[HN Gopher] A Misleading CDC Number
___________________________________________________________________
A Misleading CDC Number
Author : heshiebee
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-05-11 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| Simple conclusion: "Masks make a huge difference indoors and
| rarely matter outdoors." The 10% estimate in question is perhaps
| orders of magnitude too conservative. Why would the CDC employ
| such a weak numeric argument? They could have left it at
| something like we see no strong evidence for outdoor
| transmission. Does there have to be a number attached to public
| health advice?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >Simple conclusion: "Masks make a huge difference indoors and
| rarely matter outdoors."
|
| Also: For a disease that we now know is airborne/aerosol spread
| rather than airborne/droplet, N95 and KN95 masks are highly
| effective, a two layer cloth mask fit tightly over a surgical
| mask is moderately effective, and a cloth mask by itself is
| largely for show. I still see people saying you should NOT use
| N95 masks (they're cheaply and widely available now) while
| donning a neck gaiter pulled up over their mouth. It's another
| area where the initial messaging was terrible (in this case out
| of the good intention of reserving them for healthcare workers)
| and unfortunately has persisted.
| mcguire wrote:
| By "N95 mask", do you mean this
|
| https://www.amazon.com/3M-8511HB1-C-PS-Sanding-Fiberglass-
| Re...
|
| or this?
|
| https://www.amazon.com/AccuMed-Respirator-Filtration-
| Disposa...
|
| I've had a box of the former out in the garage for a couple
| of years; before 2020, if you looked for an "N95" mask,
| that's what you would find. But they're not terribly useful
| in a medical situation.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| More the latter. They're both N95, but the valve in the
| former means outgoing air isn't being filtered.
| raylad wrote:
| You can wear another mask, like a surgical mask, to cover
| the exhale valve.
|
| Or tape over it (securely).
| generalizations wrote:
| > For a disease that we now know is airborne/aerosol spread
| rather than airborne/droplet, N95 and KN95 masks are highly
| effective, a two layer cloth mask fit tightly over a surgical
| mask is moderately effective, and a cloth mask by itself is
| largely for show.
|
| I mean, who's "we"? I knew this back in January 2020.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| Cloth masks are largely for show in protecting you from other
| people. They are still highly effective in preventing your
| aerosols from getting out into the air. Even though COVID is
| airborne, it comes out of your mouth and nose in liquid
| droplets that then dehydrate and become airborne. If they hit
| a cloth mask on the way out, they'll be trapped.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I can sympathize with that, that would probably have been much
| more truthful.
|
| But the CDC recommendations have been so poorly thought out so
| far, it's hard to blame anyone who would say "screw your
| judgment of evidence, give us a number"
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Now the public has more recommendations from another source, and
| it also will cause people to doubt the CDC's other advice. That
| doesn't reduce the complexity or confusion, it adds to it - like
| the old XKCD about adding another standard to existing standards.
|
| That will hurt people. Wearing a mask too often outdoors will
| not. It's really major news requiring a special article to say
| the number of outdoor transmissions may be overstated from 1% to
| 10%? So what?
|
| > C.D.C. officials have placed such a high priority on caution
| that many Americans are bewildered by the agency's long list of
| recommendations. Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North
| Carolina, writing in The Atlantic, called those recommendations
| "simultaneously too timid and too complicated."
|
| What basis is there for this claim? I find them straightforward,
| and I find the CDC website clear and well-designed. I just wear a
| mask when I'll be near other people, and I avoid being near them.
|
| Ranting at an easy target, a government institution, is
| commonplace, senseless entertainment. It's often harmless - but
| not in this case.
| rozab wrote:
| >So what?
|
| So people will meet inside rather than outside, not realising
| what a huge difference it makes, thus increasing infection.
|
| I have family members who still disinfect all their shopping,
| but don't even open the windows when they have guests round.
| Prioritisation _is_ essential here, not everybody is going to
| be perfect, and if they are compromising on the wrong measures
| due to miscommunication then that 's a massive failure.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| People keep mistaking cdc, who, and other bureaucracies actions
| for something other than overcompensating for earlier
| incompetence and inaction. Bureaucracy is not driven by
| performance, it is driven by maintaining whatever current
| acceptable status quo is.
| kodah wrote:
| Would it be bad to have the CDC, the WHO, and political figures
| apologize for the environment of misinformation and division
| they enabled (and possibly created) through these means?
|
| I feel like a given citizenry can tolerate in-the-moment-
| incompetence, but they expect to be validated later in turn,
| and not just in the history books.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Put together with all of the other mistakes around covid, it all
| seems rather silly.
|
| - We all know about the WHO and their statement on masks.
|
| - Distinctly remember people saying, "We don't know if antibodies
| offer protection," (in contrast to every other known sickness
| afaik). Turns out they do and they are superior to vaccine -
| Doesn't matter follow the same precautions as everyone. I know
| people who have had antibodies for over a year, but nobody would
| hang-out with them because immunity wasn't explained to the lay-
| people.
|
| - So much hand-wringing about whether the vaccine prevents
| transmission. Seemed like a given. Turns out it was a given.
|
| - Still so much hand-wringing about vaccinated people. Given 30%
| of america is vaccinated, it seems obvious that anybody
| vaccinated can pretty much go no-mask, no precautions, and if all
| the vulnerable populations are vaccinated then _everybody_ can go
| no-mask. Basically America should be 100% open, and the .0001%
| who are vulnerable but can 't get a vaccine can wear masks and
| quarantine.
|
| It's simply unacceptable for professionsals to say "We don't know
| X, we'll let you know in 3 months." If you don't know about the
| India variants and the vaccine, spend 100k to FLY-OUT 1,000
| vaccines to India same day, inoculate 1000 volunteers, and track
| them. You'll have your answer within 40 days. Do this for _every
| variant_ , it's not rocket-science.
