Here’s how I understand it and I also could be wrong.
Aerosol = particle size is small enough that the particle floats in the air for some time
Droplet = particle size is too big to float in the air, so it falls to ground or nearest surface relatively quickly
Airborne transmission = Has to be aerosol, and the aersolized particles have to be infectious. For example it’s possible that a virus could be in aerosolized particles in the air, but it is not found in a sufficient concentration where it could infect someone that way. But it might be in a sufficient concentration in a larger droplet.
So aerosolization is necessary for Airborne transmission but not sufficient.
Yes. Viruses don’t like to be dry, and they have to be dry for true airborne spread. Could be that it is airborne but there’s a limited time window that it stays viable in the air, so it’s not as crazy as measles or chickenpox.
My Very crude understanding is that would likely be the difference in R0 is the number of infective particles required to start a new infection plus efficiency of shedding.
Droplet size
large droplets fall rapidly and are more associated with direct transmission -you and me standing close together such that you cough/sneeze right in my face so to speak or smear transmission. I think the is the standard assumption for SARS
Medium-carry enough virus and under the right conditions turn into small droplets via evaporation and stay “airborne”. This is the debate about Covid-19 around the definition of airborne. My guess is this describes primary covid transmission.
Small (“aerosols”). These are the true micro particles that very readily float in the air for true airborne transmission and carry enough virus for something that needs less particles to infect. Think measles.
This is completely an abstract understanding of my reading of the pissing contest about airborne transfer- are the medium particles that evap to smaller particles “aerosols”.
People are trying to fit and define terms as “1” or “0” when in reality there is a continuum of particles sizes, amount of virus to infect, evaporation resulting in smaller droplets with increase viral concentration, tolerance to evaporation, etc.
My conversation w a trumpaholic acquaintance of mine who just sold his bar for about125$k. There’s been rampant speculation about hm “ going off the deep end” etc because the car was his life. I just found out where he’s putting his bar $$
So if they don’t do it, they are risking their business, which is not going to be in great shape if half of their residents are in refrigerated containers.
Not a friend lol . I’m always eager to separate a deplorable from his money. I’ve gotten down 8k at even $ on the dems winning the election in the last month. As gamblers we use money to keep score. I also use it as a measurement gage to see how far gone they are. I suppose I could have debated the positives to wearing masks and changed his mind.
Gonna play devils advocate and put forward a hypothesis
We now know that it was spreading like wildfire in Late February/Early March in NYC. We had zero awareness about symptoms and what to look for.
A lot of the symptoms we now know affect young people don’t resemble typical flu symptoms we would have been looking for. We had no tests back then.
We know a lot of people develop T cells but not antibodies; antibody tests wouldn’t catch these people.
What if everyone in NYC essentially already got this, and the reason we see the age range we see is because primarily old people got sick enough to merit use of the limited testing we had available back then?
That would explain why we are seeing so few deaths relatively speaking from the outbreaks in the South which at worst would only be affecting single digit percentage of the population at the moment…
That guy suffered unimaginably. Basically covid looked like late stage cancer for the last few months. Just got progressively worse, I believe he had a limb amputated. Just awful outcome.
Yes. The main “test” that is reported is the PCR (formally, qRT-PCR) test. This is the test that most sites and states are reporting as their positive cases, and it detects the presence of viral RNA, its genome. It detects an active infection. The antibody tests may detect recovered people, and they would miss pre-symptomatic cases.
My mom called me up and mentioned there’s something extremely weird going on with COVID19 and platelets and bone marrow and kind of cells with a funny name or something but I wasn’t really paying attention, so I’ll try see what she’s going on about later.
