Susan Collins to CDC chief: I used to think your agency was the gold standard but not anymore
A lot of people agree, and not just average joes like me and you or politicians like Collins. There’s an unusual number of stories on the wires today quoting fellow scientists grumbling about the CDC’s self-defeating hypercaution in issuing COVID guidance. Ed already wrote about the most widely circulated one, in which the NYT challenged the CDC’s assessment that
less than 10 percent of COVID transmission happens outdoors. That’s technically true, wrote David Leonhardt, but misleading in the same way that it’d be misleading that less than 10 percent of Americans win the lottery. Outdoor transmission accounts for more like one percent — or possibly one-tenth of one percent — of COVID infections. By being so conservative in its estimate, the agency is misleading people into believing they’re at greater risk outdoors than they are.
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Vox reporter contacted experts who’ve been vaccinated and asked them if they still deem themselves to be at risk from indoor transmission. Nope, not really, they said. Some are still wearing masks but only to protect others from being inadvertently infected by them just in case they happen to be carrying the virus. Others shrugged at the possibility of being infected, noting that “breakthrough infections” tend to be mild or asymptomatic. “I am fully vaccinated and have resumed normal activities,” said one infectious disease specialist in California. “I have gone indoor dining, went to my first movie theater, and would go to a bar if there was an opportunity!”
Collins and other Republicans pressed Walensky on two areas of guidance. One was outdoor transmission, suddenly a hot topic thanks to the
NYT story, and the other was the agency’s already
notorious rules for summer camp, which calls for masking even young children outdoors in the heat. Watch, then read on:
Don’t blame us for the “less than 10 percent” estimate on outdoor transmission, says Walensky. That came from an analysis in the
Journal of Infectious Diseases last November. (“Five identified studies found a low proportion of reported global SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred outdoors ([less than] 10%) and the odds of indoor transmission was very high compared to outdoors (18.7 times; 95% confidence interval, 6.0–57.9).”) But Leonhardt challenged some of the data in that study in his piece this morning, noting that some cases of outdoor transmission in Singapore that influenced the conclusion most likely happened indoors. When he dialed around to epidemiologists, more than one told him they estimated that less than one percent of transmissions happen outdoors.