Carl Zimmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…The common cold is airborne, measles, many, many other things. The common cold is a kind of coronavirus, right? So, even taking their bureaucratic nature into account, I still find it utterly baffling that they would’ve resisted that rather than issuing open statements that would’ve given them an out in either direction. How do you model them bureaucratically? I think public health is just a really challenging line of work just because you want to reduce death and disease by coming up with measures that are going to apply across the board to the public, and that depends on what you understand about the disease you are trying to deal with. Then, when you’re dealing with diseases where we don’t know that much about it yet, you’re in a very tricky situation. Do you go extremely cautious and say, “This could spread in any different way, and we have to completely silo ourselves off”? Or do you say, “Well, we don’t have clear evidence that it’s airborne, so you don’t have to worry about that”? Where do you draw the line? Public health policy is a hugely difficult and contentious area. It has been since the start of public health. Now, along with that, there’s the scientific question of whether these things are airborne or not. You mentioned measles, for example. It wasn’t until the 1970s that people really agreed that measles are airborne, even though it’s incredibly airborne. It’s the most contagious disease that we know of. COVID might be in the same ballpark now, but it took a long time for people to amass the evidence, to really persuade the community. What’s the rate of return to further investment in ultraviolet lamps now?…

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