CDC reverses itself and says guidelines it posted on coronavirus airborne transmission were wrong
Last edited Mon Sep 21, 2020, 02:10 PM - Edit history (2)
Source: Washington Post
On Monday morning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention swiftly edited its web page describing how the novel coronavirus spreads, removing recently added language saying it was “possible” that the virus spread via airborne transmission. This was the third major revision to CDC information or guidelines published since May.
The agency had posted information Friday stating the virus can transmit over a distance beyond six feet, suggesting that indoor ventilation is key to protecting against a virus that has now killed nearly 200,000 Americans. The CDC shifted its guidelines on Friday, but the change was not widely noticed until a CNN report on Sunday. Where the agency previously warned that the virus mostly spreads through large drops encountered at close range, on Friday it had said “small particles, such as those in aerosols” were a common vector.
But Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious disease, said the Friday update was posted in error. “Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” he said. The edited web page has removed all references to airborne spread, except for a disclaimer that recommendations based on this mode of transmission are under review. “We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process," Butler said. "It was a failure of process at CDC.”
For months, scientists and public health experts have warned of mounting evidence that the novel coronavirus is airborne, transmitted through tiny droplets called aerosols that linger in the air much longer than the larger globs that come from coughing or sneezing. Experts who reviewed CDC’s Friday post had said the language change had the power to shift policy and public behavior. Some suggested it should drive a major rethink of public policy — particularly at a time when students in many areas are returning to indoor classrooms.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/09/21/cdc-covid-aerosols-airborne-guidelines/
ENOUGH!!
WaPo finally updated.
Original article -
But the guidelines were removed late this morning because "that does not reflect our current state of knowledge," a top CDC official said.
This is a developing story and will be updated
I don't like posting stuff for The Hill but WaPo is being slow about updates (ETA - they did finally update) -
By Justine Coleman - 09/21/20 12:40 PM EDT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday that revised guidance quietly posted on Friday that said airborne transmission was thought to be the main way the virus spreads was "posted in error." The revised guidance has now been removed from the CDC's web site.
"CDC is currently updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19)," the CDC wrote. "Once this process has been completed, the update language will be posted." The CDC guidance on the coronavirus is now the same as it was before the revisions. This guidance states: "The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person." It mentions the virus "may be spread in other ways" but does not mention it being airborne.
Public health experts were pleased with the updated guidance, saying evidence shows COVID-19 can be spread through the air and that the public should be made aware of that fact. The World Health Organization issued a warning in July, saying that coronavirus could be spread through people talking, singing and shouting after hundreds of scientists released a letter urging it to do so.
The CDC said the guidance posted Friday was a "draft version of proposed changes." It is not clear if that draft will eventually become the CDC's guidance, or if it will go through additional changes.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/517387-cdc-says-revised-guidance-on-airborne-coronavirus-transmission-posted-in
= new reply since forum marked as read
there is a quiet "uprising" in there from the career employees where they are trying to "break through" and get the info out there and each time they do, they get smacked down by the appointees and their lackeys.
It's like they're trapped and being held hostage in a dungeon, and are finding any way they can to break through with a message that says that they are there and are alive and well, but are being muzzled. And we just watched the muzzling happen in real-time (just like we saw a sharpie suddenly take a hurricane into Alabama).
And although Bannon has been long gone, his "plans" are in full effect.
By Philip Rucker and
Robert Costa
February 23, 2017
The reclusive mastermind behind President Trump’s nationalist ideology and combative tactics made his public debut Thursday, delivering a fiery rebuke of the media and declaring that the new administration is in an unending battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist and intellectual force behind Trump’s agenda, used his first speaking appearance since Trump took office to vow that the president would honor all of the hard-line pledges of his campaign.
Appearing at a gathering of conservative activists alongside Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order. “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and opposition forces. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.”
He continued, “And that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this, all the people who have come to him and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to moderate’ — every day in the Oval Office, he tells Reince and I, ‘I committed this to the American people, I promised this when I ran, and I’m going to deliver on this.’ ”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html
and it has been a struggle to get anyone just to say that spread can happen BOTH ways. It seems that the purveyors of the knowledge are terrified to characterize what would make sense. Perhaps if they could frame it in terms of percentages or likelihoods, then it could be a measured assessment vs a irrational fear of attempts triggering panic-buying of N95 masks, which would put the onus on the individual vs any facility that has poor air-handling, the latter case being they know that solution can be expensive.
Hell, I think most of us remember this same type of issue with what ended up being called "Legionnaire's Disease", which happened right here in Philly at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel back in 1976. The cause eventually determined to be due to the air-handling (HVAC), with the bacteria having exploded in the water of the poorly-maintained cooling towers at the hotel, and subsequently aerosolizing, with the tiny droplets circulating through the air-ducts, and blowing out into the hotel's guest, dining, and meeting rooms.
Original: Jul 21, 2016
Remembering the Legionnaires’ Outbreak
<snip>
In response to the medical mystery, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) launched the largest investigation in its history. “No previous scientific detective effort in history has approached the scale and intensity of the campaign now under way to track down the course, source and pattern” of the disease, reported the Boston Globe. A team of 20 CDC epidemiologists joined state health workers in scouring hospital records and poring through autopsy findings. Laboratories remained open throughout the night as helicopters flew in the latest blood and tissue samples. In hospitals across Pennsylvania, the medical sleuths interviewed patients about their every move in Philadelphia, from whether they ate the hotel’s go-getters’ breakfast to how many times they rode its elevators.
