Posted on 03/20/2021 6:22:55 PM PDT by george76
He’s polite as always in his criticism here, but this is a quietly brutal assessment of the CDC’s lethargy in adjusting its guidance to help the public navigate the dangers of COVID. And it could have been harsher: The word “schools” never leaves his lips even though students are among the biggest casualties of the six-foot rule..
The CDC began the pandemic operating on the assumption that the coronavirus transmits the way the flu does, he notes, and they never quite abandoned that assumption despite the data to the contrary gathered over the past 12 months. Six feet of distance and frequent hand-washing makes sense when you have a virus that’s borne by large droplets. Those are more likely to end up deposited on surfaces than they are to be inhaled, particularly if you’re keeping some space between yourself and the infected person. For a virus that’s borne by aerosols, distance becomes less important. Aerosols can travel beyond six feet and may linger in the air; masking is more important than hand-washing when facing a threat like that.
The CDC was operating on the wrong model of what they were dealing with at the beginning — based on a guess, not on hard science — and by the time they started to move away from it many thousands of people were already infected. We’ll never know how many contracted COVID while studiously observing the six-foot rule, believing they were safe at that distance when they weren’t.
He elaborated on that in an interview with “Face the Nation” on March 7:
MARGARET BRENNAN: You know, we look back at some of your remarks from a year ago. You’ve been pretty on the money with your predictions. But at this time a year ago, we weren’t wearing masks. We weren’t told to until April by the federal government. Now we’re being asked to continue wearing them. From where you sit, is that the biggest mistake? I mean, how would you grade our performance as a country?
DR. GOTTLIEB: I think the masks are the single biggest mistake because it was the easiest intervention that we could have reached for early to prevent spread. I think this was a real failure to detect all of the asymptomatic spread. We overestimated the role of fomites, of contaminated surfaces in spreading this virus, because we weren’t recognizing all the spread that was happening from asymptomatic individuals, because we weren’t doing good tracking and tracing. We were using a flu-model to detect COVID spread and it wasn’t applicable. So CDC was very slow to recognize this. If we had recognized earlier all this spread through asymptomatic transmission and the fact that this is spreading not just through droplets but also aerosolization, enclosed environments, we probably would have recommended masks and high-quality masks much earlier. So that was probably the single biggest mistake, largely because it was a single easiest intervention that we could have reached for early.
Mistaking how a novel virus travels from person to person was tragic but understandable in the early days of the pandemic, when scientists were scrambling to learn about SARS-CoV-2. Keeping that mistaken early guidance in place for schools for a year, knowing that it would keep classrooms off-limits to students struggling with virtual learning, is less defensible. If the virus travels by aerosol then a strict rule requiring six feet of distance between kids in class instead of three feet is hard to justify. Aerosols can cover either distance; maybe we’d see a few more infections at three feet (although the recent study from Massachusetts indicates that we don’t), but so many more that we need to wreck kids’ education for their own safety by keeping them home?
Reuters surveyed school districts nationwide last month to ask how kids have been doing being kept away from their peers. The results were what you’d expect:
Of the 74 districts that responded, 74% reported multiple indicators of increased mental health stresses among students. More than half reported rises in mental health referrals and counseling.
Nearly 90% of responding districts cited higher rates of absenteeism or disengagement, metrics commonly used to gauge student emotional health. The lack of in person education was a driver of these warning signs of trouble, more than half of districts said…
More than a dozen school district leaders told Reuters of students suffering silently with depression, eating disorders, neglect and emotional, physical or sexual abuse. Were students in a school setting, these warning triggers would be more easily noticed, they say.
One district in northern California saw a 30 percent *decrease* in child abuse reports after their school system closed last year. Were abusive parents suddenly behaving better? No. The abuse, it seems, was simply going unreported because teachers were no longer around to observe the evidence of it. “A month after school started in September, students started to open up to staff about emotional, physical or sexual abuse they reported experiencing during the lockdown,” Reuters reports. In a three-week span, the district intervened in a dozen cases of potentially suicidal students. Usually they have one or two in an entire year. That’s what the six-foot rule, which the CDC finally changed only yesterday to three feet, helped get us.
Which, I guess, means the two biggest failures of the pandemic belong to the CDC, not to Trump. There’s the six-foot rule and of course there was the testing debacle last February and March, when the agency couldn’t get a workable diagnostic out to the states at a moment when community spread was still limited. If scientists had been able to track the virus more closely during that period, they might have been able to contain it better. Oh well. Five hundred thousand dead later, we are where we are.
