
How the World Missed Covid-19's Silent Spread - fortran77
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/world/europe/coronavirus-spread-asymptomatic.html
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hodgesrm
This article is humbling, or should be. Many people have been quick to condemn
"non-scientific" laypeople for stubbornly refusing to wear face masks. But
it's clear that there's been analogous denial within the scientific
establishment itself. Human society is poorly adapted to solving "tragedy of
the commons" types of problems. It's worth stepping back a bit to think about
how we could do better, because we have even bigger problems like climate
change on the horizon.

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vikramkr
I don't think the denial was within the independent scientific establishment.
From what I saw as it was spreading, many people in academia knew something
was wrong. But, the scientific community that was tied to politics (public
health officials, government appointees, etc) were singing a very different
tune, and the political pressure to tell a nice story to the public seemed to
be incredibly intense. IMO, this underscores the need to have public health
agencies be independent of political pressures and find ways to mitigate
political influence on these agencies, sort of like how the federal reserve is
theoretically independent. I think things would have looked different if
government science officials hadn't intervened in favor of their preferred
narratives early on. This includes the WHO as well - their early denials of
the severity of the spread and apparent willingness to go along with China's
narrative just confused the scientific and political response.

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hodgesrm
I think you are right about independent scientists in some cases having a
better view of the pandemic on the ground.

At the same time it's not clear independent health authorities are the
solution. The problem we're facing with reopening is that we have to balance
health outcomes with economic trade-offs to create a solution that maximizes
both. In theory that's what we pay politicians to do, especially in
democracies.

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Gibbon1
I think one thing that happened is a total break down between policy makers
and institutional scientists. Institutional scientists simply will not
speculate publicly. Normally they work with executive branches and political
leaders to formulate a coherent policy. Non institutional scientists on the
other hand were free to say what they believed was prudent.

In the west over the last 40 years there has been a complete breakdown in the
ability of governments to formulate coherent policy followed by action.

