(2021-01-31) Tufekci Lessons From A Pandemic Anniversary

Zeynep Tufekci: Lessons from A Pandemic Anniversary. I’m now having “pandemic anniversaries”—anniversaries of tweets written a year ago. (Coronavirus)

There were three pieces of information which, in combination and properly interpreted in context, told us a lot: the WHO repeating China’s cover-up of human-to-human transmission on January 14th; China locking down all of Wuhan on January 20th and admitting the existence of human-to-human transmission; and a paper in New England Journal of Medicine authored by scientists from China, many from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, and some from Hong Kong.

by themselves they couldn’t all be taken at face value

Navigating all this required a theory of theory of knowledge—and an interpretation of how a variety of institutions and people behave—to learn the right information from each development.

First this, on January 14th:
World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

This strongly suggested that there was an ongoing cover-up in China because, at that point, there were many many signs that human-to-human transmission was occurring

Of course, the WHO cannot manufacture information out of nothing. It depends on member states to cooperate. However, whatever the exact source, an ongoing cover-up and delay in response, especially when facing an exponential process, is a five-alarm fire.

The second turning point for me was when China abruptly locked down Wuhan, a city of 11 million.

Closing down a whole city is not something the Chinese government would do lightly at all. It was a very very costly move, and information to the rest of the world that the pathogen was much more dangerous than we had been led to believe. The shutdown necessarily came with the admission that, indeed, there was sustained human-to-human transmission. For the Chinese government to do this turnabout, and at this scale, meant that things were very, very grave in Wuhan, and at risk of spreading to the rest of China in a similar manner

Seeing the Wuhan lock-down was the first time I talked publicly about the pandemic, because it was then incontrovertible that we were risking one.

Finally, the third and final turning point for me was this paper in the New England Journal of Medicine

This was perhaps the first time I felt compelled to step into this space, directly explaining an epidemiological paper to the public, because I felt like we weren’t properly interpreting what we were being told

Why is this paper significant, and why should we believe its accuracy despite being a source from China’s CDC?
Exactly because of the locking down of Wuhan.

From this paper, we learned that most of the cases had never been to the seafood market and that human-to-human transmission had been occurring since December.

But we learned something else very important: The paper explained that some cases either had very mild or atypical presentations.

In addition, Chinese officials were already telling us that the disease was spreading from patients without symptoms.

experts in the US weren’t just asking for more confirmation, but were downright openly skeptical of the possibility of transmission during the presymptomatic incubation period.

I was paying a lot of attention to this question at the time because, while not being a medical professional, it wasn’t hard to realize almost everything hinged on it. For years, I had taught about SARS, not just to teach the sociology of pandemics, but also to teach about how one can think about history and social dynamics in a more comprehensive manner