|
| If there's something I'm missing, then they need to explain it
| about 10x better than they are doing so far. Feels like a bunch
| of middle-managers.
|
| ---
|
| tl; dr - CDC needs to be managed by some software engineers
| apparently.
|
| Edit - Feel free to justify those downvotes if you think you can.
| URSpider94 wrote:
| 1. We don't (and didn't) know how long antibodies would offer
| protection. Some viral infections can recur very quickly. Also,
| all of the data I've seen is that the immunity conferred by the
| COVID vaccine is more durable than that from an infection.
|
| 2. It's not a given that a vaccine prevents transmission. Being
| an asymptomatic carrier is a real thing.
|
| 3. This statement shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how
| vaccination works. The vaccine is only 90% effective. If
| vaccinated people are swimming in a sea of COVID, then roughly
| 10% of them will go on to get COVID. You're also ignoring the
| fact that as of today children under 16 can't get vaccinated AT
| ALL, and so beyond whether they die or get critically ill from
| it, they are contributing to the sea of COVID that can infect
| vaccinated senior citizens.
|
| 3. Studies take time. Knowing how variants perform vs. vaccines
| is not a matter of people flying on a plane. It's a matter of
| running a study long enough to see who gets infected and who
| doesn't. You seem to be completely unaware of the classic
| project management warning that it takes 9 months to have a
| baby, 9 mothers can't have one in one month.
|
| On masking in public, you also need to understand that we have
| to have rules that are manageable. You can't say "oh vaccinated
| people, you can stop wearing masks in public", because then
| every storekeeper needs to query every non-masker to ask
| whether they are vaccinated - and of course they are all going
| to say yes, and they are even going to carry fake vaccination
| cards to prove their point. It's just an untenable situation,
| and additionally as long as COVID is in open spread with tens
| of thousands of cases per day, vaccinated people are still
| vulnerable.
| kickout wrote:
| I think your getting downvotes with your 'software engineers
| should manage everything' comment. That's a comical statement
| to make and comes off appearing as a 'know-it-all', something
| the CDC appears to be suffering from
| Someone1234 wrote:
| This seems like pointless pedantry that the article itself seems
| to admit.
|
| The CDC set the bar really high (10%), so that they could provide
| public health guidance without getting caught in bickering about
| error-rate or statistical anomaly traps. The CDC tried to avoid
| pedantry and are now getting pedant-ed for that too.
|
| Ultimately this is a distinction without a difference, since
| "less than 1%" is included in "less than 10%." The CDC covered
| their back, and the public health guidance was identical.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Too bad they couldn't just give a range: 0.1 to 10%.
|
| Just like when my boss asks for a schedule: 1 to 100 days.
| mcguire wrote:
| How well does that work with the boss?
| wnissen wrote:
| In this case technically correct is not the best kind of
| correct. An N95 mask is about 95% effective in preventing
| spread indoors. Isn't it critically important to know that
| being outdoors is apparently roughly as effective as one of the
| most effective masks? People spend more time inside than
| outside, so maybe it's not 5x as effective, but outdoors is
| much, much safer than indoors. If the real number is .1% for
| outdoors then you are actually better off being outdoors than
| wearing an N95.
|
| I don't envy the CDC, it is almost impossible to communicate
| anything even slightly complicated. When they announced that
| vaccinated people could gather in small groups, at least one
| person I know interpreted that as saying it was low-risk to go
| to church in a large gathering with singing.
| breck wrote:
| > Ultimately this is a distinction without a difference
|
| That is an illogerate statement. 10%, and 1%, and .1% are
| vastly different and lead to vastly different decision making.
| mcguire wrote:
| Absolutely. Human behavior-wise, 10% = "some chance", 1% =
| "no chance", and .1% = "physically impossible".
| srinivgp wrote:
| Absolutely not a distinction without a difference. "Less than
| 10%" implies, in the vernacular, that they didn't have
| confidence stating another round bound. That almost certainly
| it is greater than 1%, probably greater than 2%, and there's a
| good chance it's greater than 5%. That's how folks read numbers
| like this. And then they will correctly conclude they should
| not listen to the CDC because the CDC's numbers seem made up.
|
| If you need more nuance to avoid miscommunicating but you do
| not give it, you have miscommunicated.
| makomk wrote:
| They probably can't actually know the answer any better than
| that. Think for a moment about this statement from the
| article: "There is not a single documented Covid infection
| anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such
| as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby
| table." That's probably true, but how would you even find
| those infections? There's no record of who walked past who on
| the street, no way to contract trace every stranger that
| passes by an infected person, and generally countries don't
| even try. So the fact that this form of infection hasn't been
| documented to happen says very little when it's so much
| harder to detect than indoor transmission. Ultimately, where
| you draw the numerical line is going to mostly be a matter of
| personal judgement, and no matter what choice the CDC make
| the New York Times will always be able to find experts who
| back a different conclusion.
|
| (Also, the word "casual" is doing a lot of work in that
| sentence. There absolutely have been documented examples of
| outdoor transmission via, for example, people going for walks
| together or chatting with each other outside. So if people
| think that this means all outdoor interaction is safe, as the
| article seems to be inviting them to do, this could cause
| some real problems.)
| spfzero wrote:
| In your first paragraph, you say there's no way to contact
| trace outdoors, and in the second you say there are
| documented cases of it happening.
|
| There are ways to predict your chances of getting infected
| from someone outdoors. You back-trace from known cases,
| identify the people they have interacted with, and from
| those that later contracted Covid, you note whether the
| contact was indoors or outdoors. There is plenty of data to
| do that with.
| makomk wrote:
| The instances of outdoor infection that have been
| documented aren't just random strangers passing each
| other on the street or sitting near each other - as I
| recall they involved people who knew each other, which
| obviously makes contact tracing easier. Also, one of the
| ones I know of was in New Zealand during the period where
| every case was headline news and aggressively
| investigated, and the other was in China which similarly
| had very few cases that were very aggressively traced.
