May 11, 2021: Great Outdoors -

Debunking is a special art form, and this piece by David Leonhardt on A Misleading CDC Number is a fine piece of debunking.  

Bottom line:  The CDC has said there is a less than 10% chance of catching COVID outdoors, when it’s a less than 1% chance, possibly a .1% chance.  How can this be? It’s because different places and different governments defined “outdoors” differently, and Singapore defined all construction as “outdoors” even if it was actually construction indoors, and … basically, there you go. Read the article if you want more. It contains this succinct comparison:

“Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.”

Leonhardt wrote to the CDC asking them to justify saying “less than 10 per cent,” and got a bureaucratic response from an unnamed official there:

“10 percent is a conservative estimate from a recent systematic review of peer-reviewed papers. CDC cannot provide the specific risk level for every activity in every community and errs on the side of protection when it comes to recommending steps to protect health.”

This reminded me of when I was pregnant and I stumbled across a slim but mighty library book, title now lost in the mists of time, but which should have been called “Scary Studies You Will Read When Pregnant, And How Not to Panic about Them.”  I worked for a book company back then. I wish I had bought ten copies, using my employee discount, so I could have given them to anxious friends.

The book had chapters like “Studies about sugar,” or “Studies about coffee,” and then it would analyze the methodology of widely-cited studies with confusing and conflicting results. It would turn out that one study defined “moderate” coffee drinking as a cup a day, “heavy” as two cups a day;   another defined “moderate” as nine to twelve cups a day and “heavy” as thirteen or more; a third looked only at NEVER-coffee drinkers vs EVER-coffee drinkers. Furthermore, one had only twenty women in it, and they were all … whatever, all white, all young, all medical students on rotation, and since one of the resulting kids had twelve toes, well, then:  BEWARE! Five per cent of children born to women who had ever sullied their lips with even ONE cup of coffee might have Excess Toes. (I exaggerate. Not much.)

My obstetrician used to say, “We try not to DO experiments on pregnant women, you know,” and he meant exactly what the book meant at the end of every chapter: Hey, be prudent, don’t do anything extreme, err on the side of caution, but also, don’t freak out. For a certain personality type (mine), that book was a godsend.

Leonhardt summarizes:

“[T]he scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.’s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors.”

I think wearing a mask has become something other than a science issue on the streets of Portland, and has turned into a courtesy marker, a tribal marker, a style statement. Which is fine.  It can be like fleece and flannel, just a thing we do more than folks do in some other places. Or it can be like that for a while, for now, while things are in transition. Whatever works. I’m not writing this to protest masks outdoors. I’m not on a crusade to beat up the overly-cautious CDC. I am just grateful for an explanation of why the data on outdoor transmission has been goofy (mostly because Singapore coded all construction as an outdoor activity). I grasp that if people wear masks outdoors, they will have those masks with them when they go indoors, so...  etc. Good point! I just think many people are grownups, and can handle a simple rule of thumb. Plus, I am a fan of a good debunking.