In the early weeks of the pandemic, we were inundated with reminders to “wash our hands”. It was said that 20 or even 30 seconds of thorough scrubbing was needed to kill any particles that might be lurking there.
And we were treated to some rather patronising instructional videos. You’d assume that most adults were already familiar with the concept of hand-washing. (Telling us to “be thorough” would probably have sufficed).
Yet more and more evidence emerged that surfaces (known in the medical jargon as “fomites”) are not an important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2. Which is not to say you shouldn’t wash your hands.
However, there was still a dispute over whether respiratory droplets or airborne particles play a greater role in viral spread. Droplets are transmitted over short distances, and fall to the ground quickly. (Hence the ‘2m rule’.) Airborne particles, on the other hand, can remain aloft for minutes or even hours, and travel much greater distances.
Over the last couple of months, it’s become clear that COVID is primarily transmitted via airborne particles. (Though some would say this was clear as early as the Diamond Princess outbreak, when several hundred passengers caught the virus on a cruise ship.)
In a recent article for the New York Times, the science writer Zeynep Tufekci reviews the debate over the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and explains how mistaken assumptions led to errors in pandemic management.
She begins by noting it was only on April 30th this year that the WHO finally updated its website to indicate that COVID is transmitted via both droplets and airborne particles. Until then, it simply had claimed, “the main way the virus spreads is by respiratory droplets”.
As Tufekci notes, this mistaken assumption led to errors of both commission (like closing playgrounds) and omission (like ignoring ventilation).
If the importance of aerosol transmission had been accepted early, we would have been told from the beginning that it was much safer outdoors, where these small particles disperse more easily, as long as you avoid close, prolonged contact with others. We would have tried to make sure indoor spaces were well ventilated, with air filtered as necessary.
This also implies that plastic shields – which you might have seen in your local gym or supermarket – do essentially nothing to prevent transmission:
There was no attention to ventilation, installing air filters as necessary or even opening windows when possible, more to having people just distancing three or six feet, sometimes not requiring masks beyond that distance, or spending money on hard plastic barriers, which may be useless at best. (Just this week, President Biden visited a school where students were sitting behind plastic shields.)
Indeed, one of the safest places to be during the pandemic is outdoors. (As I’ve noted before, the vast majority of infections occur in indoor spaces.) This raises serious questions about the Government’s stay-at-home order, which confined us to our homes for weeks, with only one form of outdoor exercise per day.
Particularly absurd was when police forces used drone footage to shame people who were out walking in the countryside (most likely from indoor offices where the risk of transmission was far higher.)
If COVID mainly spreads via airborne particles, then telling people not to go outside doesn’t really make sense. And in fact, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined shelter-in-place orders in the United States, but did “not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths.”
Tufekci compares the lack of attention to airborne transmission of COVID with our misunderstanding of cholera’s spread in the era before John Snow:
So much of what we have done throughout the pandemic — the excessive hygiene theater and the failure to integrate ventilation and filters into our basic advice — has greatly hampered our response. Some of it, like the way we underused or even shut down outdoor space, isn’t that different from the 19th-century Londoners who flushed the source of their foul air into the Thames and made the cholera epidemic worse.
Tufekci’s article contains a lot of interesting details, and is worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Isn’t this going to have the muzzlers shouting “I told you so “?
Except masks if they stop anything only stop droplets
and only on dummies that don’t breathe moist air.
They can shout “I told you so” as much as they want, they can pretend 100 years of studies don’t exist, but real world evidence conclusively proves they don’t work as every country with a mask mandate has seen cases rise.
If it was proven that masks worked … which they don’t.
This has been blindingly obvious from the start: tube trains were the first indicator. Hospitals with no opening windows recirculating the virus.
Better infection control in hospitals would have made a big difference, you’d imagine. It would have been an idea to separate infectious covid patients from others, ideally in separate buildings.