| This does not say good things about how well countries
| with more cases are detecting outdoor transmission.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> That 's probably true, but how would you even find those
| infections?_
|
| Well, you could look at the infection rates among people
| who attended large outdoor gatherings during the pandemic
| in spite of warnings - like Trump rally attendees or BLM
| protesters.
|
| Or you could look at infection rates for people who have a
| tractable list of possible exposures - interview only
| people who live alone and work from home, and see if people
| who only shop for food have a lower infection rate than
| people who shop for food and also golf once a week.
|
| Or you could run an experiment - get some infected people,
| have them cough at petri dishes inside and outside, with
| and without masks, and at different distances.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| If the larger public could read and understanding the
| underlying data in the way you're proposing then the CDC's
| guidance isn't of importance. Since they won't/can't, the
| public depend on/trust the CDC's guidance, who were
| intentionally conservative here for that _exact reason_.
|
| As far as public health policy goes this is a distinction
| without a difference. Everything else is just pointless
| pedantry.
| bluGill wrote:
| I can read the data. However I also know it is messy (as
| all data is), and needs a lot of understanding. Give me the
| data and some time with a computer and I can make sense of
| it though - I have all the skills. However I also have a
| day job, and then a family to spend time with. There isn't
| enough time left to figure out the raw data. Thus I really
| need trustworthy people to figure it out for me and give me
| the summary that I can use. Such people should ideally have
| practice at the job and so can do it faster than me, while
| also looking for things that I would forget to account for.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That's exactly what they did.
|
| They said it is less than 10%, and now we have a bunch of
| people "correcting" them that it could be actually less
| than 1%. That correction is unhelpful/pointless/pedantic.
|
| If the statement is still true, and the public health
| guidance is _identical_ , then what is it we're even
| discussing? This discussion is pointless and the article
| itself is pointless.
|
| The CDC cannot win no matter what they do. They say it is
| "less than 1%" then someone will find a study that shows
| that they're wrong, if they say "less than 10%" then
| people will say that isn't precise enough and that
| they're wrong.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The CDC cannot win no matter what they do.
|
| Their job is to pick the most accurate number they can.
|
| And by accurate I don't mean "most mathematically
| correct", because that would be "less than 100%".
|
| Making an accurate estimate isn't about winning or
| losing. It will never be perfect. Oh well, still have to
| try.
|
| You see how "less than 100%" would be a horrible number
| to pick, right? Wanting more accuracy is not pedantry.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why can't they just give the number and the confidence
| interval and the methodology they used to arrive at the
| numbers??
| brianwawok wrote:
| What percentage of the American public understand what a
| confidence interval is? I have 95% confidence that this
| number is under 0.1% using the methodology of pulling
| numbers out of my butt.
|
| I have been in college level stat classes where many people
| didn't truly grasp confidence interval. While I would love
| the data, I think it's not really the most important thing
| during a crisis.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| No - but a lot of people by now work with someone or know
| someone who does understand stats. So people could talk
| about these things and start to understand it.
| rayiner wrote:
| The CDC is supposed to give the public evidence based guidance,
| not dictates. If you don't show your work and simply demand
| people to confirm, you won't get compliance. That's true in
| myriad real life contexts, from the workplace to pandemics.
| jefftk wrote:
| I wish they'd said something like "less than 10%, and most
| likely less than 0.1%" to communicate the uncertainty.
| superkuh wrote:
| The CDC's advice has been focused on one thing since the start of
| the pandemic: keeping the amount of PPE and infrastructure
| resources required down to the attainable for hospitals. It has
| never been about protection of the public at large.
|
| It's why they waited so long to acknowledge aerosol spread and
| still stick to droplet based modeling of indoor spaces despite
| acknowledging aerosol spread being dominant. It's why they say
| 6ft still re: droplets even though aersols don't care about 6ft.
| It's why they (and states) still let people use ineffective unfit
| "masks" instead of requiring (and supplying) everyone with N95 or
| better.
|
| I just don't understand what exaggerating outside spread does to
| help them with this. If anything it suggests that outdoors we'd
| need to use _more_ N95 masks. It seems to go against all their
| past behavior.
| 66fm472tjy7 wrote:
| Austria[0] and Germany[1, edit: this seems to only be true for
| Bavaria and Berlin, see comments below] have mandated the use
| of FFP2 masks since the end of January. Their neighboring
| countries didn't[2].
|
| If you look at the data, there does not appear to be a decrease
| in infection numbers relative to their neighbors after the
| switch to FFP2[3].
|
| [0] https://orf.at/stories/3197782/
|
| [1] https://www.focus.de/finanzen/recht/verschaerfte-
| massnahmen-...
|
| [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-
| updates/2021/0...
|
| [3] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-
| explor...
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Germany hasn't required FFP2 masks, the state of Bavaria did
| (which includes only 15% of the german population)
| DemocracyFTW wrote:
| Not right, in Berlin FFP2 is required in supermarkets, on
| the train and so on. This may be because the individual
| state not the federal government set up the rule, but there
| you go.
| 1ris wrote:
| Germany requires FFP2 masks OR op masks. Public
| transportation requires FFP2, vouchers for FFP2 masks have
| been issued (huge cash grab for pharmacies, but thats a
| different story). They are ubiquitous. I just went shopping
| and all customers wore a ffp2 mask. The cashier was behind
| totally useless (see: aerosols) plastic shielding and
| didn't wear any mask thou.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Apropos of very little, I was in Tennessee recently and
| at nearly every establishment, the personnel wore their
| facemasks around their chin, presumably to nominally
| satisfy some corporate mandate. I say this more as an
| amusing observation than an implicit judgment one way or
| another.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The CDC wants people wearing masks in as many places as
| possible for as long as possible because it prolongs the sense
| of danger and seriousness around the pandemic.
