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.
This is where the rhetoric around unvaccinated people is going. Every day I am reminded of that Mitchell and Webb “are we the baddies?” sketch.
In Perpignan there are now a bunch of vigilantes blocking off a shopping street and demanding to see if you are vaccinated.
We all know where this is going to go. Dehumanisation of a minority group has a 100% track record in terms of outcome.
It’s more or less what our government, led by that well-known closet libertarian and lockdown sceptic Alexander “Boris” Johnson, beloved victim of nasty SAGE bullies, is saying.
I still beg to differ here: That’s Boris the Absent, who, after taking the UK out of the EU common market to ensure that London-based hedgefonds will remain forever free from the threat of EU-wide taxation, happily delegates actually governing the country to a group of foreign experts (WHO) and their domestic lickspittles (SAGE et. al.), provided he can keep his title and doesn’t have to do anything himself (save the occasional press statement).
Definitely, Kim Jong Johnson has been bullied into becoming a great fat communist fraud instead of the libertarian he is.
Actually King Kong Johnson.
LOL – its all about saving lives for this guy
At least Duterte doesn’t pretend to be other than an evil (and ignorant) fascist.
That’s sort of the point I was making below, in a roundabout way. I don’t really care what he’s saying, I care about our government here much more, who are doing the same thing, with more subtlety (but not much).
he’s a least honest, boris and his health Junta aren’t even honest about their desire to show they own the people of the country.
And he will end up hanging from a tree, like all fascists.
If I could just go over to the Philippines with a firearm and kill this evil fascist mother fucker!
Nice one Rodders, why don’t you house arrest people with heart disease (99,680) and chronic lower respiratory infections (19,463) total: 119,143
Covid-19 deaths 8,209
Keep diabetes, its a good earner for Big Pharma, wouldn’t want a visit by the Coca-Cola company now would we…
Yes. You have to ask whether he’s just plain stupid or is weighed down by his pockets… or maybe both.
Duterte is the likes of Piers Morgan and Michael Gove without the PR mask on.
These leaders on some affiliate marketing scheme from Big Pharma.
What do Piers, Gove and Duterte all have in common? (I could add more of course)
That’s right – I wish they’d all succumb to the same fate that Duterte wishes for the unvaxxed.
And so it begins.
“Kill people, save lives”.
We killed the people we falsely claimed were at most risk from the virus to save people at risk from the virus.
Dirty Duterte has been killing people for years.
“Duterte said “walking spreaders” should be confined to their homes.”
That’s the people who been jabbed, then!
Charming!
What we need is to return to a policy of DENAZIFICATION.
LOL! He’s really going to blow his top when he finds out that the vaccine doesn’t reduce the spread of the delta variant.
No he won’t, he knows and doesn’t care. It’s about CONTROL.
He wouldn’t listen to blasphemy like that.
Probably not. The Philipines are a former US colony (took it from Spain) and the government of this guy is very probably absolutely dependent on money from the USA. Hence, this is about pleasing the people who pay him.
Great. He’s made a firm and undeniable statement of his position.
Walking spreaders should be confined to their homes.
So, if evidence emerges that vaccinated-infected also spread covid as much as unvaccined-infected then the vaccinated should also remain in their homes.
I’d say that it might be better to form policy based on symptoms. There’s fairly good evidence that significant viral shedding in the asymptomatic-infected-unvaccinated is relatively rare, so really they should only force the unvaccinated with covid symptoms to stay in their homes. Unvaccinated without symptoms are unlikely to be spreaders.
There’s also emerging evidence that asymptomatic-infected-vaccinated do spread covid, due to them having rather surprisingly high viral loads. Thus he should force the vaccinated to stay in their homes unless they have a recent negative test.
Of course all the above is irrelevant — their president isn’t working with science or logic, but is just propagating the usual scientific illiteracy, that the only way out of this is with mass vaccination. They’re only making things worse, but they’re doing it anyway.
It was always thus.
The pandemic would long be over and had taken a much more benign toll, if anyone feeling sick just stayed home, especially if taking painkillers.
But that wouldn’t have served the agenda.
TBH, anyone with a cold or flu should stay at home until they are better, pandemic or no pandemic. It is just a common curtesy. Nothing annoys me more than people who insist on coming into the office with a cold or using public transport etc when they are under the weather and giving their germs to everyone else. Incidentally, such people thought nothing about the consequences of spreading disease and potentially killing granny prior to all the Covid hysteria.
For some people though it’s the difference between being paid or not, or even of keeping their jobs at all. Of course everyone would like some R&R when they’re under the weather but it’s not always feasible.
I can understand that position, but on the other hand I also respect the position that says mere colds should not be allowed to get in the way of getting the job done.
As far as the “greater good” is concerned, the effectiveness of our immune systems and the delicate balance with endemic seasonal viruses depend on rapid and regular spreading of these bugs through society.
Nah! What’s in a bloody cold for God’s sake? We all used to go into work with a cold. In fact if someone called in and said they were taking the day off because they had a cold everyone thought they were being a bit wet.
