Sorry that you decided not to go. Personal responsibility is key. But who knows whether next year will offer the opportunity? COVID transmission is not as easy as promoted and certainly not stopped by a mask or six feet. Be well and blessed.
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Incorrect @pax4pax. Not even going to waste time re-explaining what the vast majority of the scientists and doctors continue saying about the importance of masks and social distancing. You are either helping solve the problem or you are part of the problem.
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That’s an impressive logical contradiction.
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I’m going to push back a little on the previous two posts. pax4pax said covid transmission is not stopped by a mask or 6 feet. That’s absolutely true. Distancing and masks reduce the chance of transmission, but they certainly don’t stop it.
Show me this research please. Where do you see verified cases of contracting covid where everyone was social distanced at least 6 feet and everyone was wearing a mask? (Not including surface contractions). Please link it.
“Not as easy as promoted” is a message that undercuts the severity of where we are right now. Over half a million dead worldwide in a few short months…1/3 of that here is the US, and this disease has only just begun to wreak havoc on the US and other countries that aren’t taking it seriously.
What i keep repeating is… Why take unnecessary risks that may lead to death of you or a loved one? It baffle me more every day. Anti-maskers are a scary bunch of idiots.
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While I’m certain that neither is an absolutely 100% solution (there will always be outliers) there’s no doubt that they’re the most effective tools we have and that we’d have been in a tremendously better position if more people had been more diligent about doing both sooner.
It’s still possible to freeze to death with a warm jacket on… but the anti maskers logic equates to saying “a jacket can’t protect you from the cold you might as well be naked in sub-zero temps”
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For masks, data shows a risk reduction of between 24% and 99% depending on which type of mask, the duration of contact, and the distance from the other person.
For distance, the rate of transmission in contact tracing is 17% at 3 feet and 3% at 6 feet. So again, it’s a risk reduction but not a risk elimination.
Basically, all of these epidemiological interventions are like slices of Swiss cheese – each one has massive huge holes the virus can (metaphorically and literally) float through. But if you stack a whole block of several slices of cheese together, the risk of transmission goes down radically.
I’ll try to find some studies in a bit, but I have to make the kids dinner.
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I don’t understand your outrage.
Here, let me google that for you. !g scholar covid mask efficacy
Masks remove lots of virus particles. They don’t remove 100% of them. It’s still possible to catch the virus while wearing a mask.
Of course we should wear masks when we go out, but masks and social distancing don’t 100% stop covid transmission. Do you truly think otherwise?
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True. But that’s not what pax4pax said. There were two claims. The first was that covid doesn’t spread as easily as some folks think. The R value is thought to be somewhere around two, which means that if you’re sick, out of all the people you interact with, on average about two other folks will catch it from you. Not everybody you meet, only two of them. The second claim was that masks and distancing don’t completely stop transmission. pax4pax didn’t say wearing a mask is stupid so don’t bother. That’s why I pushed back on the following posts.
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For some reason my phone isn’t allowing me to highlight and quote posts so bear with me.
It’s distinctly possible I misunderstood him…
First of all covId spreads far more readily than anyone thought earlier on. Not too many weeks ago the WHO was telling us there was no evidence of human-human transmission. Now they’re saying it’s aerosolized and you can catch it from someone who was a room 2-4 hours before you were even if you don’t touch anything… so I strongly disagree with the sound bite that it doesn’t spread as easily as some folks thought… I think it spreads far more readily.
The second claim was that masks or distancing “certainly won’t stop it” (again sorry if not precise having problems with phone.)
Well that’s an absurd proclamation. Will it stop every single virus cell from infecting another? No. Will it cut in in half, quarters, tenths or less? Yes. Will each of those people no longer continue the R 2+ you noted… absolutely. It’s absurd to say it will not stop it. It’s not 100% effective… a concept that was not proposed, but still the only way to stop it.
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Btw this conversation will make no sense because claud blocked me for being a republican so it’ll be difficult to connect the dots when people are responding to both of us
Bottom line for me it’s that there seemed to be a downplaying of the severity of what we are experiencing right now. I took his comments as, “come on! Live a little! Get out there and mingle… Covid isn’t that bad.”
Maybe i misread the message. If so my apologies.
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Oh, I see. Through my lens it read more as find a balance. He said ‘sorry [someone] didn’t go and personal responsibility is key, yet who knows whether next year will offer the opportunity.’ What I took from that is that it’s sad [someone] had to miss something nice, and though each person needs to do the right thing for themselves and the common good, perfection is out of reach so don’t accidentally miss the parts of life that make it worth living by overstriving for that last bit of additional safety. Masks aren’t perfect, distancing isn’t perfect, but if we take care we can manage a really good level of safety without giving up everything.
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I follow the state-by-state population average reproduction rate at https://rt.live/
These days it’s running pretty close to 1.1 as broad averages for many states, meaning each group of 10 sick people passes covid along to about 11 other people. Florida and Texas are in trouble now because of localized hotspots where it has grown fast recently, but statewide they’re having R values of 1.18 and 1.13 respectively, so overall it’s not spreading like wildfire, it’s just steadily chugging along and incrementally adding victims.
I don’t think it’s well characterized yet. There seems to be increasing evidence that it lingers in the air a bit rather than just being a matter of directly catching someone’s sneeze or cough, but you still have to gather up enough virus particles to get sick. Like maybe 1000 or 10,000. So if you go into an empty room after a sick person left, even if the air is pretty stagnant you might have to stay there and breathe for a good while to vacuum up enough virus to get an infectious dose.
