This feels like an absurdly bad-faith attack to me. It's true that there were no studies on *6 feet specifically*, but there is a mountain of evidence showing that social distance reduces COVID transmission.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/02/six-foot-rule-covid-no-science/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/06/02/six-foot-rule-covid-no-science/
Comments
You can't study 5 feet vs 6 feet because it's impossible to measure! It was always going to be a rule of thumb.
And there’s the answer. I mean, they acknowledge it and still keep poking at Fauci anyway.
ok have fun dying
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39939417-five-feet-apart
https://bsky.app/profile/arrannz.bsky.social/post/3lpp746sgac2g
I wouldn't expect everyone to know that, but I'd hope someone writing for a big name paper would be aware.
Also: children: famously known for being germ factories in normal times treated as if they were suddenly better at hygiene than doctors
Yes, there are absolutely people who think that.
My interest is weirdly shifting away from the game, and into testing the limits of what people will take literally/be pedantic about.
it's an arbitrary limit, meant to motivate examination of the hazard. it does not mean that 50.1 volts is instantly fatal or that 49.9 volts presents no danger
he was caught lying and being a businessman more than once, he flip-flopped a couple times about important parts of covid response for mainly political reasons, and he generally spread FUD bc of his elitist distrust in the public
One of the sides didn't want test data because it might make some people sell some stocks.
The other side was fighting a disease.
What did he know? When did he know it, and why didn’t he do anything about it then?
45 had access to intel but refused to warn the country. He, his son-in-law, and the right wing politicized it, hoping to cause further harm b/c of political ideology.
There is simply no perfect way to communicate with hundreds of millions of people in the middle of a rapidly evolving pandemic.
The WHO's tweet from March 28, 2000 is still posted "FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne." [their emphasis, not mine]
(The collective *waves hands dismissingly* for literally 1+ million lives less than 5 years later. Batshit
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
It clearly worked.
I think the legalistic “what are my personal rights” approach common in the UK and US failed because it can’t encapsulate shared risk.
"Pull the mask over your penis-nose and give me space - not arms length, a whole 6 feet. 2 meters if you're a Canadian, bitch"
Filtering the air is expensive and time consuming. It was done eventually but it took time and people were already dying by the wardful.
6 feet is easy and cheap and can be implemented immediately.
Same way that it only counted as in school exposure if it lasted 15+ minutes instead of 14
Normal humans grasped the fuzziness but officials took advantage of false precision
Note to US readers: 2 meters is just over 6.5 feet. Even the Canadian government was saying ‘yeah, roughly that far’.
The national parks had some funny pandemic themed signs about distances from animals iirc
I know this, because I was in a cancer infusion ward with my parents, and a nurse told us none of us needed to mask because she was 6 feet away so we *couldn't* get sick. She spread her arms to demonstrate.
In the real world you just have to pick a number and let people eyeball it.
Am I only now discovering that this had no scientific basis!?
6 foot was a rounded measure but it did have a scientific source.
Would be preferable to that than having someone cough on the back of your neck at least.
Of course, people need to realize, these things werent meant to be singular rules. They are designed in conjunction with others!
You social distance AND wear masks, and get vaccinated.
...yes these are all people that think speed limits are tyranny.
...yes even the ones who were highway patrol which is more than one of them.
It's like that Family Guy scene where Lois realizes it's just easier to say "terrorism" than have an actual political platform.
In the pandemic we were told to "run a light" into the body. There is no science to support that.
In the pandemic, we were told inject bleach. There is no science to support that.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marjorie-taylor-greenes-attacks-of-fauci-over-covids-six-foot-rule-not-based/
Of course, good ventilation is very expensive and hard to implement quickly.
what was the crucial, obvious, thing we should have done at that moment in time with present moment knowledge that the public would have not rejected?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
6 feet = better
10 feet = great
over Zoom = ideal
all seemed pretty logical to me
Unless you think standing right next to a smoker is the same experience as standing 10 feet away upwind.
Dry air better than wet air.
Not talking (like on a train) better than talking (like in a restaurant).
Every thing has its slightly better or slightly worse and they all add up.
Dry air the virii have less water to hide in before they die from dehydration or light exposure. More water in the air will block more UV...
Yeah, it's the sum of all the parts.
Next up: We demand an apology for "Change your Clock, Change your Smoke Detector Battery" campaigns because batteries can fail at other times
because Covid is airborne, the distance between two people is a very minor factor compared to airflow (particularly inside vs outside, plus quality of air filtration)
6 feet was an artifact of the early droplet theory that never got updated
we got stuck. I get why we got stuck but there's a lot to learn from it.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
WHO was also major contributor to the entrenchement of the erroneous droplet-dogma...with the result that tons of people, at least here in Switzerland, still think of 6 feet as a kind of magical protection & never learned about Aerosols
It just did this with loads of dead weight welfare loss, and displaced needed air quality discourse 🤷♂️
It’s healthy to limit exposure to bull 💩
I have no words.
because it’s very measured and admittedly makes a solid point about how hysteria and social pressure often usurps actual science in the midst of a panic. it’s not anti health or anything. ffs
https://bsky.app/profile/michaelhobbes.bsky.social/post/3lpp6tqa5rs2w
TL;DR: Informed guesses are okay in a new public health emergency.
