
The CDC waited 'it's entire existence for this moment.' What went wrong? - rmason
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/cdc-coronavirus.html
======
orev
I can’t help but think of the CDC (hear me out) as the Night’s Watch in Game
of Thrones. 1) Setup to protect against things that haven’t happened in most
people’s lifetimes. 2) Reduced funding/personnel because nobody really
believes it can happen (due to #1). 3) When something finally happens, ignored
because it conflicts with the desired political narrative.

As the most watched TV show in history, it wouldn’t be difficult to draw an
easy parallel between to two in order to illustrate systemic failure to the
public.

~~~
david38
Similarly, I think of it as your point 1 plus no practice.

It’s nearly impossible to prepare for something and get it right when it’s
never actually happened. Rockets for example get massive amounts of study and
simulations and then still get things wrong.

Yes, sometimes you get lucky, but this is also dealing with human behavior and
biology. Less predictable than say, computers.

~~~
orev
The human behavior factor has changed dramatically with the introduction of
social media. People react very differently to information when it’s a
constant unfiltered stream, when in the past it was more of a daily update of
(somewhat) vetted information. Social science is still grappling with how
social media has affected human behavior.

------
mrfusion
They also lost a lot of credibility by making ridiculous announcements and
fueling media fear mongering. Your dog can give you corona. No evidence of
immunity. You can get it from touching things. You can’t get it from touching
things. The six foot rule with no real basis. Masks don’t help. Masks do help.
Now masks are symbolic. Etc.

~~~
eightysixfour
All of those things were based on evidence of the time, and then they updated
their stance as they got new evidence. How is that ridiculous or fear
mongering? Blame the media for blowing things out of proportion if you want
(only using the high values for model estimates which have been accurate for
months for example) but don't blame scientists who are literally saying
they're working with the best evidence they have at the time.

> No evidence of immunity.

Was actually the WHO and they said "There is currently no evidence that people
who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a
second infection"

Which is an entirely accurate statement at the time. The intent was to make
sure people who had tested positive and then negative post recovery did not
decide they had a party pass when we simply don't know how long their immunity
lasts.

> You can get it from touching things.

It lives on surfaces, including some for a long time. Wash your hand.

> You can’t get it from touching things.

"This is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still
learning more about how this virus spreads"

> The six foot rule with no real basis.

Saliva and mucus typically travel 3-5 feet.

> Masks don’t help.

We thought sick people are the only ones that need to wear masks.

> Masks do help

We learned a lot of people are asymptomatic spreaders.

There are many things that have gone wrong with the flow of communication
during this crisis, but if you read what the CDC actually said instead of what
the headline news source was, they've done a good job of

~~~
mwigdahl
The problem was not that they changed recommendations based on the knowledge
available at the time, it's that those recommendations were not given with a
qualification and confidence level appropriate to the strength of the data.

There was too much desire to appear strong and knowledgeable, resulting in too
many occasions where forceful, even morally-based recommendations needed to be
not just modified, but _reversed_ based on updated data (see the Surgeon
General's tweet from Feb 29 on the uselessness and social immorality of mask
use -- hasn't aged well).

To be fair, this was not all the CDC -- the media amplification /
simplification played a huge role here also -- but the fact remains that the
CDC and other US health authorities promulgated recommendations that were flat
out wrong and in some cases actively harmful by overindexing on poor data.

~~~
ikeyany
You're getting downvoted for strange reasons. The surgeon general literally
said this:

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing
general public from catching #Coronavirus"

------
wgjordan
Typo in title (not in the actual article headline)- should be 'its', not
'it's'

------
est31
It could have been worse if it had not been for Congress:

> The damage would have been far worse had Congress not stood in the way of
> repeated defunding attempts by the Trump administration. In its first two
> years, the Trump budgets proposed to slash the CDC’s appropriation by 18.2%
> and then by 17.1% (accounting for inflation). Today, its FY 2021 budget
> still seeks a cut of over 10%. Even when Republicans controlled both houses,
> Congress roundly rejected these aggressive Executive-led cuts, to maintain
> the agency’s funding near the previous year’s level.

[https://envirodatagov.org/an-embattled-landscape-series-
part...](https://envirodatagov.org/an-embattled-landscape-series-
part-2a-coronavirus-and-the-three-year-trump-quest-to-slash-science-at-the-
cdc/)

~~~
imglorp
What was the motivation for the cuts? Was it merely difficult to justify
spending on a 100-year event that might never come? Or was there a conflict of
interest?

~~~
yardie
Tax cuts at any cost. Since they can't make small cuts to the large programs
(military, SS, Medicare) they make thousands of large cuts to the not so well
known programs, CDC, forestry, NEA. Then they go back to their constituents
about how many millions and billions in programs they've cut.

~~~
_-david-_
>Tax cuts at any cost.

The revenue brought in from taxes increased after the tax cuts.

[https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-
FY19....](https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-FY19.pdf)

~~~
EdwardDiego
Are you implying a direct causative link?

~~~
_-david-_
>Are you implying a direct causative link

No.

The person I was responding to was making the claim that budget cuts were made
to make tax cuts possible. I was trying to say that the tax cuts did not lower
the revenue so budget cuts were not needed to justify the tax cuts.

~~~
BlackNitrogen
The per year deficit greatly increased though during that time. we reduced
taxes, the economy grew a little more but the deficit really increased. the
net is we borrowed from the future to make those tax cut (cause we'll have to
back back the extra deficit over time).

------
raverbashing
*its entire existence

(I wonder if HN has ever considered pulling the headlines from the link
directly as that could help with avoiding editorialization)

~~~
tzs
What should count as "the headline" for a link? The contents of the <title>
element in the <head>? The contents of the first <h1> in the <body>? I asked
this once [1].

Part of dang's response:

> What the rule means by "original title" can be any one of the candidate
> titles that an article itself provides. That can be the main heading on the
> page, but often that is misleading or baity, especially with media sites.
> The HTML doc title, as you point out, is often a good alternative. Often a
> subtitle is better than the main title. Other good places to look are the
> URL, photo captions, and the opening paragraph.

After you figure out which of those should be "the headline", then you've got
to deal with the possibility that it is too long. Try to shorten it? Try one
of the alternative sources dang lists?

It also might not be plain text. The .innerText of the element you choose will
usually be what you want, but I'm not sure that always will be right.

What might be reasonable would be to for the HN submission page to extract
several candidate titles from the page and ask the submitter to choose one one
of them, with an option to enter a headline manually if the submitter doesn't
think any of those work as is.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22931845)

~~~
raverbashing
The title tag for this article seems correct, so that's probably the 1st
choice. The <h1> is similar but the title has "\- The New York Times" added to
it.

I believe the clickbait issue might be valid for less reputable sites, but in
this case it works.

------
redis_mlc
TL;DR:

\- the CDC leader is not charismatic

\- the CDC has 3,000 staff, but no mgmt.

\- the CDC dropped the ball on notifying local officials of who was getting
off airplanes

\- the CDC has no data science coordination comparable to a random high school
student

\- the CDC was slow to do anything involved with testing, and contaminated
whatever it did make

\- the CDC appears to have gotten some information in Jan., but failed to
execute until March (since the Wuhan corona lab is funded by the US, we should
have known in mid-Dec. or sooner.)

\- the CDC is hapless.

This was all predictable had the GSA, or any senior leader, audited them. I
don't see their failure as funding-related - they're just an aimless
bureaucracy.