| jrockway wrote:
| Why does the CDC want to prolong the sense of danger?
| setr wrote:
| To play along: The CIA receives its funding based on
| perceived threat - the more there is, the better funded
| they need to be to defend against it. The less threat, the
| less the CIA needs to exist.
|
| The CDC is the same: the importance of their organization
| is perversely tied to medical danger present in the world,
| and the population's perceived danger from it (as long as
| the CDC ensures they're not at fault, or rather, no one
| believes them to be).
|
| That is, no one cares about the CDC when there's no
| pandemic.
|
| TB: this is also the basis of niet:automata's plot, taken
| to the extreme. The equivalent for the CDC is that they
| would intentionally preserve pandemics despite ability to
| eliminate them altogether, in order to preserve their own
| existence
| superkuh wrote:
| There are very different kinds of outdoors. A megacity urban area
| with packed sidewalks in literal urban canyons is one thing. A
| suburban town's sidewalks where I pass ~1 other person (on the
| other side of the street) every 5 blocks is another kind of
| outdoors. I'd wear an N95 in the former but not in the later.
| calyth2018 wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be at that extreme.
|
| A walk in a park vs a picnic of 20 people in a park from
| different households.
|
| The former's risk is probably nil; the latter's not. However,
| I've seen this last fall...
| FuckButtons wrote:
| One of the points that keeps coming up in these conversations-
| and is cited here as evidence - is that there are no documented
| cases of casual transmission from being near someone outside.
| While I don't on principle dispute the conclusion - citing a lack
| of evidence of something that would be incredibly hard to find
| evidence for is not an effective argument. There are a huge
| number of cases where the actual source of infection is
| completely unknown and in the cases where tracking and tracing
| succeeds it is based on asking people who they interacted with,
| so the set of people you walked near in the street while
| infectious are almost certainly never going to be found and
| documented. The fact is we don't know - it seems unlikely but
| there is some amount of existential uncertainty about outdoor
| transmission and given the fact we want the outbreak to end
| sooner rather than later being overly cautious doesn't seem like
| a terrible idea to me.
| zaroth wrote:
| There are plenty of friendly gatherings that happen throughout
| the summer where people who know each other spend significant
| amounts of time together outdoors.
|
| If outdoor transmission happened, you would see some documented
| cases. It's not just all strangers walking past each other on
| the street.
| haspoken wrote:
| http://archive.is/jzhF7
| JPKab wrote:
| "That benchmark "seems to be a huge exaggeration," as Dr. Muge
| Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In
| truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems
| to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple
| epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has
| happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or
| close conversation."
|
| I'm extremely grateful that the NYT is calling this out. However,
| they are far too late, and frankly, played a role in misinforming
| the public on the pandemic.
|
| The audience on HN is pretty strongly aware of the extreme
| misinformation on COVID pushed out by right-wing news
| organizations, but doesn't SEEM to be aware of the extreme
| misinformation that was pushed out by the left-wing news outlets,
| which successfully skewed the US public's perception of COVID
| risk.
|
| The partisan divide on THIS specific topic shows that American's
| on both sides of the political divide grossly overestimate the
| likelihood of hospitalization from COVID, but that those who
| consume left-wing media are an order of magnitude more incorrect.
|
| Here's a good breakdown, containing links to the source polling
| data on the topic.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-misinformation-is-dis...
|
| I wasn't quite aware of how misinformed highly educated
| colleagues were until I contracted COVID in mid-February. My wife
| and I couldn't understand why people were acting like I was in so
| much danger, until we realized that people were grossly
| overestimating, by massive factors, the danger I was in. I'm a
| physically fit, active male in my late 30's. But people on my
| team acted very surprised that I didn't miss any work, and only
| had a loss of sense of smell as a symptom. They were acting as if
| I was somewhat of an outlier, instead of being the absolute norm
| for my age group/health status.
|
| The implications of this fear-mongering results in me being
| treated like a leper for not wearing a mask on hiking trails in
| wide open, wind-blown, and sunny open spaces.
|
| It's been a big reminder to me, that no, people on the left
| aren't actually less prone to misinformation, despite my
| preconceived notions and biases. Quantitative illiteracy in the
| majority of the American public has had horrific effects in this
| pandemic.
| spfzero wrote:
| I think more than a left-right thing, this is a different axis.
| Some people are just more fearful in general. I've been
| surprised by friends of my same political persuasion that have
| acted in ways I would honestly need to call, not-quite-sane.
| Such as deciding now to keep their child out of school for the
| entire 21-22 school year, or leaving deliveries on their porch
| for 3 days before bringing it inside. These are smart people in
| many ways, but somehow their brains were hijacked.
|
| Talking to them about the actual risks triggers an emotional
| response. Even relating the risk level to something they do
| every day like driving seems to have no effect.
|
| These are people who are educated and consume news from
| respectable sources.
| JPKab wrote:
| My brother's wife is one of these folks you talk about, with
| the "keeping kids out of school" and "leaving deliveries on
| porch for 3 days".
|
| Very well said!
|
| What I'm very curious about is what makes me perceive risk so
| much differently than these others. I'm wondering if it's
| conditioning (I spent a big chunk of my life building houses,
| and therefore climbing on extension ladders and walking on
| roof trusses was a daily ritual), childhood (I was in
| unstable environments a lot), or just brain wiring from
| birth.
|
| A respondent on your comment mentioned a willingness to
| "outsource judgement to news sources" and even better
| "outsourcing judgement to political rivals and adopting the
| opposite viewpoint by default". This is a phenomenon that I
| anecdotally notice is intensified with educated elites. My
| brother's wife went to Cornell, never struck me as
| particularly creative or novel, but just has a great work
| ethic and follows what books tell her to do. She's a born
| rule follower, and follows conventional wisdom to the point
| where it borders on comical and often, defying common sense.
