Thread by @studentactivism

Big thread. One big takeaway, though it's not central to Bergstrom's point, is that individuals shouldn't interpret CDC guidance as advice on what's safe for them AS INDIVIDUALS.

https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1479938654579544065

CDC guidance—even good CDC guidance—isn't intended to provide information about when you can be 100% sure you won't infect someone. It's not intended to answer that question, and it doesn't answer that question.

The CDC is trying to articulate policies that are going to keep transmission low while balancing various other priorities. If your priorities aren't the CDC's priorities—and they probably aren't, not exactly—their guidance will be an imperfect fit for you.

Example: At Christmas, when @grammar_girl was sick, leaving isolation was going to mean sharing meals and air with two old people and an immunocompromised teenager. The CDC's "likely to keep transmission rates low for most people, statistically" advice wasn't good advice for her.

And this is true even if the CDC winds up giving good advice. Because the CDC's advice is never going to be "here's what you should do to be 100% sure of never passing on the virus to anyone," because that's not the advice the CDC has been asked to give.

Again: The CDC wants to keep transmission rates low while balancing other imperatives. I think their current balance is a bad balance, but even if their balance was a good balance, it'd still be a matter of managing competing imperatives on a national scale.

I've seen people say "The CDC says you can't transmit covid after five days." But no, that's not what the CDC is saying. The CDC is saying the risk goes down, usually, after five days, to a level the CDC thinks is acceptable provided certain safeguards. Not the same thing.

When @grammar_girl was still testing positive at ten, eleven, twelve days after infection, she and I searched everywhere for guidance as to whether that meant she was still infectious. Couldn't find any from any public health entity. Nothing at all.

@grammar_girl It's hard to figure out what actions you can take to be reasonably certain that you're not putting your loved ones at risk. It sucks that "advice from the government" isn't a category of information that answers that question. But it isn't. Because it's not designed to be.

Again: I think the CDC's current guidelines are bad. But even if they were much much better, they'd still be insufficient.

A lot of people are interpreting the embedded tweet as meaning "The CDC is mostly well-intentioned, but not perfect," and that's at least partly on me—I phrased it imprecisely. My tweet above captures my meaning much more clearly.

https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1480211852462329856

Important to note, though, that the intended audience for this thread wasn't people who already distrust the CDC's guidance, but people—including people who follow me, and who have told me recently that they're doing this—who are using that guidance as a model for their behavior.

I have a tendency at times to phrase criticisms in an understated way so as not to alienate people who I'm trying to communicate with. That tendency served me badly in the above tweet.

But the core message of the thread is a critically important one: Even if you think the CDC is doing a basically competent job (which, again, I don't right now), it's still prudent to always interpret their recommendations as a bare minimum standard at best.