Complete crap that asymptomatic people contributed to the spread.
I am glad you pointed this out.
Also complete crap to think masks are effective against areosols. They arent. And that’s why the virus spread widely and quickly many months after those early days. It spread during the time when everyone was wearing masks everywhere.
Asymptomatic transmission of covid did not occur at all, study of 10 million people finds..
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3919319/posts
That is literally the premise of every Democrat politician and Karen, assuming they in everyone else has Covid but doesn’t know it, going so far as to say even if you tested negative for Covid, you still may have Covid so you must wear a mask and social distance.
The numbers for today show that 98.18% survive being exposed/tested/infected/diseased by whatever it is they are worry about..
The CDC itself recently issued the results of a study of mask effectiveness and by their own admission masks only reduce transmission and death by 2%. To any statistician that amount is statistically insignificant, effectively there's no difference between going maskless and wearing one.
How much has this study been reported in the media? I just happened upon it but to my knowledge it's been almost buried, it doesn't back up the mask cultism of those in power. Notice the date on the study, March 12, so it's been out 2.5 weeks and you hear nothing of it in the media.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm?s_cid=mm7010e3_w
The United States Health Service, Schools Division, is concerned that so many children were not under their care and supervision during the lockdown.
It’s brainwashing and day care.
The public schools are nothing else.
Totally bogus study, and from China, no less.
Now, that said, I am fairly sure mildly symptomatic individuals are more infectious than persons who display no symptoms whatsoever as determined by, say, a team of experts monitoring said person(s) 24/7 for weeks before any antibodies are detected. Failing that, what is and is not “asymptomatic” has a lot of grey to it, and self evaluation of such (as on the typical COVID screening questions) can be highly suspect.
Viral load matters - a lot - and so distancing still helps (inverse square rule) unless the background level of floating or semi-floating (much more likely) virions becomes so high that it is equal to or higher than the virion level chucked out by that maskless or poorly masked spreader 3 feet away from you. The latter is very unlikely. The good Dr. seems to have forgotten his freshman Physics class.
However, his point about CDC’s “lethargy” is still correct.
If there’s anyone who’s an expert on complete crap it’s ‘Allahpundit’.
Cont’d: That said, the school closings in many cases were excessive. Schools that stayed open or were open more, this last fall, in my area, and practiced good mitigation otherwise, did NOT prove to be hotspots of COVID-19 spread. Some spread mainly through sports activities did occur, from school to school, but outbreaks were quickly caught and contained. All positive and negative aspects considered, I’d say states like CA get a comparative “F”.
Well, yeah, except that first sentence is NOT what the study states. The 2% is growth rate. Put it in the exponent.
2nd, my observation until around Thanksgiving or so was of quite a few people dropping their masks once in stores, etc., many poor masks in evidence, completely lousy mask usage (poor fit, mask under nose, etc.), dreadful mask etiquette... Most of this, aside from hardheads and wimps, is due to virtually non-existent education on these points. Sure, there are lots of kumbaya commercials urging us to wear masks, but I've yet to see one PSA on (crucial) mask etiquette. It's a wonder the "study" showed any benefit at all.
The last few months I think the "usage" aspect has improved slightly. But it will fall off, I'm fairly sure.
Nor, for people who MUST get "out" some, but are vulnerable or esp. for those who care for vulnerable people, are strongly protective masks (basically, US made N-95's) available even now. And heaven forbid someone come up with a more comfortable design. 15 months ago I'd have said such a failure would be incomprehensible to me. Now... It's a good thing I don't know who best to throttle, because there are too many...
I was diagnosed asymptomatic, as I far as I know I didn’t infect anyone. I’ve been in quarantine. I work in a hospital ER, constantly exposed to Covid and I’ve been vaccinated.
And still have have to wear this G damned face diaper!
I wear a mask when required to do so. I can only tolerate a mask for about 15 minutes, so I limit my shopping trips for about that length of time. It is easy to see why people pull their masks down. My take is the CDC knows that a how to wear a mask PSA would be a total waste of money. Even Fauci has been seen pulling his mask down when he thought he was off camera.
To any statistician that amount is statistically insignificant...
Are you a statistician?
Maybe so, but I find the masking rule to be the most obnoxious.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit could not point to a single case of asymptomatic transmission….
The false narrative of asymptomatic transmission has been the justification used by politicians for lock downs .
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