| > TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant. I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines. With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a very quick and polarised view to newly presented evidence, and can often sound like he's being overly dismissive to my layman's ears. To the degree where I end up thinking, "it can't be that black and white". I get the sense that sometimes the co-hosts would likely go for a more nuanced perspective, and often they do try to soften the edges around some of his opinions, but the podcast is very much his domain. By the same token, I've often heard him admit that he was wrong. The sign of a good scientist! So there's that. Being in the UK, and having received head-on the full barrage of "communication" from our Government during COVID, I have learnt to be sceptical of the messages they put out, and defaulted to "cynical" when first hearing their report of the new variant at the end of a recent press conference. The more time goes on though, the evidence does seem to be mounting that we should be looking at this very closely and not dismissing it out of hand. > The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months. Completely agree. We have to use a balance here of scientific evidence, but also strategic thinking - which may not be 100% scientific - and the strategy may be that it's safer to assume this variant is more easily transmissible, and act accordingly, rather than wait for the science to catch up and prove it 100%. All of that said, re. TWIV - it has been a game-changer of a podcast for me during this pandemic. I thoroughly enjoy listening to the hosts, all of whom are generally good natured, clearly very experienced, and doing a good job overall of science communication. No view on COVID is going to be perfect, and in my view their output is a net positive (by far) even despite the above. |
In the latest TWIV, their comment was that the things you would do to prevent COVID are the same no matter if it is a new Strain or not. That's true - but we also have to deal with a increasingly uncomfortable truth - in many places, the COVID incident and death rate are pretty much the same, despite dramatically different legal and social dictates around masking, etc. Italy, France, USA, UK, Spain, Belgium, etc are all within 10% of the total death per million population, for example.
There is a weird cycle around COVID. Everyone reports on how awful it is somewhere, people draw a over-broad conclusion about the moral or scientific failures of the continent / state / country / red state / blue state, then that wave of covid waxes in one place, and wanes is another, and the cycle repeats again.
This pattern continues despite different travel restrictions, different masking policies (way less then my state in the USA, for example), etc.
SO I think the answer is not - we couldn't change anything - but rather - what is really the science behind this - and do we truly understand what is going on? I get that Vincent is burned out and has a knee jerk reaction, if I had to deal with all the insanity around the Hydrochloroquine crap I would be too.