| korethr wrote:
| > What I'm very curious about is what makes me perceive
| risk so much differently than these others. I'm wondering
| if it's conditioning (I spent a big chunk of my life
| building houses, and therefore climbing on extension
| ladders and walking on roof trusses was a daily ritual),
| childhood (I was in unstable environments a lot), or just
| brain wiring from birth.
|
| I'm guessing conditioning is a big part of it.
|
| I'd wager the majority or people with more hysterical
| reactions have lived fairly comfortable lives, without
| having to face much in the way of dangerous risks. And
| without that, they also fail to also learn that risks and
| dangers can be controlled and mitigated. Or that even mild
| preparedness can mean the difference between recoverable
| injury and death. So absent this personal experience of a
| counterpoint to the hysteria on the news, they're more
| likely to accept prognostications of certain horrible doom
| uncritically.
| whipaway wrote:
| This is an intersection of so many things: politics
| (outsourcing your judgment to your enemy and effectively just
| doing the opposite of them), brain-structure propensity for
| fear, esteem for authorities and experts (fundamentally the
| tendency towards authoritarianism, whether it's based in
| expertise or other things), class tendencies that value
| visible signals of virtue, intelligence and taste, etc.
| JPKab wrote:
| Extremely well stated and reasoned.
| whipaway wrote:
| They've been so circumspect about their advice, their advice is
| practically useless and even worse: induces society-wide
| agoraphobia and fear. This does not come without consequence, the
| health effects of destroying the normal fabric of society are
| profound. Constant stress and fear ruins a person's health, never
| mind the effect of it occurring at a global level.
| js2 wrote:
| > It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate
| effectively, and leaving many people confused about what's truly
| risky.
|
| I don't understand how this happened. The C.D.C. literally has a
| manual on how to communicate effectively during an outbreak:
|
| https://emergency.cdc.gov/cerc/ppt/cerc_2014edition_Copy.pdf
| breck wrote:
| A PDF, lol. Further evidence of the problem.
|
| There's one trick they can do to regain trust--move their
| website, publications, datasets, press releases, *everything*
| to git (https://breckyunits.com/how-to-fix-the-cdc.html).
|
| I wish they came out and said:
|
| "We understand we will constantly make mistakes and bad actors
| will constantly try to influence us. To counter that, we will
| make it painless for people to fork and correct. Every change
| will be open, attributable and signed."
| JPKab wrote:
| During the Obama administration, he put out an executive
| order for Federal Gov't agencies to open up their datasets.
| There were hardcore standards set, APIs, certain formats,
| etc. This is the same initiative that created data.gov. It
| was revolutionary and groundbreaking, and the various federal
| agencies essentially ignored it, and were allowed to.
|
| I'm talking about a full executive order, and I had a lot of
| expertise and was being tasked with helping agencies,
| including the VA and DOE, open up their data. HHS was also
| part of this.
|
| I was immediately blocked in all of these agencies with foot-
| dragging, and a complacent, "I couldn't give a fuck"
| attitude. They didn't care about enacting the order, because
| unlike me, they all knew that there would be no consequences
| for not doing so. They didn't do it, and there were no
| consequences.
|
| I voted for Obama twice, but one of the things I noticed
| about his administration was that they weren't willing to
| strike fear into the hearts of bureaucrats who undermined
| their objectives. Another executive program he pushed, for
| properly integrating military health systems with the VA's
| health systems, was also actively ignored by the VA, with
| zero consequences. That experience was the final straw for me
| to leave and join the private sector, and get out of DC
| permanently.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what would that look like in
| concrete terms? Can the president credibly threaten to fire
| people or mess with their funding?
| breck wrote:
| That sounds very accurate. Thanks for your efforts, and I
| bet you actually had a bigger long term impact than you
| realized. In my past experience with big orgs, it takes
| people like you to get the ball rolling, and eventually it
| does pick up momentum, just takes a long long time (not
| sure what the best way to forecast timeframes is).
| mhb wrote:
| Seems like no one there has read the manual:
|
| "Throughout this book, six principles of effective crisis and
| risk communication are emphasized:
|
| 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating
| information quickly is almost always important. For members of
| the public, the first source of information often becomes the
| preferred source.
|
| 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information can
| include what is known, what is not known, and what is being
| done to fill in the gaps.
|
| 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be
| compromised during crises.
|
| 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering
| should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are
| feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and
| rapport.
|
| 5. Promote Action: Giving people meaningful things to do calms
| anxiety, helps restore order, and promotes a restored sense of
| control.
|
| 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly
| important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful communication
| promotes cooperation and rapport."
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Value #1 seems pretty at odds with 2 and 3, and dangerous
| with #5. I wonder how the CDC reconciles this... surely Be
| Right is more important than Be First. A spammy news site
| could claim most of these values in this order.
| Izkata wrote:
| No, 2 includes "what is not known, and what is being done
| to fill in the gaps". Being honest about "we don't have an
| answer to this yet but are working on it" helps with the
| others.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| it's really not complicated: tell the public as soon as
| possible what is known and be honest with them about what
| isn't.
| j4yav wrote:
| #1 could be just opening up the communication channels and
| sharing where you are at with the rest.
| breck wrote:
| To me it seems like something has fundamentally changed in
| the world in the past decade. If you are an information
| worker and want to have credibility, you need to put things
| on git. Otherwise you lose credibility. It's sort of like the
| difference between hearsay and the written word. Anything not
| backed by git nowadays I consider as hearsay.
| elliekelly wrote:
| "Hearsay" is a bit of a misnomer because it encompasses
| _any_ statement made by someone else - oral, written, non-
| verbal, git repo, etc.
