By The FirstThe CDC faced a growing backlash Tuesday after a NY Times report claims their risk assessment for outdoor transmission of COVID-19 was “greatly exaggerated.”
“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.
