Thread by @JewhadiTM

The CDC is greatly exaggerating the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission.

The agency's disease advice is seen as increasingly irrelevant by more Americans.

reason.com/2021/05/11/cdc… via @reason

“Case in point: On April 27, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky grudgingly acknowledged that fully vaccinated people could gather outdoors and conduct outdoor activities without wearing a mask.

Wakensky cited increasing data that a person is much more likely to get infected with COVID-19 through close extended contacts indoors.

Walensky added, "Less than 10 percent of documented transmission in many studies has occurred outdoors. We also know there's almost a 20-fold increased risk of transmission in the indoor setting rather than the outdoor setting."

However, Walensky and her agency are wildly overstating the risks of getting infected outdoors.

New York Times today:

“That [10%] 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% and may be below 0.1%, multiple epidemiologists told me.

The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.

Saying that less than 10% of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year.

[That number] is both true and deceiving.…

These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10% of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not.

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.”

Keep in mind that the data suggesting that the risk of acquiring COVID-19 through outdoor infection is around 0.1% (1 in 1,000) was gathered before vaccines became widely available.