@ShanghaiDiva
What about the inconsistencies/contradictions in this expert advice?
Mask are of no benefit
Wait, now we all need masks.
Schools are safe.
Wait, 8 hours later schools are not safe.
No need to quarantine arrivals.
Wait, we should quarantine arrivals.
There weren’t inconsistencies in expert advice, however some people were given credibility by the government on no basis whatsoever. (Such as those from the Great Barrington meeting in Downing Street).
As it was a pandemic the evidence was emerging all the time. What it took, and what many nations did well, was keeping up with the evidence and also good critical thinking.
Japan, for example, put out the message of
“Three Cs” (closed spaces, crowded places, and close-contact settings) From the beginning of the pandemic.
How did they know this before the strong evidence of it being airborne and in closed spaces appeared?
Japan really looked at the emerging evidence in a robust and critical way. And by evidence, it wasn’t just ‘experts’, it wasn’t just previous knowledge, it was where the virus tended to spread most. Which was:
In households
On buses
In workplaces
In hospitals
In restaurants
In taxis
In churches
Who was spreading it?
Families to each other
Healthcare professionals
Care homes
How was it spreading?
Explosions of case numbers rising exponentially in localities
Vulnerable and old people seem most affected
What do these all tell us? That close contacts, being indoors, with more people that we know or are physically close to is the most risky. That sometimes it seems to spread more (what we now know as super spreading events which is why big numbers of people are so dangerous), and that older and more vulnerable people are most affected.
We could see that from the start if only we’d looked. Schools have never been ‘safe’ we just didn’t have evidence that they were very ‘unsafe’ - which is very different. People talked about schools being safe from two studies in the UK where summer schools with only a tiny amount of students in big classes with low covid numbers circulating. Of course that’s not good evidence! It’s not rocket science.
Quarantine, isolation and lockdown have been the backbone of public health response to transmittable diseases for centuries. We knew that all along also. That wasn’t new evidence, people just don’t know what way is up any more.