Right but even then it’s a flip. Like to put this in context I was surprised before when I was told that even with everyone in my poker game masked and me wearing an N95, if one person had it we’d all get pozzed.
Meanwhile only 43% of spouses are catching it when their spouse has it?
Like you can sleep next to someone for 6-8 hours and still be < 50% to catch it.
But the other thing is that the study you referenced was for aerosolized droplets not respiratory droplets. My terminology may be wrong here but basically the bigger droplets were what drove the 6 foot rule, the aerosolized spread is what drives like super spreading.
IIRC aerosolized droplets were previously said to survive 3 hours and respiratory droplets like 15 minutes. But they found a large drop in infectivity within 10 minutes on aerosolized droplets. So maybe it’s even quicker with respiratory, and maybe speaking doesn’t aerosolize it?
If only yelling, singing, coughing, etc aerosolize it - and a mask blocks a lot of that - it would probably explain a lot of the super spreading and still allow for the household infection rates to be low.
Yeah I mean it depends on air circulation but mostly I was thinking 10 hours a day in the same house must mean 15+ minutes in close proximity, plus shared surfaces.
This could also be a big part of the fall/winter spread. That’s 50F.
But I don’t think we have much insight into whether it’s behavior, viral load or variance.
Like are the super spreaders members of church choirs and bar-goers who yell over loud music? Or do some people just expel more virus or more aerosolized virus based on other variables such as initial load, immune response, or something physical or genetic?
Aerosols last longer in the air and travel farther than respiratory droplets because the droplets are heavier. There seems to be some debate over the dividing line between aerosols and droplets and I really don’t care to learn about it. They act in the same general way, I would guess, with differences correlating to their size.
For my purposes, I just need to know that masks and social distancing work and that I shouldn’t panic around a maskless person as if it is certain death, although I shouldn’t be happy either.
Yeah, I would like to know more definitively about distance and duration, but it is what it is.
It would be nice to know like an X second maskless interaction with a hug is safe, or maskless conversations inside when X feet apart are safe, or the air is safe X minutes after someone vacates a space.
Millions of young people around the world would volunteer to be guinea pigs to help answer your questions if you paid them a few thousand bucks, (or perhaps cut their prison sentence in half.) It amazes me that stupid “ethical” considerations seem to be stopping that.
You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. You can’t say that those things are safe, you can just say they are safer and you need to figure out what your risk tolerance is and what value of X is sufficient for your goals.
The poker analogy is that you’re the guy on the forum asking how you could have avoided getting stacked. Sometimes, you play it perfectly and get unlucky. There’s going to be some randomness about who gets sick and who dies from COVID. Don’t go nuts trying to find a foolproof solution.
I’ve accepted that I’ve reached the point where knowing more about the current understanding of science won’t help me be safer (but I need to be on top of changes in that understanding).
My dad’s girlfriend just pulled me aside and berated me for neglecting my dad. Chief on the list. Not spending time with him inside and insisting on only walking outside together.
This is the lady who threw him a family birthday gathering with her whole family at the peak of Australias first wave. While he and I made do eating cake outside on his front lawn.
A large proportion of the people who died got infected in exactly those circumstances.
Ughhhh. But of course I nod and make peace to keep the old man happy.
I am not saying that the general concept of “ethical considerations” is stupid. I am saying that it is in this case where the tiny risk is worth the reward (money for the volunteer and knowledge that might save many lives.)
The fact is many young people would probably volunteer for no money at all. Which I believe is now happening in England.
Repeating myself, but it’s pretty effin easy to avoid all superspreader events. That alone would make a huge impact on the spread and likely allow masked and socially distanced OFB and OFS.
I’d love a society that could actually crush the virus but at this point I’d settle for 10,000 a day with a fairly broad spread across the country. And I hate myself for saying this, accepting the stupidity of my fellow lolAmericans.
On the relative risks of human challenge trials, Katharine Wright, assistant director at the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, noted that they take place to test flu vaccines without there being an effective treatment, and all “first in human” trials similarly present unknown risks.
Despite the uncertainty, volunteers are lining up. More than 2,500 UK volunteers have signed up to the 1Day Sooner movement, which has been petitioning parliament to support human challenge trials and fund a challenge study centre to quarantine between 100 and 200 volunteers. Globally, the non-profit organisation advocating for human challenge study volunteers has attracted over 38,500 willing participants.
Volunteers are typically compensated for their involvement in challenge trials. It’s normally in the region of about £4,000, said Catchpole, though that is something the ethics committee will decide.
But people were volunteering for altruistic reasons, said Wright. “People are publicly coming forward to volunteer for challenge trials because they want to help everyone return to ordinary life as soon as possible,” she said. “It’s very impressive … but they have to understand that nothing is certain in research.”
Our first in human trials are all done on patients with cancer who have already failed on available standard of care treatments, so it’s not quite the same thing as healthy volunteers. At least not in oncology.
Understandable, but would it still be possible to get representative results from a potential virus vaccine if their immune systems have already been clobbered by chemo?
Sorry, I’m not suggesting we test Covid-19 vaccine on cancer patients. I’m disputing that persons viewpoint that all first in human trials present unknown risks. We mitigate those risks by trialing potentially dangerous drugs on people that are going to die anyway because they have failed frontline treatments. (And those people do us all a great service by participating in trials.)