Right, but for example, we've been maintaining consistent behavior here for 6 weeks. The rate of new infections increased for weeks after the orders went into place. So each person was infecting more people. Now it has plateaued and started dropping. So each person in infecting fewer. The overall behavior hasn't changed, if anything people are going out more now than before. What's the difference? (You know the answer, you're just playing devil's advocate)
The published rate of infections is necessarily the rate of
known infections, i.e. those which have been tested for and come out positive. The observed rate therefore goes up simply because more people are tested (the USA had a very low testing rate in mid-March; there may be some variability on the dates of testing increases in your area). In other words, the official number infected in the early days of low testing (late March or so) is likely to be a significant underestimate, but much less so now.
Organizations give public statements to impact people's behavior. When the WHO gives a statement about a disease, they know it will impact people's behavior, they're certainly not ignorant of that, and they'll formulate their messaging in a way that will elicit the response they deem desirable. Right now, they are saying things like "people might not develop immunity" because that statement encourages stricter quarantine, and they believe that's the responsible stance to take. When they were saying it might not spread between people, they did it because it would discourage people from cutting contact with China, because they believed that international relations hurting was a bigger threat than this coronavirus. Written public statements aren't quick press conference answers where you answer what's asked or say what you think is interesting. Written statement's are deliberate public relations moves with purpose.
No. They say they don't know if people can catch coivd-19 twice because they don't know. There are proper experiments to do to determine this sort of thing: you can't flip a coin or just open a fortune cookie. South Korea has just today released a study on ~200 subjects (that's arguably quite small) suggesting coronavrius cannot be caught twice at least within the current timescale covid-19's been around. This because bearing in mind some immunities have a lifespan (e.g. why you have booster vaccines) so people immune now might not be in 12 months or 5 years.
The WHO can come out and provide advice like "don't send planes to Wuhan". And they did. They aren't going fanny around with strange "nudge" schemes to subconsciously control behaviour, never mind that the average national government isn't going to fall for that shit, as they tend to be full of hard-headed realpolitik types.
Finally, you know which countries had expert representatives on the WHO council? China, USA, Thailand, Russia, France, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Australia, Senegal, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and New Zealand. That's a majority of Western countries, plenty of which are US allies. Why would they be particularly minded to protect China? Why would the US representative not maybe tell his own country if something dodgy was going on? Not that they're actually politicians, they're scientists and doctors, with far less motivation to fiddle what they say to achieve obscure aims of global domination or whatever other lurid fantasies paranoid Americans have about international bodies trying to take over the USA. I think if you don't understand theh WHO as a scientific / medical organisation and how scientists go about things, you are likely to misinterpret a lot of what the WHO does.
The world health organization didn't make a statement that they have no evidence that covid-19 wasn't planted by space aliens for a reason. You don't give a statement of what you don't know for no reason.
Fucking hell. The WHO is expected to explain what it knows, because issues of how a disease is transmitted and whether immunity is gained are incredibly important for epidemiology, public health and policy. If they didn't say anything about these things, the first thing that would happen is they'd be asked, so the obvious thing to do is say what they know, which might be "we don't know".
There was evidence that the virus moved person-to-person. Taiwan sent their own people there, they saw what was really happening because they didn't trust China or the WHO. They reported it to the WHO and the WHO ignored them.
The evidence from Taiwan was anecdotal and hearsay. It wasn't a study, it was a report that some Taiwanese doctors had been told by colleagues in Wuhan that medical personel were contracting covid-19, which is something consistent with human transmission. That's not even remotely close to enough to base official statements on.
USA
