(2021-04-29) Tufekci The Cdc Is Still Repeating Its Mistakes

Zeynep Tufekci: The CDC Is Still Repeating Its Mistakes. By issuing covid-19 recommendations that are simultaneously too timid and too complicated, the CDC is repeating a mistake that’s hounded America’s pandemic response. The new guidelines are rigid and binary, and aren’t accompanied by explanations or a link to an accessible version of the underlying science, which would empower people to both understand them better and figure things out for themselves.

The new guidelines come with charts that list specific activities and how a person should engage in them, based on their vaccination status

Confused? You’re not alone. The guidelines got Linsey Marr, a professor at Virginia Tech and a leading expert on viral transmission, to remark that even she can’t remember all of this. “I would have to carry around a sheet of paper—a cheat sheet with all these different stipulations,”

We wear masks for three reasons: to protect ourselves from people who might be infected, to protect others from our infections, and to set social standards and norms appropriate for a pandemic. The last one is the most important: A pandemic requires a collective response

Let’s start with the outdoors. Study after study finds extremely low rates of outdoor transmission. So far, I’m unaware of a single confirmed outdoor-only super-spreading event, even though at least thousands of confirmed super-spreading events took place indoors

When outdoor transmission does occur in small numbers, it’s not from fleeting encounters, but from prolonged contact at close distance, especially if it involves talking, yelling, or singing.

An increasing number of scientists believe that outdoor and indoor transmission differs so starkly because the coronavirus transmits through aerosols

Unlike droplets, these aerosol particles do not immediately fall to the ground with the force of gravity within three to six feet, and they concentrate most around the person emitting them, so close contact remains risky. Crucially, they can disperse quickly if they are released in the great outdoors, or, conversely, they can keep accumulating in a poorly ventilated, enclosed environment and travel beyond the short distance in which droplets would fall.

even without taking vaccines into consideration, the previous guidelines that recommended masks in “public settings,” including outdoors, were already too rigid and too timid.

What about rules for vaccinated people indoors, then? One could argue that the science is already fairly strong that the vaccinated are likely fine even indoors, especially if community transmission isn’t very high, and that the CDC guidelines implicitly assume this. That said, one can concede that this part of the empirical record is still evolving. However, that’s not currently relevant for public rules and behavior, because just like we can’t tell only the sick to wear masks, we cannot tell only the vaccinated to chuck their masks indoors—a grocery-store clerk shouldn’t have to police this. For now, indoor spaces have to keep masks as a rule simply for sociological reasons. We should make that explicit too

The science supports a simple guideline that allows for the removal of all mask mandates outdoors, except for unvaccinated people in prolonged close contact, especially that involving talking, yelling, or singing

Finally, the CDC guidelines are not just timid and inconsistent. They are late: We’ve known about outdoor transmission being a much lower risk for almost a year now.