Joe Rogan on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1599
SUBJECT: HEALTH
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
there's also there's no common sense there's no evidence that it spreads outside there's no evidence it's the whole thing is bananas
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Rogan claimed there was "no evidence" that COVID-19 spreads outdoors, criticizing a California outdoor-dining shutdown as baseless. Contemporaneous research contradicts the "no evidence" framing: a peer-reviewed systematic review (Bulfone et al., Journal of Infectious Diseases, published online in November 2020, around the time of this episode) found that fewer than 10% of documented global SARS-CoV-2 transmission events occurred outdoors, and that the odds of indoor transmission were about 18.7 times higher than outdoor transmission (95% CI 6.0-57.9). That means outdoor transmission was not zero: the review's own data confirms real, documented outdoor spread, just at a much lower rate than indoors. So the evidence available at the time showed outdoor transmission risk was real but substantially lower than indoor risk, rather than there being no evidence of any outdoor spread. Whether a specific outdoor-dining ban was well-calibrated policy is a separate, more debatable question, but the categorical claim that no evidence of outdoor spread existed is not supported by the scientific literature.