| breck wrote:
| Yeah, it was rushed writing on my part. Basically there's
| an OOM difference in the credibility between things
| published with a backing git repo and those where just
| the artifacts are published.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Seems like no one there has read the manual:
|
| You can say that again!
|
| > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating
| information quickly is almost always important. _For members
| of the public, the first source of information often becomes
| the preferred source._
|
| Fauci saying masks don't work before he said the opposite.
|
| > 2. Be Right: Accuracy establishes credibility. Information
| can include what is known, what is not known, and what is
| being done to fill in the gaps.
|
| Instead of saying they didn't have enough information about
| outdoor transmission, they threw out the 10% number as a
| random CYA. See above about the first number being sticky.
|
| > 3. Be Credible: Honesty and truthfulness should not be
| compromised during crises.
|
| Fauci saying masks don't work, and also the 10% number being
| thrown out there without caveating that it's a wild ass
| guess.
|
| > 4. Express Empathy: Crises create harm, and the suffering
| should be acknowledged in words. Addressing what people are
| feeling, and the challenges they face, builds trust and
| rapport.
|
| Fauci berating people for being upset that their lives are
| being shut down by government orders.
|
| > 6. Show Respect: Respectful communication is particularly
| important when people feel vulnerable. Respectful
| communication promotes cooperation and rapport.
|
| Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the country.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > 1. Be First: Crises are time-sensitive. Communicating
| information quickly is almost always important.
|
| An I correct in remembering the CDC taking its talking
| points from the Chinese officials who had a vested interest
| in spreading disinformation and falsehoods about where and
| how the virus started?
| HonestOp001 wrote:
| That was the WHO. Faucii is technically trying to avoid
| being found out that he has connections to starting
| everything when an organization he had his hooks in had
| operations in the Wuhan lab.
| js2 wrote:
| > Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the
| country.
|
| I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to at
| least listen to what local public health officials were
| dealing with:
|
| https://khn.org/news/article/public-health-officials-year-
| of...
|
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/736/the-herd
|
| A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks its
| okay to bully and berate officials.
|
| _Anna Maria Barry-Jester: "People are not willing to be
| governed," at least not by officials who ask them to make
| sacrifices for their neighbors. And as a result, the
| officials, trying to govern us are quitting in droves.
| Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public
| health officials working in communities all over the US
| have left their jobs, many because of threats and political
| pushback.
|
| Nearly one in six Americans now lives in a community that
| has lost its local health department leader during the
| pandemic, officials like Mimi and Gail. It's the largest
| exodus of health officials in US history._
| mistermann wrote:
| >> Instead of respect, we got demonization of half the
| country.
|
| > I don't think this is entirely fair. I'd invite you to
| at least listen to what local public health officials
| were dealing with...
|
| ~Half the country was ~demonized (or more importantly:
| _perceive_ themselves to have been demonized), or they
| were not. Whether it was ~justified is certainly
| relevant, but it has no bearing on the fact, and more
| importantly: the second order behavior that will result
| from that fact, perhaps for several years.
|
| The CDC guidelines seem to have been written in a way
| that is mindful of this complexity, but it seems they
| were not followed for some reason (do you point your
| critical eye at these shortcomings, and with the same
| enthusiasm and scrutiny as you point it at the members of
| your outgroup?), which will likely have some negative
| consequences, most of which we will be completely
| oblivious to (not to worry though: we'll imagine plenty
| of others, and consider these imaginations to be
| reality).
|
| > A significant and vocal portion of the country thinks
| its okay to bully and berate officials.
|
| And whose fault is that, _comprehensively and
| accurately_? Is the suboptimal behavior of black people
| in inner city ghettos purely their fault? Should they
| just work hard and pull themselves up by their
| bootstraps? INB4: _That 's different! That's
| whataboutism! That is not comparable_! Mother nature
| decides how reality unfolds, based on recursive causality
| far beyond our ability even conceive of, let alone
| measure and understand. You and I can only decide (to
| whatever degree we have free will) how we shall
| conceptualize the situation, and then how we shall act.
| One can perceive it simply, with a high level of
| confidence in the correctness of one's _biased guesses_ ,
| or one can exert effort to perceive it more accurately,
| closer to how it really is: _unknown_. Just as the people
| in the article have chosen a way to perceive reality (my
| guess: low complexity, high confidence), so too do you
| and I choose a way - and based on such choices, reality
| unfolds according to the laws of the universe - our
| respective agreement with how this is, is not a
| requirement.
| mhb wrote:
| I listened to that TAL recently and how they were treated
| was outrageous.
|
| But NPR reveals some bias in a couple of instances. For
| example, they describe how the health officials had to
| rescind the order prohibiting people from being on the
| beach because it was impossible to enforce. An unasked
| question is whether an order to close beaches might have
| engendered skepticism of public health officials'
| judgement.
| js2 wrote:
| It's okay to be skeptical. I think we look at how
| officieals closed the beaches, know now that outdoor
| spread is rare, and say that it was an obvious
| misjudgment. But this ignores the practical reality of
| what happens when the beaches are open, which is this
| sort of thing:
|
| > "We don't want people from higher-impact counties who
| maybe haven't done as good a job as Santa Cruz has to
| come in and spread that virus," Hart said. "In ordinary
| times, we love people coming in, right? Our economy is
| driven on tourism and agriculture. We want people here
| during normal times. This is not a normal time. So we
| don't want those folks here from Sacramento or other
| areas," Hart said.
|
| > The law breakers have been all ages, but a few whom
| deputies caught were teens who gathered in a car near the
| beach and passed around a bong, Hart said.
|
| https://santacruzlocal.org/2020/04/09/authorities-close-
| sant...
|
| Maybe the officials should have left the beaches open and
| tried a message like "it's okay for Santa Cruz locals to
| go to the beach, but this thing spreads through the air
| in enclosed spaces, so please everyone take your own cars
| or drive with the windows open, and we don't want people
| from outside communities coming here and spreading the
| virus."
