In a short piece in the Harvard Gazette they note:
Federal agencies helped set the stage for a wave of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories about its origins through early missteps in messaging about the virus and control measures, stumbles that fueled public distrust and hampered government efforts, according to New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. For instance, public health agencies failed to speak clearly and in a timely fashion about how the virus could spread indoors, Mandavilli said in a talk sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication on Wednesday afternoon. Officials initially put more emphasis on hand hygiene rather than masking and erred in communicating candidly about the vaccines and side effects. Anti-vaccine activists used all of that to their advantage. “The lack of honest conversation has undermined trust in public health,” said Mandavilli. “Whenever there’s silence from the public health agencies on the topic, that’s when misinformation gets in, and suddenly, it’s difficult to counter that message because it’s simple; it gives you easy answers; it’s memorable. And once it gets in there, it’s hard to get rid of.”
The above two points are interesting. First, the means of spreading is still an open issue. How big are the carriers, what are the dynamics of the carriers, what is the lifetime of the carrier, etc. There are yet any reasonable well accepted answers. Demos we have, but they are meaningless. Now hands vs communal spread is something that could have been solved. It again begs the question of what the carrier is and what is the lifetime of the virus, with and without a carrier.
The Failure was the Government. It still is.
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