[0:00]
one thing that has created a really major problem with our ability as a society to deal with Covid 19 is the bad information we got early on on how to control the spread of covid so you probably remember at the very beginning of covid we were told to stand 6 feet away from each other cover your cough or sneeze, wash your hands for a while they didn't even recommend masks but then when they did um they recommended surgical masks or cloth masks 
[0:30]
all of that advice is based on the concept of droplet borne diseases so this idea that a disease that's in your respiratory tract spreads when you cough or sneeze on someone that's why when you're sitting in a restaurant like the idea was like if you're six feet away from someone you're not gonna get it because it's too far away for them to cough or sneeze on you now it turned out that this was not correct it is not true that covid only spreads through droplets through coughs and sneezes 
[1:01]
it actually also spreads that someone's just breathing into the air those um viral particles hang in the air for hours and hours and hours and hours and even from the very beginning in 2020 there were aerosol experts and engineers um lobbying the WHO saying hey we really think this is airborne we think it's fully airborne can you stop telling everybody that it's droplet and the WHO was like no we're good it's not airborne we're sure it's not airborne so after like 
[1:32]
a year of studies truth comes out it is fully airborne and what's even Wilder is that in the process of learning that Covid was fully airborne they discovered that all of these other viruses RSV flus cold all these viruses that you were told to like cover your mouth when you cough and stand far away from someone and don't let someone sneeze on you all of those viruses are also fully airborne that means that if you're in the same room with them you can get the virus from across the room this explains a lot about how we all get sick in the winter 
[2:06]
it also means that these droplet borne precautions were inadequate to control covid to control the flu to control RSV to control colds all of these airborne respiratory viruses and there are a lot of implications to this first of all take hospitals for example in hospitals they have long utilized droplet protections to try and protect people from getting things like a flu or RSV or cold in the hospital so that's why you see so many doctors walking around wearing surgical masks 
[2:36]
or you might see curtains put up yes they're for privacy but also extensively to help stop the transmission of viruses now it turns out that all of these measures are just inadequate that means people in hospitals vulnerable people are getting infected with viruses that now include covid 19 which is everywhere in hospitals that means that all of these protocols should have been upgraded when we learn this but they weren't and actually my most recent article on my substack called the gauntlet 
[3:09]
is about how the who just put out a new document that finally acknowledges there's no such thing as a droplet borne infection that all of these viruses spread through the air but also in that document they stopped short of actually advising healthcare facilities and governments to start recommending and implementing airborne infection control that means that all over the world people are still getting infected with Covid 19 and killed in hospitals so for example a study just came out um about an area in Australia in Victoria um 
[3:43]
that found that thousands of patients have been infected in the hospital and hundreds of those patients went on to die of covid a 10% fatality rate of people who were infected in the hospital with Covid 19 but there are other implications to how messed up it was that the WHO put out this guidance that they were sure it wasn’t airborne um even aside from the fact that hospitals and doctors still don't know how to do proper infection control for Covid there's also just a reality that people are very confused about how covid spreads 
[4:14]
if you're not super in the weeds on covid information you probably still think that standing a few feet away from someone covering your mouth or wearing a surgical mask is a proper way to protect yourself from covid and to be fair those things don't do nothing you should still cover your mouth it's better to be further from someone who's sick and a surgical mask does protect you from disease more than nothing at all but if you really wanna avoid covid you should be taking airborne precautions so wearing a mask that forms a seal around your mouth and nose 
[4:48]
like a K N95 or an N95 mask another problem with this like poor communication that has gone on between the WHO and the public about how covid spreads is that people are under the impression that it is just simply impossible to control covid so one thing you'll hear a lot is like well we already tried you know we did a lockdown we did XYZ we did all this stuff in 2020 and if we couldn't defeat it then then how could we eliminate it now well I hate to break it to you but all that stuff we're doing in 2020 was the wrong form of infection control 
[5:20]
so instead of doing social distancing and telling people to wash their hands we should have been upgrading ventilation and filtration systems cleaning the indoor air we also should have normalized mask wearing instead of stigmatizing it and making it out to be something weird or ineffective it's not impossible to eliminate covid we haven't even really tried to do it yet and the alternative is getting people sick over and over and over again because what we know now is that people have very 
[5:51]
very short periods of time um during which they're actually immune to covid so after a vaccination after an infection some people get no immunity at all some people get immunity that lasts a few weeks a few months at most like a year but for the most part people are getting reinfected with covid every single year that's also because covid mutates a lot faster than we had hoped it would so right now we're coming out of this really large winter wave called J N 1 that was ongoing for months and months and months we're finally at a point where covid cases are pretty low in the community 
[6:22]
but they've already identified a new variant that's beginning to take over from JN.1 it's called KP.2 and within the next few weeks it's gonna start to become dominant and people are gonna start getting sick again because immunity from covid that was acquired from the JN.1 variant that you got this winter doesn't hold up well to K P2 so you can get covid again all this is to say the WHO’s failures at the beginning of the pandemic to properly consider how covid might be transmitting 
[6:52]
Are still with us today people don't understand how covid transmits they don't understand how to reduce the level of illness in their communities or even that it can be done and they're still being exposed to covid and hospitals you can read more about it at the gauntlet check it out at thegauntlet.news