So many failings in welfare [largely because of conservative politicians disdain for the poor] that aggressively punish people with instant cutoff the moment they get even the smallest bit of a stable income.
Nor being allowed to buy pre-prepared hot food.
http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-six-feet-away-rule-is-woefully.html
original paper: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2763852
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1478804143837954056.html
But as you say - number also chosen as easy-to-communicate and practical.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/covid-airborne-spread-how-to-prevent-b1993267.html
# source particles x exposure time ÷ distance - shielding
distance is one of the factors. if you halve the distance, other things being equal, you can remain there for half as long!
The 6 ft thing ended up being dumb b/c we didn’t take COVID seriously enough, not b/c we took it too seriously.
But he put the burden entirely on the people making the determinations of 6 feet and masks, etc.
It’s easy to say “you don’t know if it’s really 6 feet!” But it’s BS just the same
And if you let one county party, everyone from the county where it's bad would go there!
“in hindsight, there were significant logistical consequences of ‘6 feet’ becoming the absolute standard despite being an arbitrary number. 3 feet might have been just as good. let’s learn from this”
become
“liberals decided doing anything collectively for public health was overreach!”
Both the Trump and Biden CDC pushed this anti-science narrative for Capitalism vs the millions dead or disabled
But also the 6ft rule doesn't do much when it's aerosolized, but that's a different argument.
Instead, we have a political football.
Flu, norovirus, and colds all stopped their normal seasonal circulation in late 2020. That’s pretty strong evidence social distancing works at stopping disease spread!
https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/php/reporting/norostat-data.html
But also is there a reason you've suddenly picked it up in 2025? Was it making the rounds elsewhere or something?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7462404/
Probably that fuckwad denied CoVID.
So much of the advice was "we think it will work because it works for other diseases and the negative effects are minimal".
The original study took place in darkened rooms to prevent participants knowing which study group they were in.
A followup study had participants don ICE style hoods in lit rooms for researchers to evaluate concussion-causing events. Minimal COVID transmission at any distance!
And in any case, as I explicitly said, exposure to the viral load in a droplet or droplets is much more likely to cause infection than exposure to airborne particles, especially over a short duration.
So there is good evidence that a 30 second stretch works as well as a 60 second one. But a 20 second one isn't.
Is the key time 25, 28, 29 or 30 secs ? That is less important. 30 secs is good. Do your stretch for that.
It’s going to be a very difficult fall and winter. People will get sick, people will die.
But there’s even less political desire to blame fauci for being overly permissive.
doi: 10.1164/rccm.202004-1263PP
I'd call this an empirical best practice - I think it was very reasonable advice, based on what was known at the time.
Fuck the Bezos Times forever.
Health officials were making impossible decisions based on what they learned daily, while thousands were dying every day, in a country where half the population thought it was a hoax. Let it go.
when i say i'd rather a vaccine than a DISEASE they shrug and laugh. Don't know the difference between measles and shingles either.
it sucks, people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2862334/
If people gotta visit public indoor spaces it'd be hard to navigate much above that. Especially without having to stay breathing the same air for longer.
NPR posted this a year ago.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/06/21/g-s1-5705/coronavirus-faw-if-youre-still-trying-to-stay-covid-safe-does-the-6-food-rule-matter
I remember seeing a twitter post back in 2020-2021
Of course it is! These people are denying germ theory.
I'm going to assume the safest distance is as far away as one can stay.
In the UK could have avoided lockdowns with the right interventions and public adoption of early precautions. The political decision to minimise Covid led to deaths and starker interventions.
Am I going to die immediately while you get to live?
Science failed us. Let's kick all the scientists out of the country.
they might want to pass on this.
Dilution reduces viral load!
Zero.
Distance is kind of the first, most basic protection against catching illnesses, if my common sense is leading me right
i agree, absurdly bad faith
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(20)31364-1/fulltext
*some of which might even be correct.
We just don't know yet. You can go out and find out. Or just don't worry about it. If it affects you, someone will tell you.
Why is this in the newspaper, the time spent writing and editing this could’ve been spent licking doorknobs and drinking raw milk
In the other we got 6 ft and plexiglass barriers as mitigations with no evidence at all. And then a ‘sterilizing’ vaccine that wasn’t.
Is there not an evidence problem with that?
Assumptions about a vaccine led to ‘once you’re vaccinated you don’t need to mask’ recommendations.
So that lack of evidence likely caused harm to a bunch of people.
Again, no evidence supporting it beyond faulty inference.
Obviously the more we learned, those guidelines were relaxed.
Recommending distance would have been a great idea, recommending 6 feet specifically was a mess.
"it says 6 feet!"