[felipeerias]

I’ll give you an example.

Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit.

Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.

[civilitty]

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

Did measles not exist before 2020? Where do you people find this crazy shit?

[chrisan]

Source of western healthcare authorities telling the public this?

edit: also the airborness of it was also a repeated topic in the cited grand rounds

[felipeerias]

The WHO only declared COVID-19 to be airborne in December 2021.

There were many articles at the time describing this failure. It’s interesting how quickly it has faded from memory.

I’m on my phone, so this is just an example from a quick search. Again, there are many like this:

“Public health organizations including the World Health Organization (WHO) initially declared the virus to be transmitted in large droplets that fell to the ground close to the infected person, as well as by touching contaminated surfaces. The WHO emphatically declared on March 28, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne (except in the case of very specific “aerosol-generating medical procedures”) and that it was “misinformation” to say otherwise. […]

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States followed a parallel path […]

“The very slow and haphazard acceptance of the evidence of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by major public health organizations contributed to a suboptimal control of the pandemic, whereas the benefits of protection measures against aerosol transmission are becoming well established.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070

[magicalist]

You said

> Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

There was certainly mainstream belief that covid was limited to droplet transmission (though I remember much discussion of that as well) but the idea that Western medicine didn't think any viruses were airborne is nonsense.

Another comment brought up measles, which is a great example, and known for many decades.

[jquery]

>Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time.

"Healthcare authorities" are not necessarily scientists, they are professionals. Nor am I aware of them ever making this claim in the first place, at least never in any kind of coordinated way. Please provide a source.

If you're talking about masks for Covid, that was because the Trump administration bungled the mask situation so badly that we were critically short on masks[1]. It was decided that to minimize causalities, focus would be on making sure health care professionals got masks first.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/n95-...

[melagonster]

>It was just an old idea

but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time.

Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.

[felipeerias]

But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.

[brabel]

> Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief.

Regardless of whether this particular "belief" was actually held by anyone (it probably wasn't as others point out), science is fully based on evidence. If what you say is actually true, what those people claiming that were doing was not science by definition. You cannot claim something which you can't back up with data and plenty of evidence and call what you're doing science.