[mike_hearn]

> you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway.

There are three options:

1. Fauci knew the correct answer to some degree of accuracy and picked a rounded off version.

2. He didn't know the correct answer but thought he did.

3. Fauci didn't know the correct answer, was aware he didn't know, and he made one up in order to sound knowledgeable.

You're arguing what happened is (1). What actually happened is (3), which we know because he admitted it.

Social distancing had no effect, and this was known early on. There is no known distance curve that correctly models SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the real world, largely because it spreads via aerosol clouds as well as droplets. The data for this was available nearly from the start because:

1. SARS-1 acted this way, as do other coronaviruses. Outbreaks of SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind.

2. The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random, even though everyone was confined to quarters. There was no physical contact in that case and it made no difference whatsoever.

Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried. What did work was high quality air cleaning equipment, as found on planes - places that remained remarkably infection free despite everyone being much closer than 6ft together.

[sorcerer-mar]

It never takes long to get from "I need to be trusted with the facts!" to demonstrating just gobsmacking levels of willful ignorance.

> Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried.

> Our search identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents, with no randomised controlled trials and 44 relevant comparative studies in health-care and non-health-care settings (n=25 697 patients). Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m (n=10 736, pooled adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·18, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·38; risk difference [RD] −10·2%, 95% CI −11·5 to −7·5; moderate certainty); protection was increased as distance was lengthened

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

---

Can you explain step by step how "SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind" and "the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random" are evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?

This would be great evidence against the claim "if you are more than 6ft away, you will not get sick," and your airplane example would be great evidence against the claim "if you are fewer than 6ft away, you will get sick," but neither of these claims were ever made.

[mike_hearn]

Such papers aren't worth much. For example, that meta-review claims masks work. Some other scientists did a different meta-review (the A122 Cochrane Review) that concluded the opposite (strictly speaking, that there was no useful evidence masks worked). If you dig into the details of why they disagree, you'll find none of the studies claiming this stuff works are scientifically valid whilst the Cochrane meta-review is very careful. Real-world reliable evidence > models.

So what happened: activists went directly to the head of Cochrane and demanded the review be disowned, which it was, despite it having been signed off on by the org previously and there being no scientific problems identified with the study. That's how they manufacture consensus in the healthcare system: top down orders from corrupt leaders who suppress beliefs and evidence that makes them look bad. They do this because it works. After all, look at this thread. People say, look at all the evidence! Look at the consensus! They can't all be wrong!

Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything. The institutions of science failed during COVID, and frankly are failing most of the time hence the replication crisis. It's not specific to masks or social distancing. We can play that game for any claim you want to make about COVID, or many other topics. Science is broken.

> explain ... evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?

There are two components to this:

1. There's a threshold value beyond which a non-immune person becomes infected and that viral load in the exposure over that doesn't matter much. Given that viruses replicate that's not surprising.

2. That a sick person can emit infectious aerosols that can hang around in the air for long periods and travel long distances e.g. via air ducts.

The intuition you're working from is that SARS-CoV-2 viruses are created in the body, that they travel only in large droplets that fall to the ground quickly due to gravity, and that risk of infection is linear in dose. Thus, being far away from an infected person should reduce the risk linearly. That's the idea the "professionals" used to justify their policies, but it's based on a model that's too far from reality to be useful. It might work for a hypothetical spherical-cow type person standing on a perfectly empty and flat 2D plane, with no air movements. It doesn't work for real world scenarios with complex layouts and complex movements of people, which is why when you look at the behavior of the virus in real settings like the Diamond Princess or jet liners the results are completely different to what the model would predict.

[sorcerer-mar]

Hold on there amigo.

What you said is that Fauci had no reason to believe that social distancing would be helpful and knew that it wouldn’t be helpful.

I just linked to very clear reason to substantiate his beliefs. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and even regardless of whether this view ended up actually being correct, this evidence existed.

It is empirically, obviously true there was reason to hold this belief.

> Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything

I see that you’ve never heard of science… which concludes: “we don’t know yet” on most questions most of the time. The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions and even still they’re open for debate. But we have to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty all the time! Even the decisions that ended up being wrong during COVID (of which there were plenty) were well within the aperture of reasonability given the conditions they had to be made under.

None of this gets even close to the threshold of the government propagating verifiably false information. Not even in the same ballpark.

> Such papers aren't worth much.

Lol. “How am I so confused about what’s going on?! Must be the institutions’ fault!”

[mike_hearn]

You're citing papers which came after the public health authorities decided it would work, not before. Before the sudden about face the WHO had guidance for how to handle a respiratory virus pandemic. It said don't shut the borders, don't try and socially distance, don't restrict travel. All that was torn up and replaced overnight.

But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

> The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions

That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™.

You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".

[sorcerer-mar]

Social distancing dates back literally to the 14th century dude. It is a standard tool in the contagion toolbox. The null hypothesis is that you would apply it to this contagion too until you have evidence otherwise.

No, he told us the number 6 "just appeared," as compared to the numbers 5 or 7.

> You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

Please link to said papers.

Again, you're just wrong on all the facts. There are plenty of good reasons to have defaulted to social distancing. Not only was this logical at the time, but all evidence still points to it having been the correct decision in retrospect. I know you're in the habit of simply dismissing countervailing evidence, i.e. you've decided to give up on yourself, but there is literally centuries of evidence behind social distancing.

The fact that people caught COVID while far away from each other literally isn't even a dent in this body of evidence. And I don't mean that because it's weak evidence against it, but that it's not even evidence against it. Nothing about the social distancing hypothesis suggests one cannot get sick at a distance.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/

Thank you for providing all of your evidence (none). It is illustrative for other readers.

[mike_hearn]

Details matter! Medieval quarantine ships worked against plague and cholera because those pathogens spread very differently to aerosolized coronavirus, and had very different mortality profiles. You can't just lump every possible pathogen into one bucket labelled "contagion" then claim you now understand it. That's exactly the kind of broken thinking and fake expertise that led to so much loss of trust.

Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.