Pandemic advice from the WHO

[mtbc]

I had previously had a vaguely good impression of the World Health Organization. However, during this pandemic they have unpleasantly surprised me. In trying to understand how to protect myself from SARS-CoV-2 I have been keeping somewhat abreast of the preliminary research and it did not take long for multiple credible items of circumstantial evidence to emerge that widespread mask-wearing helps and that infection appears to follow indoor airflow. I would certainly understand some we're not sure caveats but it disappointed me to see how long it took the WHO to start to agree about masks and now they seem to be dragging their feet on airborne transmission. As somebody who dropped biology before finishing high school and whose professional focus is neither medical nor epidemiological, am I the one very plausibly mistaken about all this, should I have more faith? Otherwise, what is going on with the WHO? Are they hamstrung by what would be politically convenient for China and the US? Are they scared to make a best guess in a crisis situation? Should we be listening to some other organization instead?

Comments

[shadowkat]

No, they refuse to list the vascular dimension as symptoms. I checked. Or the fact that not everyone has the cough, tighteness in the chest or fever.

New York figured it out enough - to require more than temperature checks. Hence the masks.

I think what happened in Rockland County scared the hell out of our Governor. (I can see why - one guy, one, spread the disease to over a thousand people.)

[mtbc]

Wow. I hope that there is some subsequent postmortem on all this that, among other things, reveals what their deal is, why they are doing more harm than good in this case. Though it's not like the WHO had an unblemished record previously (I don't know about the CDC), perhaps I should have just paid enough attention to go in already skeptical.

[shadowkat]

I do too. WHO really needs to be taken to task on this. NY is right - they should have raised the alarm earlier. But they were too worried about the economy, and economic pressures kept them quiet. But the Governor of NY is right - without your health, you've got nothing. If the virus wins - there's no economy.

Part of it isn't WHO or the CDC (Center for Disease Control in the US) fault. The Trump administration de-funded the CDC and scaled it back, getting rid of a lot of people. It also got rid of the CDC and FEMA's procurement functions, leaving that to individual states and redistributing the funding to military and other areas. And it stock-piled ventilators but didn't keep them up to date or in shape. Instead it focused on military, defense, and spending towards corporate or big business interests. Dumb. Very dumb.

WHO similarly suffered from lack of funding from rich member nations across the Board. Britain, the US, etc, didn't put as much money into WHO. Also WHO was kind of put in a fund-raising role and constantly tip-toeing around the big member nations.

Because of this - State health agencies, and independent/private companies had to step in and pick up the slack. They are - but there are issues. Some are making a profit at the risk of lives (Gilead), and others are rushing things through without proper protocols in place. And then there's the media who is not sure of the information out there and how to accurately disseminate it. So as a result, no one has a firm handle on what this virus does exactly, how infectious it is, or the actual death rate. The numbers are all over the place. There's so many people who have had it and died from it or complications from it - that aren't being counted.