14 votes

The sixty-year-old scientific screwup that helped Covid kill

2 comments

  1. riQQ
    Link
    Very interesting to read. It's the general problem that some people already knew the "correct" version, but couldn't make this version scientific consensus. And this one indicates, that we should...

    Very interesting to read. It's the general problem that some people already knew the "correct" version, but couldn't make this version scientific consensus.

    What must have happened, she thought, was that after Wells died, scientists inside the CDC conflated his observations. They plucked the size of the particle that transmits tuberculosis out of context, making 5 microns stand in for a general definition of airborne spread. Wells’ 100-micron threshold got left behind. “You can see that the idea of what is respirable, what stays airborne, and what is infectious are all being flattened into this 5-micron phenomenon,” Randall says. Over time, through blind repetition, the error sank deeper into the medical canon. The CDC did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    And this one indicates, that we should focus way more on having proper air filtering in public facilities like schools or restaurants:

    Working at a VA hospital in Baltimore, Wells and his collaborators had pumped exhaust air from a tuberculosis ward into the cages of about 150 guinea pigs on the building’s top floor. Month after month, a few guinea pigs came down with tuberculosis. Still, public health authorities were skeptical. They complained that the experiment lacked controls. So Wells’ team added another 150 animals, but this time they included UV lights to kill any germs in the air. Those guinea pigs stayed healthy.

    4 votes
  2. ImmobileVoyager
    (edited )
    Link
    That's an incredibly interesting article, of a kind I haven't read in Wired for ages. Great reporting on how science works, or doesn't. says Wikipedia, citing The Lancet, but of course I didn't...

    That's an incredibly interesting article, of a kind I haven't read in Wired for ages. Great reporting on how science works, or doesn't.


    Each SARS-CoV-2 virion is 50–200 nanometres in diameter.

    says Wikipedia, citing The Lancet, but of course I didn't read the paper, who does ? ;-)

    3 votes