|
| I believe health officials were generally operating in
| good faith. That doesn't mean they were always correct.
| I'd like to ask what they were thinking when they closed
| the beaches, but I don't think it was a simple
| calculation.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I think the calculation was wrong. It's not a question of
| whether being outdoors was safe or not, it's about
| whether or not it's safer than gathering indoors.
| Instead, they naively thought that closing outdoor
| gathering spaces would leave people with no option
| besides privately quarantining rather than--predictably--
| gathering indoors away from regulators. And while we
| didn't know precisely how much safer it was to be
| outdoors than indoors, we certainly knew that it was
| quite a lot safer.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Anyone who paid attention in high school biology knew
| that the beach is close to the safest place you could be
| during a respiratory pandemic. The literature on fresh
| air and sunshine improving tuberculosis outcomes is a
| century old.
| bko wrote:
| I think that partly has to do with CDC overreach. For
| instance, CDC mandated an eviction moratorium. You can
| agree with the moratorium, but is that really something
| the Center for Disease Control should be involved in?
|
| Also, some nursing schools have seen record applications,
| suggesting people actually want to help. You provide no
| scale for that 250 public health officials.
|
| https://son.rochester.edu/newsroom/2020/record-breaking-
| enro...
| JackFr wrote:
| > Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 250 public
| health officials working in communities all over the US
| have left their jobs, many because of threats and
| political pushback.
|
| Or, "I'll do the job when it's easy but when it's hard,
| gosh I'm trying my best why won't people just do what I
| say."
| [deleted]
| awillen wrote:
| Or, "I'll do the job when it's underpaid,
| underappreciated and hard, but when people start
| threatening myself and my family, I'll quit."
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| They're continuing this bad streak with saying things like
| people that have had COVID should be immunized.
|
| The reason they're saying it is pretty obvious to me - a
| lot of people that just had a cold in the past year think
| they had COVID. I had a friend that thought he had it twice
| before he actually did. Also if you didn't get very sick
| you might not have had enough of an immune response to get
| all that immune.
|
| If they explained that, it would be fine. Instead they're
| basically doing misinformation of their own. My mother-in-
| law is concerned that I'm not getting the vaccine. I had
| COVID bad in December, and I have autoimmune issues so I'm
| not going to poke the proverbial bear unless I need to.
|
| She also thinks that you're only immune for three months if
| you actually got infected, but that's the media's fault.
| They ran all those stories about antibodies only lasting a
| few months without going in to details about memory T cells
| or the like.
| Izkata wrote:
| > She also thinks that you're only immune for three
| months if you actually got infected, but that's the
| media's fault. They ran all those stories about
| antibodies only lasting a few months without going in to
| details about memory T cells or the like.
|
| It's also wrong regardless. "Three months" came from
| studies that only lasted three months / were early in the
| pandemic, and actually meant "at least three months".
|
| There are newer ones now that say "at least 8 months",
| and even that is several-months old news.
| js2 wrote:
| What evidence do you have for your argument?
|
| Donald Trump had Covid19 and was later vaccinated and has
| the best medical care in the world. Do you think his
| doctors would have done so if they didn't believe it was
| medically justified?
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The fact that a confirmed natural infection confers
| immunity equal to or greater than the vaccines is well
| established at this point. There are something like 80
| documented reinfections _worldwide_. For previously
| infected people with autoimmune issues there is miniscule
| upside and some potentially significant downside to
| getting the shots.
|
| Donald Trump is about the last person on earth I would
| point to as someone whose actions and motivations should
| be viewed as straightforward. He's been pumping the
| vaccines and trying to take credit for them ever since
| they were approved, and his making a big show of getting
| the vaccine can easily be viewed in that light.
| js2 wrote:
| > The fact that a confirmed natural infection confers
| immunity equal to or greater than the vaccines is well
| established at this point.
|
| I don't think this is true:
|
| https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-get-a-
| covid-19-va...
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-
| reinfection...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102006
|
| > For previously infected people with autoimmune issues
| there is miniscule upside and some potentially
| significant downside to getting the shots.
|
| I wasn't addressing that portion of AuryGlenz's comment.
| Obviously if you have an underlying condition, you should
| take that into account. The C.D.C. addresses autoimmune
| conditions here:
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recomm
| end...
|
| > Donald Trump is about the last person on earth I would
| point to as someone whose actions and motivations should
| be viewed as straightforward. He's been pumping the
| vaccines and trying to take credit for them ever since
| they were approved, and his making a big show of getting
| the vaccine can easily be viewed in that light.
|
| He didn't make a big show of it. He made no show of it at
| all. I'm not appealing to his judgement. I'm appealing to
| the judgement of his doctors.
| hvac wrote:
| >The fact that a confirmed natural infection confers
| immunity equal to or greater than the vaccines is well
| established at this point. There are something like 80
| documented reinfections worldwide.
|
| There is definitely _a lot_ more than 80. My impression
| is that the mRNA vaccines are more effective than natural
| immunity.
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014
| 0-6...