Nowadays no doubt if anyone sneezes the rest panic and hide away waiting for death to come riding over the hill. It’s pathetic, come on get grip.
This is going to result in civil war. Especially when the vaxxed start dying including, hopefully, Duterte himself.
He won’t have had the jabs!
He had the Sinopharm, it was a battle to get him to do it on TV, he didn’t want to do it.
I doubt it – probably saline solution or a vitamin B shot.
So isn’t that the most useless of all the useless “vaccines”?
I have staff in The Philippines
Vote for a psychopath, get a psychopath
Is that Grant Shapps?
Philippines population: 109 million. So 7 million people are going to run the entire country and 102 million people are under permanent house arrest?
Most likely there will be a remarkably rapid (and remarkably implausible) spread of “vaccinations” and certification “proving” such, through the country.
Just another tax.
Obviously he didn’t get the memo about the vaccines not stopping infection.
I work in the Philippines and have lived here for almost a year. Here in Metro Manila, we’re about to re-enter our second hard lockdown this year due to the so-called “delta” variant, which I’m sure will last until October even though they say it’s only supposed to be until August 20. This type of language is pretty common from the president, and it’s hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously.
In fact, it’s hard to take anything the government says here seriously, because most of the time the government doesn’t even know what’s going on. The palace spokesperson will say something one day, and then it takes the media and the government a couple of days to figure out who said what, if it’s true or not, if they can move forward with it, etc., etc. As the article says–and this may be something of a saving grace–the vaccine rollout here has been an absolute catastrophe, and the government is pretty much dependent on vaccine charity at this point. Therefore, I wonder what planet Mr. President is living on threatening to lock vaccine refusers in their homes when the government can barely manage to get 15% of its population fully vaccinated after 7 months. The authorities can’t even manage a unified track-and-trace system (thank God for that), let alone issuing everyone a national ID card. On top of that, many Filipinos still have fresh memories of the disastrous dengue vaccine campaign some years ago, and most of them are devout Catholics.
But then again, nothing surprises me these days.
Fascinating insight. If you have time please consider submitting a postcard from Manila. The Daily Sceptic site has many from around the world. When we look back and read all these, the farce and the top down multinational media control will be apparent.
Published one on LS back in February, maybe I should write an update!
Now would certainly be timely, in view of the above.
I’d be particularly interested in the interaction between the kind of totalitarian pomposity and thuggery displayed by Duterte above and the street reality of a state in which relatively few have access to the vaccines anyway.
Please keep us posted!
A great reminder that one of the best defences against tyranny is an incompetent government bureaucracy.
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York yesterday said that they are ‘done’ being nice to people who haven’t had the jab. We asked you nicely and you didn’t do it do now it’s time for mandates.
I’ve been watching our ministers for a while now. They make sure that they leave a verbal trail of ‘nice’ so that they can say they bent over backwards. We told you the jab was free, we came to your area, we did pop up clinics, we provided education and reassurance and still you didn’t. We’ve ticked all the boxes our government lawyers told us to before we do what we were always planning.
I he getting likes on Twatter from the bed wetters?
Well well, the hysteria has gone way too far, but then politicians are just as easily brainwashed as anyone else.
President TooDirty is an absolute bell-end. But he also seems to be a thoroughly nasty nutjob. Just the latest in a string of outrageous statements he’s made over the last few years.
I saw a documentary at a film festival, those were the days, about the death squads targeting drug users in the Philippines. So it is strange that Duterte actually wants people to inject.
I don’t care a bit if Dutertre dies. In fact, I’d give three hearty cheers.
This man, along with Dan Andrews (Kim-Jong Dan), St Jacinda (the “toothy tyrant” of NZ) and all the other tyrannical power abusers of the pandemic should be confined to a lunatic asylum on an island in the middle of the Pacific, isolated and out of harms way, and the world would instantly be a better place.
Probably send along Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance too. Oh, and bring a friend, like perhaps Neil Ferguson.
All will be watched in their padded rooms by orderlies in white coats, while some draw up plans for world domination, while others keep occupied scribbling insane models and predictions on the wall, letting out the occasional squawk or cackling laughter.
Once a day they’re let out on a leash while they run back and forth, crazy eyed and screaming “the unvaccinated must die, they must die!”
Enjoy your fantasy.
Most of your fellow countrymen are standing around clapping them.
What, they’re clapping President Duterte of the Philippines are they, for encouraging the death of his citizens?
Leftists must be getting seizures from the cognitive dissonance this produces.
On the one hand, it’s Duterte whom they consider a fascist sub-human just half a notch above Trump.
On the other hand, he comes out as the most rabidly pro corona vax person on the planet.
How to reconcile these two things…
Coming to a nation near you
Fuck you Duerte! I hope you get assassinated and killed in response to your comments! and I hope all those over in Philippines going along with this hate and evil against the unvaccinated end up dead as well!
Another bought politician. The question is…..who bought him? I think we all know.
How the ***k did he become a president? This man is a despot
I don’t think there are enough words in the English language to describe this disgusting piece of shit.