Lessons from the Covid War by Covid Crisis Group

Author:Covid Crisis Group [Crisis, Covid Group]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

IMPROVING AIR QUALITY: THE MISJUDGMENT ON AEROSOL SPREAD

In any war, one of the most important jobs is to assess the nature of the enemy. In the Covid war, that meant assessing the virus, how it spread, whether and where it had spread in the United States, and how it was evolving.

The first critical period to do this assessment was in the couple of months between mid-January and mid-March 2020. As we mentioned earlier, the United States could not get critical information out of China.

The most important and fundamental misjudgment about the viral enemy was about how it spread. Early on, the U.S. government and the WHO mistakenly assessed that the virus was transmitted on surfaces, or large respiratory droplets, and that aerosol transmission was rare. The truth was just the opposite.14

Experts, including the Wolverines network, were already calling out this misjudgment and pressing the case for aerosol transmission. Two of us, Michael Callahan and James Lawler, were treating patients on the stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship in February 2020 and noticed evidence of aerosol transmission. Lawler saw the same thing in his medical center. Another one of us, Mike Osterholm, was also arguing that aerosol transmission was the key. A number of other experts were pressing their case by March 2020, partly from analysis of some of the cruise ship evidence, their own observations, and evidence from outbreaks in meatpacking and processing plants. Then came a remarkable outbreak in May 2020 from a choir practice in Washington State.15

Yet the opposing view dominated CDC and WHO guidance through most of 2020. At least until April 2020, and intermittently after that, this mistaken assessment also downplayed the significance of air quality and ventilation. As most Americans remember, what ensued instead was a frenzy of deep cleaning in every part of America. This “hygiene theater” likely contributed little if anything to reducing the spread of the virus.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this misjudgment in framing policy tools and undermining public confidence in expert guidance throughout the rest of 2020 and into 2021, the deadliest and most costly phase of the pandemic in the United States. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it well when she discussed the issue in May 2021:

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