase.
“But you’re a computer program, Agent Smith. Why don’t you just turn off your sniffing subroutines?”
I was wondering why, at the start of the pandemic, I was seeing medical researchers who study droplets and aerosols explaining that yes, people breathe out aerosols under normal circumstances and this was a likely way of transmitting the virus, and doctors generally were saying something else entirely.
It’s shocking how many known myths continue to be taught in medical schools (and become the basis for medical devices, etc.). There’s a lot of really dangerous racist medical myths that persist, despite it being acknowledged they’re completely wrong.
Doctors didn’t think humans were producing aerosols (that can travel great distances) under normal circumstances - they thought it was only something that happened in specific circumstances, such as when people were being intubated (i.e. in hospitals), not all the time in daily life (the belief was they were only producing droplets that couldn’t travel more than a few feet). So as a result they thought masks were completely vital in hospitals (they are), but not necessary for everyone else.
And that 6’+ spacing and sneeze guards were enough inside a building, and never mind the ventilation.
When I told my GP I was fairly sure I had gallstones, part of his sneering dismissal was to inform me that gallstones affect people who are “fat, female and forty”. I bit my tongue from asking whether that was a peer-reviewed wives’ tale, because at that stage it didn’t feel constructive to get into it with him. And fortunately it was all resolved when the fictional gallstones became moderately life-threatening and the folks at the hospital took a few hours to diagnose and fix the problem.
Obviously, medicine is a huge field, and patients are diverse and complicated, so if front-line medics didn’t have some simplifications and heuristics to fall back on, they wouldn’t even be able to point their patients to the right specialist half the time. But what doctors might sometimes forget is that if someone’s taught them a vague rule of thumb, it’s precisely because their knowledge of the matter isn’t complete. E.g., if the extent of your knowledge about gallstones is “fat, female and forty”, fair enough, but that in itself should tell you you’re not an authority on this.
This is why training people to be experts in something has to go hand in hand with training them to be conscious of the nature and limits of what their expertise means. Some fields seem better at that than others – I don’t know what the story is with medicine, but there may be room for improvement.
Nice summary. And if my memory is ok, the thing might have a lot to do with the officials trying hard to avoid panic in the early days - I remember that the thing was that they didn’t want us imagining an anthrax type - nowhere’s safe scenario and have us all running all across the countryside or whatever.
Now that I type that, worrying that people would overreact to the pandemic is yet another piece of traditional wisdom that should be revised.
I thought it was obvious early on from the various published airflow transmitted cases that it wasn’t just droplets.
I took the CDCs early anti-masking advice as evidence of Drumpf’s corruption of the agency, being told to lie so the administration didn’t look as incompetent as they obviously were. I honestly didn’t think they actually believed what they were told to shovel; Occam’s Razor suggested to me their advice had been thoroughly corrupted by right wing politics.
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Yeah that’s a fair criticism — I was trying to contextualize the article to get people to read it, rather than hijack all of the original author’s hard work by summarizing it so that no one actually read the source. I probably could have done a better job of balancing that. I blame the 5 microns!
No worries. I’m just glad to see the important issues being discussed so we can all be more informed!
Anyone who doesn’t read it, IMO, missing out. One of the best pieces of reporting I’ve read in a while. I used to have a Wired subscription but let it lapse, and this made me reconsider getting one again.
Whatever ever happened to the “air getting into room” test?
real-life ex: My engineering mentor at the hospital waiting for his daughter who’s there for treatment. In a waiting area he looks up at the ceiling, sees a/c ducting, notes where it’s logically heading toward, calls a nurse over, and informs her of his finding: The a/c duct ‘check valve’ was installed backwards. Say’s she: Occupants and staff further downstream had been complaining for months about poor air circulation and warm conditions.
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