Imagine if we’d spent £0.5tn on really protecting the vulnerable and not spending most of it on paying healthy low-risk people to sit at home on furlough, useless track&trace and mass testing the healthy?
maybe, one day, someone will start using UV air cleansers in hospitals, nursing homes, schools, offices, theatres, indoors, etc….
but then, probably not, as it might effect jab sales
The idea is to reward vab title holders not people who make photocatalytic air conditioning kit (such as daikin).
Sorry, not buying it. The government’s public health advisers knew exactly how this virus was transmitted. It’s a coronavirus, not some alien species.
They wanted to implement a whole range of social control measures and develop a test and trace infrastructure that would then become a vaccine passport system for total control of our public spaces and licensing of our God given freedoms.
They lied and schemed and got exactly what they wanted in the end. It wasn’t a “lack of attention”. Don’t be complicit by letting them off the hook.
I’m not sure that they did know.
But – they weren’t interested, because you are right to say that the real objective was to use measures of social control. That was an objective both politically and of a psychological need for personal significance in public health and epidemiology.
Precisely, the notion that HMG did not have any idea of how a Coronavirus spreads, that it is more likely to spread though touching surfaces etc, is laughable.
Far more likely is that this was the start of a pre-determined psychological warfare operation (terrorism) where confusion and conflicting messages are deliberately seeded in the public consciousness, because confused, disorientated people are easier to sway in to the desired mindset. The people who do this are pondlife of the lowest order.
Iain Davis did a great article early in the scamdemic, which does a great job of covering the techniques employed by HMG to brainwash the public and is definitely “worth reading in full” 😉
COVID 19 – The UK Scamdemic – Part 2
https://in-this-together.com/covid-19-the-uk-scamdemic-part-2/
Nor am I. One of the weird things is the apparent ignorance in certain groups of so-called experts about such things. It’s just about possible that there has been an element of deliberate fraud based on their knowledge that many are ignorant about heating and ventilation etc.
Most people with a bit of experience should know that poor ventilation and humid conditions, maybe in circumstances where many punters talk out loud a lot, is a significant place where you might be infected by something or other. There are quite a lot of things that can be done to improve the environment in some places, like using UV-C to sterilise recycled air in systems that use recycling (such as office blocks, some stores etc), but you can’t get rid of it altogether without losing the benefit of certain places for groups of people.
SAGE did not have any coronavirus expert on their books….,,,
” Which is not to say you shouldn’t wash your hands.”
Yes – I remember a nurse telling me a year ago that the main effect of hand hygiene had been to reduce the incidence of other problematic nosocomial infections.
A further major effect is dry and cracked skin.
Many of the govt.policies simply created virtue signallers because everyone knows that the only way to acquire virtue is by following govt mandates,
That allowed countries, like the UK, Canada, and the USA to become police states.
Alas, what to do with the “Enemies of the State” who refuse to conform to what’s best for them?
Now the inevitable reluctance to relinquish power ( Boris, Fauci (the fraud), etc, etc,).
Collateral damage is Science. There is none left—-only Science in Interest of the State or the Media.
We’ve been in thrall to idiots from day one, as most of us know already.
Nothing like stating the obvious. Of course some of us were already trying to get accross the importance of ventilation and fresh air while those in control were insisting we lock ourselves away in sealed containers.
Ok in my own defence I am drinking beer, but a couple of things I don’t understand .
Firstly, I know only two people who have had what appears to be genuine symptoms of covid, so two sets of spouses and children had to isolate, and other than the original person none of the immediate family caught it.
Second, we know that pubs restaurants, bars etc (all indoors) have not largely contributed to the spread, ditto shops and supermarkets.
The author talks about super spreader events as though they are a given, but where were they and when? And how did those events cause the super super spreader events in care homes and hospitals?
Is the author saying it’s in the air everywhere, in which case masks are either pointless, or necessary forever? If you still have to be near someone to get it why didn’t it happen in the examples I’ve given?
OK my brain hurts and the beer’s calling!