By The FirstEven the far-left New York Times is now calling-out the CDC’s over-the-top warnings on COVID-19 transmission in outdoor environments, labeling the agency’s risk assessment a “huge exaggeration.”
“When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that ‘less than 10 percent’ of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission. But the number is almost certainly misleading,” writes the New York Times.
“It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark — 10 percent — so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it,” adds the newspaper.
According to the Times and virologists, the actual statistic is likely below 1% and could actually be below 0.1%.
“These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent 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,” concludes the author.
h/t New York Times
