If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently?; COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ turned out to be true, and other C-Virus related stories

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WSJ: If We Knew Then What We Know Now About Covid, What Would We Have Done Differently?

How easy it is to forget those first nightmarish months of the pandemic. Epidemiologists, doctors and scientists haven’t forgotten, though. Those who spent time on the pandemic’s front lines have since asked themselves: What have we learned? What do we now know about Covid-19 that we didn’t know at the start of the pandemic, and what would we have done differently had we known?

Answering those questions about this pandemic, they hope, will help us better manage the next one.

We didn’t understand how great the airborne threat from Covid-19 was—that it could be transmitted by breathing tiny aerosol particles that could linger in the air and travel far beyond our 6 feet of social distancing. If we had known, we could have taken more effective measures to control the spread.

For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets that would most likely fall to the ground within seconds. Since the droplets might contaminate surfaces, we washed our produce, sanitized our hands (to the tune of “Happy Birthday”), cleaned doorknobs and railings with alcohol, and opened our Amazon deliveries outdoors because the boxes might be contaminated.

A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.

The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.

“We were outsiders,” says Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor who teaches aerosol science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. More than 260 scientists signed an article laying out their argument in July 2020 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. In October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its guidelines to acknowledge the potential for airborne spread of Covid-19 when people are singing or exercising in poorly ventilated areas. --->READ MORE HERE

Illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times

COVID-19 ‘conspiracy theories’ turned out to be true:

One by one, the myths and lies propagated by the ruling elites about COVID-19 are falling like dominoes.

What was supposed to have been “misinformation” is the real deal.

The “wet market” theory, which never made sense, is turning out to be all wet. Major government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — now say that the virus probably leaked from China’s Wuhan virology lab. It didn’t come from a bat sandwich after all.

Likewise, the lockdowns imposed all over the country did not slow the pandemic but did enormous damage. A year ago, Johns Hopkins issued a meta-analysis stating that while “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”

We now know that natural immunity derived from infection is far superior to that of the so-called vaccines, which prevent neither infection nor transmission. The February edition of the liberal Lancet medical journal reviewed 68 studies, concluding that the vaccines lose effectiveness sooner than natural immunity.

Keep in mind that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities dismissed natural immunity in favor of the vaccines for nearly two years.

“The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern,” Allysia Finley wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.”

The CDC owes an apology to the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, not to mention the public. Released in October 2020 and now signed by nearly a million “infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists,” the declaration recommends targeting shots to vulnerable people (older adults and those with other health conditions) and achieving herd immunity by allowing the healthy and young to get COVID-19 as they would any other virus.

For this medically sound advice, the Barrington signers were slandered and canceled. On Oct. 8, 2020, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins sent an email to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. --->READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

Nate Silver blasts ‘crazy’ COVID lockdowns that closed churches, kept museums open

A troubling insistence on harsh Covid rules

USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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