<snip>
The outbreak of the mystery disease generated intense media coverage. Newsweek called it the “Killer Fever,” while Time dubbed it the “Philly Killer” on its front cover. Most of the media, however, settled on another name for the strange respiratory illness—“Legionnaires’ disease.” As months progressed without the identification of a cause, the medical investigators themselves came under the microscope of public scrutiny—even being forced to testify before Congress.
One frustrated CDC microbiologist, Joseph McDade, decided to redouble his efforts in the days after Christmas. Having cancelled his vacation plans, McDade spent hour upon hour in his laboratory scouring slides that had only been examined in five-minute bursts in the initial rush to find the cause. “It’s like looking for a contact lens on a basketball court with your eyes four inches above the ground,” McDade told the New York Times. After spending a half-hour examining tissue taken from the lung of one of the victims, McDade found the culprit for the disease—a previously unknown bacterium that the CDC dubbed Legionella.
Nearly six months after the outbreak, the CDC announced that it had cracked the case. The Legionella bacteria thrived in hot weather and in water such as the air-conditioning system perched on the roof of the 19-story Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Although Legionella wasn’t found in the hotel’s cooling system because it had been cleaned by the time of its discovery, investigators surmised that the system’s powerful fans emitted a mist of contaminated water that fell on pedestrians on the sidewalk below and were sucked into the lobby through a ground-floor vent where victims breathed in the tiny, infected water droplets. Ultimately, 34 people died and more than 200 became ill from the outbreak during the American Legion convention, and the discovery led scientists to document earlier outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, including one that killed three members of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows who attended a convention in the same Philadelphia hotel in 1974.
https://www.history.com/news/the-discovery-of-legionnaires-disease
In the case of COVID-19, you have a virus (vs the Legionnaire's bacteria), but one where the mechanism of aerosolizing can end up happening in a similar fashion.
This is not a "black or white" issue. There are multiple vessels that this virus can ride to allow it to spread - from the larger droplets that fall to the ground or onto surfaces, to the smallest aerosols that float suspended in the air, and every size droplet in between.
There is no one "uniform size" of droplet. That's not how biology, chemistry, and physics work. It takes years for big pharma to design, develop, and manufacture a device (nebulizer/inhaler) that can consistently emit a uniform particle size (aerosolize) of drug (liquid or powder) upon device activation, in order to be effective in the lungs, so "in nature", it'll never happen on its own if someone sneezes or coughs or even talks. But this doesn't mean that the entire range of sizes don't get emitted when someone sneezes or coughs or talks. There is usually a prevalence of the one and a minimal of the other. But the problem is the "other" (the aerosols), when present, can linger longer because they aren't heavy enough to "fall to the ground". They can travel further and get moved around by air currents and HVAC systems within a room. The larger the room, the more places they can expand to but then since the volume of the space is much larger, this would serve to dilute it (with "outside" being the ultimate sized "room" with near infinite volume for dilution).
The fact that there might not be "more cases" may be because the load was not enough for someone to truly feel any symptoms so they weren't tested. And early on, millions could NOT be tested because states/counties/municipalities were restricting the testing to an extremely narrow set of people - "symptomatic" (and a very narrow set of "symptoms" too - the now-known possible symptoms were not considered "symptoms" back then), "over a certain age", "certain medical conditions", "first responder". If you didn't fit that criteria, you were turned away. So there are probably multiple times more who may have been infected but were never registered as such, and you even have some who went on to get antibody tests that actually confirmed that there was some exposure but those could rarely be verified using the standard PCR tests.
And you are correct about the problems of dealing with aerosolized versions of this virus - and that is why early on, the authorities were initially ruling out masks as being truly effective unless they were at least N95. But they also made the same fatal mistake of assuming that the virus was only being transported in that one very tiny size, completely ignoring the droplet sizes of a typical sneeze or cough that could be loaded with the virus.
So this is why we have all the ridiculous contradictory info out there regarding masks because you have a conundrum of both situations ("large droplet" vs "aerosolized droplet" ) being "true" and "possible", to an infinite combination of degrees, at the same time. The difficulty is being able to narrow the statistical instances of which forms are more prevalent and under what circumstances. The mask prevents larger loads of virus from being emitted, but it is not going to be as effective as a protectiion for the wearer inhaling aerosolized bits of the virus. A cough might emit lots of large droplets but if they manage to get diverted by a fan in the room, they might break up into smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter droplets that get moved a further distance.
There have been many variations of "infographics" published by public and private health authorities that attempted to illustrate a general level of "mitigation" that a mask might provide, and notably in environments where there is active community spread of the virus (this would be for "average sized" droplets) -
As we go into the winter season in the northern half of the country, the concern will then be dry air and heating systems, coupled with finite volume rooms, that might cause some major issues. I had posted upthread about Legionnaire's and how they found the hotel's cooling towers and AC systems actually helped to aerosolize the cooling tower water that the bacteria thrived in, and subsequently spread it through the air in the hotel.