Posted on by Californiacontrarian

C D C

Should CDC stand for Consistently Damn Confusing ?

Friends of mine just returned from Hawaii. Apparently it was quite nice, as Hawaii is usually nice. The one bugaboo, besides the frequent Covid testing that was necessary to travel into and out of the island state as well as with inter-island travel, was the wearing of masks on the beaches. They related that everyone was wearing masks while walking on the beach, and if perchance you did not wear one, you got the steely-eyed intimidating stares. I could relate to that, as the last time I walked on the beach here, it was the same. The only thing more insane in the “wear a mask, or else religion” is the wearing of a mask when driving alone in a car. Huh??

What does the CDC say about wearing a mask while strolling on a beach? Keep in mind that the source of most mask confusion these days is actually the CDC (in addition to the mainstream media). Sometimes I wonder if the CDC has hired a special speech writer/editor whose job it is to make all of the CDC’s statements confusing. If so, give him/her a raise!

The following is from the New York Times:

“When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizationsrepeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.”

However this statistic is very misleading for a number of reasons. First of all, what does “less than 10 percent”  actually mean? Does it mean 9.9 percent? Does it mean 5 percent? Or does it mean 0.1 percent? All of these numbers are “less than 10 percent!” To me this “less than 10 percent” is deliberately misleading if the true incidence is anything other than 9.5-9.9 percent. (Note that “deliberately” is my emphasis!) 

As best I can tell the incidence of outdoor transmission can be much more accurately stated as less than 1 percent, and perhaps even closer to 0.1. percent. Again from NYT:

The benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.

Apparently there is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.

Hmmm!

But it gets worse (NYT again):

If you read the academic research that the C.D.C. has cited in defense of the 10 percent benchmark, you will notice something strange. A very large share of supposed cases of outdoor transmission have occurred in a single setting: construction sites in Singapore!

Likewise in a study, in which 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.

This is obviously a big mess, and apparently had to do with what is considered indoors versus outdoors in the Singapore data base. Did the CDC actually read any of the studies from which it abstracted its data? Hmmm! Double Hmmm!

To me there are two possible conclusions here:

First, mask wearing is not necessary outside except in extraordinary circumstances.

Second, the best thing would be to ignore the CDC completely.

5/13/21

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