Sure it’s not for those sunglasses in your photo? Couldn’t that be the reason? As a nation we’re getting entirely too clannish and factional. Whatever happened to chewing it over together and working it out despite our differences? We don’t have to agree on everything to respect each other as people of good will.
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Hey those are Sunclouds… they’re not bad for a middle class working stiff! I’d have updated it if I had a better picture taken any time in recent years. I ageee the divisiveness isn’t helpfull in our country.
@bkh, that R0 hides a lot of variability, about 80% of cases are attributed to about 10% of people…Also the newer estimates of biological R0 (sort of the intrinsic transmissibility of the virus are closer to 3.
There’s also a little bit of circumstantial, not-yet confirmed data suggesting the virus has become more transmissible than it was in Wuhan:
https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-mutation-explained.html
Our current Rt is WITH a modified lockdown in most of the country, with most of those superspreading events foreclosed by outright bans.
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also, sorry to be so annoying but I just want to make sure everyone has (what we think so far) is the most up-to-date info. WHO didn’t say “you can catch it from someone who was in a room 2-4 hours before you were, even if you don’t touch anything”
Here’s what they actually said: “aerosol transmission can’t be ruled out” and that it’s possible it could be a factor in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces. However, the transmission dynamics and contact tracing make it clear this NOT a primary method of transmission we should be overly concerned about. The virus is scary enough, but a typical surgical mask is going to be protection enough for most people.
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I always appreciate your clarifications and elaborations. Yes, I believe in the “superspreader” phenomenon, although I hadn’t heard the 80%/10% figures. And from a practical perspective I’m more interested in the effective R value achieved by the behavior of the population than I am in the underlying property of the unconstrained virus. But it is interesting that R0 is now closer to 3 than 2. Can I safely jump to the conclusion that it’s 3 not because of a better understanding of the original virus, but because of the virulence of the current strain?
Thank you. That is a valuable service to our community.
I thought the general assessment was a bit stronger than the WHO’s cautious statement of mere possibility, driven by several investigations of spread patterns in church congregations and concurrent restaurant diners.
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I think the WHO itself is saying that while it’s possible, it’s not driving transmission. I agree not every expert is as cautious as the WHO and many are convinced some aerosol transmission is going on aside from in hospitals, where intubation clearly makes it happen. There are a handful of cases (Singapore church pew, choir practice in Washington, restaurant with A/C in China) that are strongly suggestive of this, but the problem is that those could have also been situations with some contaminated surfaces or potentially even droplet transmission.
I think the problem is really one of terminology more than anything. When infectious disease folks say “airborne” they mean things like tuberculosis, measles, and other diseases with much higher R0s (anywhere between 10 and 15 for a lot of these). These diseases really do spread that way often, which is where, say, you walk into a large room, cough once, 30 minutes later someone pops in to the other side of the room and gets measles from you. That’s not going on in very many cases – when we do contact tracing, we don’t find connections in place that are separated in time, that you’d expect if these diseases were airborne in that sense. In addition, if airborne transmission were a problem, then all the healthcare workers relying on surgical masks instead of N95s would have higher rates of COVID-19 from patients; but in fact, they often have lower rates of positivity than are prevalent in their communities as a whole, suggesting that the masks are working.
Now, can the virus spread as aerosols? Almost definitely…but if those aerosols dry out quickly and have a much smaller infectious dose of the virus, they may be mostly unable to make you sick unless there are a ton of them swooping into your nose. Disease transmission rates are telling us that mostly not happening.
The WHO represents every country, including really poor ones. So they recommend interventions that provide the most bang for the buck. Most countries can’t afford N95s or UVC lights or to reconfigure the ventilation systems in indoor buildings. Social distancing, hand washing, masking, and effective test/trace/isolate have been shown to work even in really impoverished, war-torn countries, so that’s what they’re pushing. They don’t want to focus on airborne transmission because it’s not clear that will help kill this pandemic.
I think they have some issues with their messaging, but I understand the rationale for their guidelines.
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The debate between infectious disease specialists (who overwhelmingly dominate in WHO) and indoor pollution/aerosol engineers has been fascinating. This is nicely summarized in this news feature in Nature. Two of the signatories to the commentary asking WHO to take the transmission via aerosols more seriously happen to work in my institution, in a different engineering department. They’ve been pulling their hair about WHO’s muddled messaging and in their view inadequate guidance that’s been heavily centered around just two transmission pathways: droplets (via direct ballistic trajectory) and fomites (droplets that deposit on surfaces), while essentially ignoring aerosols. None of the aerosol engineers are saying that sars-cov-2 is airborne in the sense of measles. They are simply pointing to the fact that small droplets in the order of a few micrometers can linger in the air for many minutes and can easily flow around over distances that are far longer than 1 or 2 meters. This, in fact, could easily be as important transmission mode compared to large ballistic-trajectory droplets, and possibly a far more important driver than transmission via fomites. Opening windows and ensuring good fresh air circulation does not cost anything. Outdoor is generally far safer than indoors - I do not think anyone disputes that. Masks are not full proof but are far more effective than nothing against both ballistic droplets and aerosols. Wear masks in public, period. Why add “when distancing is not feasible qualifier”? WHO still seems to be behind on simple and effective messaging. They really should get some engineers on board.
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