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| It doesn't make sense to compare a study where
| asymptomatic people were being mass tested for the
| presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA with the vaccine trials or the
| CDC's existing tracking of breakthrough infections, both
| of which require the presence of symptoms before running
| any tests. The CDC has even set a lower CT threshold
| (i.e. higher amount of viral RNA must be present) in
| order to consider a positive test to be an actual
| breakthrough infection.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/can-you-get-
| covid-tw...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Trump has political reasons for wanting to be seen having
| taken the vaccine. If his doctors felt it wasn't the best
| treatment but wasn't particularly harmful, would they
| deny him the vaccine? Right or wrong, doctors write
| scripts all the time that are a limited to no value
| because the patient wants it and if there is little to no
| harm from it.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Since regan and the politically troubled vaccination programmes
| of the 70s, the senior staff at the CDC are all political
| appointments.
|
| Effectively, they're in-house politicians who serve the (PR)
| interests of elected politicians.
|
| Actual independent health professionals aren't the ones doing
| the communication; and have been generally forbidden from doing
| so.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Interesting that this is downvoted, it's the actual answer to
| the question.
| [deleted]
| JPKab wrote:
| A charitable take: They didn't read their own manuals, which is
| extremely common in US Federal Government agencies, and really
| any large bureaucracies.
|
| A less charitable/borderline hostile take: Biden is extremely
| likely to not run for re-election (due to his health), and has
| some extremely ambitious legislation he is pushing which will
| cement his legacy. He and his advisers don't believe they will
| maintain control of the House of Representatives in 2022, and
| are justifying many of these changes with the crisis of the
| pandemic. If the pandemic doesn't appear to be a crisis, the
| odds of this legislation being passed are lower.
|
| Probably the most frustrating part of all of this is the fact
| that the April job's numbers (1 million jobs predicted, actual
| was a 1/4 of that) were hand-waved away with "people can't work
| when their kid's schools are shut", as if the administration
| hasn't helped justify schools remaining closed in certain
| states. (I live in Colorado, a blue state, and our schools have
| been open since January with no issues, as opposed to Oregon,
| where they are still closed.)
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > as opposed to Oregon, where they are still closed
|
| This is false. I live in Oregon and my kid's school has been
| open since February. Both our elementary school and middle
| school are dealing with a minor COVID-19 outbreak too and
| they're small schools in a very wealthy city (median
| household income is over 110k), so I question the
| authenticity of your "no issues" comment regarding Colorado
| schools.
|
| EDIT: just checked, our local high school has more than
| double the cases of our elementary and middle school
| combined. Yeah I'm really doubting the "no issues" part, but
| I guess "issue" is relative
| JPKab wrote:
| You "question the authenticity" of my statement.
|
| I'm sorry, but this is part of the misinformation. Of
| course there are positive cases of COVID in schools, and of
| course high schools (my son is a freshman) have higher
| rates. This is explained by the science, which clearly
| shows that high school age groups have dramatically higher
| rates of transmission.
|
| It's more about the risks. All of the teachers in Colorado
| were prioritized for vaccines. They are all vaccinated in
| my county (Jefferson County, which has almost 600,000
| residents). Which leaves the bigger question: What's the
| risk to the students, and to the people they can spread it
| to?
|
| To the students, the data clearly shows that it's minimal,
| unless they have comorbidities.
|
| According to the CDC's latest data, here:
| https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
|
| 350 people between ages 5-17 have died of COVID in the US.
| This age group represents 16.3 percent of the US
| population, or roughly 56 million people.
|
| You were correct that I was wrong about Oregon. My
| brother's kids are still out of school because his wife is
| terrified of them catching covid, and she kept them remote.
| They are ages 5 and 7, respectively. She's been one of the
| most extreme overreacters in the pandemic. She lived like a
| shut in for 8 months, and she's healthy and in her 30s.
|
| Now onto the question of the danger the kids pose to the
| public by spreading covid to their families or vulnerable
| people.
|
| At this point, the majority of Americans over 60 are
| vaccinated. Vulnerable people were prioritized. Which is
| why you aren't seeing news reports of droves of people
| dying in Colorado as a result of schools being opened.
|
| All of these decisions represent trade-offs, but too many
| in the US public seem to not understand relative risk. I am
| safer if I wear a helmet when I drive my car than
| otherwise, but I'm not going to, for the same reason you
| don't.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Has everyone forgotten that Trump was president for the first
| year of the pandemic, during which many of the CDC actions
| we're criticising happened?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I mean, their whole raison d'etre is to manage disease
| outbreaks, and at the start of the outbreak they were caught
| with neither basic supplies (PPE, respirators, etc) nor plans
| for provisioning the same. They also tried to roll their own
| tests which proved faulty and labor-intensive rather than using
| the WHO standard tests (though as luck would have it, testing
| capacity doesn't seem to have been a strong predictor of
| success in combatting the virus). So I'm not entirely surprised
| that the CDC is struggling to communicate effectively during
| this outbreak.
|
| I have the board game "pandemic" which came out some years
| before COVID, and I remember thinking about how cool the CDC
| was, as though it was one of the few agencies that had its shit
| somewhat together (the only other which springs to mind is NASA
| though no doubt NASA also has its share of mismanagement). Boy
| was I wrong.
| ikura wrote:
| This is a shoddy article that serves only to undermine efforts to
| deal effectively with Covid, in return for some clicks and
| eyeballs.
|
| Firstly, the entire premise of the article is not grounded in
| fact, it's based on multiple in-conclusive statements and
| reports. Just read the language in the first few sentences -
| "almost certainly", "appears to be partly based on", "seems to be
| an exaggeration". But the article then proceeds as if that were
| fact.
|
| It then tries to reach unsupported conclusions that feed into a
| convenient narrative at the expense of an inconvenient reality.
|
| That outdoor transmission may have been low is inseparable from
| the fact that the general population HAVE been distancing,
| cleaning, masking and other responses. So to conclude that since
| "<10% is too big of an estimate" masks should not be required for
| any outdoor activity is gross.
|
| It signs off by concluding that Britain's drop in death rate
| since January is based on Britain being locked down indoors and
| carefree outdoors completely ignores the fact that vaccinations
| have been ramping up.
|
| If you have a genuine conclusion then you don't need weasel words
| and misleading logic to tell your story.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They aren't using weasel words, they're trying to guess the
| sources of statements which were released unsourced (which they
| shouldn't have to do.)
| ikura wrote:
| Seems like a rather strong conclusion to be based on
| guesswork. "CDC didn't cite their sources for this figure and
| I don't believe it" isn't as catchy a headline though of
| course.
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