Back in Feb/March there were epidemiological as well as laboratory studies that strongly suggest covid likes cold, dry air - as do a lot of viruses. It’s how they’re stored so they don’t degrade, right?
All of these links (out of some 400 I have saved) have stuff that I’ve synthesized into my belief that low absolute humidity (which is strongly tied to temperature) is a big factor in virus longevity - which equals transmission rate and initial viral load of infection. If you really want me to pluck out the quotes I will.
without looking, i’m guessing this isn’t true. will come back with an edit.
edit: got through the first three. nope, i’m out. Nothing in feb/march. Closest uses data to April. There was a bunch of very preliminary work, calling it ‘strongly suggest’ is just overstating things… and always was.
Quick note, this passage is exceptionally stupid:
The temperature dependency is also clear within the United States, Dr. Bukhari said. Southern states, like Arizona, Florida and Texas, have seen slower outbreak growth compared with states like Washington, New York and Colorado. Coronavirus cases in California have grown at a rate that falls somewhere in between.
In reality, different viral loads before any distancing measures were in place were key. Arizona, Florida and Texas would go on to have disastrous summers.
Then I’m going with Fauci>Rand in this one and any partial is essentially insignificant at this point. Even in NYC which has a much higher sero-prevalence than Florida et al.
Specifically asked and answered by an expert who if anything is being pressured to downplay the virus.
I think what suzzer is trying to say is if you assume 20% of people are immune then all things being held equal less people will be infected now than when we had 0% of people with immunity. That is almost certainly true. I think the only mistake he is making is the terminology he is using. If I am off there please explain why.
Yeah, we have 200k vulnerable folks that can’t get it now, and some millions of people that have had it and recovered and probably won’t be getting it again for a while. Combine that with the few remaining nutters like us that don’t go out in public, and the benefit that the millions of folks that are wearing masks provide, and we don’t see a curve shooting the moon.
That categorically is not “herd immunity”, but rather some backpressure against exponential and explosive growth.
All evidence points to the vast majority of the impact of weather on the spread relating to people’s behavior. Gathering outdoors is way less bad than indoors. So 65-75 degrees is the sweet spot. Too high or too low and people go back inside.
Does it make you uncomfortable even a little bit that you’re on the same side as right wing nutters with this argument?
I don’t think this is as much of a thing as we think it is. In my last couple of weeks in Philly I saw more and more people going maskless, riding elevators maskless, etc. While moving I had to pass on two elevators in a row to avoid riding one with a maskless person.
I think a whole new group of high risk people are stepping up to fill the void. I also think all these people sitting at outdoor restaurants maskless before and after their meal are going to move their maskless selves inside the restaurants in a couple weeks, take their infected selves to Thanksgiving and Christmas parties that will be maskless, and we’re going to see this thing explode almost everywhere. In Dec/Jan.
It also hasn’t burned through all the vulnerable. Quite a few have been very lucky so far.
Every time Randy opens his mouth the response should be “Are your ribs herd-immune from being re-broken from when your neighbor beat your ass that time?”
Yeah, this is a good way to explain it. Have to bifurcate the pool. There is nearly full herd immunity among people that have been YOLOing it or forced to go out for work since March but if/when people who have been relatively careful the whole time start going into full OPEN FOR BUSINESS mode then the virus will spread like wildfire again and the immunity of the YOLO crowd will just be an insignificant speed bump in the spread.
The thing is, there are a lot of respiratory viruses that aren’t seasonal. And these zoonotic diseases are their own ballgame. We can speculate, but there’s a lot we just don’t understand right now.