Smoke is still lighter than an aerosol.
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I had the same thing happen the other day. I had my mask on and someone was vaping about six feet away, and I could smell strawberry. Didnât make me feel very comfortable about my mask effectiveness.
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the stuff youâre smelling in smoke is much smaller than the droplets, like orders of magnitude smaller.
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Also while covid can be aerosolized by stuff like singing or nebulizers, my understanding is that it usually isnât. Otherwise it would be as contagious as measles.
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Same goes for when I smell someone farting for an entire airline flight.
In addition to whatâs already been said, a singular instance of a pathogen coming into contact with you is usually insufficient to cause an infection, and thatâs true of most diseases. For many, you may have to get infected with tens of thousands of viruses or bacteria in order for them to replicate fast enough to cause an infection. With covid, weâre seeing that masks are effective even when they donât totally block aerosols, and most spreader events are superspreader indoor things with lots of people hanging out for a while without masks rather than passing contact. That suggests that it would take a pretty high innoculum in order to actually develop an infection. So, not only are molecules you can smell quite a bit smaller and lighter than even viral aerosols, your nose may also be much more sensitive even to low levels of the scent in question compared to the amount of virus it would take to get a toehold in your body.
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Thereâs no hard line between airborne/droplet/aerosol/whatever, itâs all a continuum. What youâre smelling in smoke can be molecules smaller than the virus itself.
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But yeah, I wouldnât hang out where I can smell someone vaping or smoking, even if I were wearing a mask. Theyâre pretty clearly not containing all their own breath in a mask.
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Fuck the fact that theyâre closed. Czechs hit the mountains every day here. No employees, no first aid. Every child for themselves sledding or skiing down the mountain.
People wonder why there are still restrictions.
Anti-maskers were using the argument that what use is a mask if you can smell farts when wearing them. Same thing here.
I started to add an edit to my post and then thought na JT wonât think Iâm implying heâs an anti-masker 3rd columnist donât worry 
:)
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quick Millman update:
Feb 2nd COVID Mini Update: Tough week.
I mentioned over the weekend that my modeling work has projected that this will be the worst week in terms of US deaths since the pandemic began and should be followed by a significant downturn in mortality.
I neglected to mention that this is the first time the model has ever predicted four back-to-back days of 4000+ dead. Specifically, starting today, 4066, 4382, 4237, and 4181.
Letâs all hope Iâm super-wrong about this.
12 weeks between 1st and 2nd dose looks good, with Oxford.
Oxford vaccine also seems to negate transmission by the vaccinated.
This study - on 17,000 people in the UK, South Africa and Brazil - showed protection remained at 76% during the three months after the first dose.
The UK âgambleâ on the 12 week gap between doses looking like it could pay off, now 90% of the UK population >75yrs and extremely vunerable are vaccinated. 65yr-75yr and vunerable to be vaccinated by end Feb 2021.
As no-one had a guess, let me tryâŚ
AZ approval will not come until the US is satisified with the proposed delivery date. This date may be someway off given the EU approved AZ (Oxford) already and is already realising their contracted x million doses by x date is not going to transpire (similar with the UKâs long pending approval of Moderna, no point approving if you canât get supply)
European Commission advised countries to vaccinate at least 80 percent of those above 80 by the end of March.
The Czech Republic has vaccinated less than 30 percent so far. Ugh. Almost wish I was back in America.
Also is anybody familiar with Bamlanivimab? The Czech government bought a bunch of it to treat covid.
It sure seems like that all the vaccines do a great job of stopping serious disease and a perfect (?) so far record on stopping death.
Great news to see that transmission is confirmed, that as CN as long maintained it would be highly unlikely to see substantial transmission. But good to have the actual data.
Gotta get this thing knocked down faster though. I saw someone online use the phrase "it canât mutate if it canât multiply). We are running such a huge natural selection scheme. Almost identical to what we do in the lab with bacteria and yeast to get around product toxicity. We make it easy that a bunch of little changes can build-up over time by slowly increasing the amount of product instead of trying for one big huge jump.
Thx for bird-dogging the variants. Good stuff.
In the lab
Within AZ Oxford vacinne - different mechanism to Mod / Pfizer who have not yet âcome outâ either way
Yes, Covid has mutated over 12,000 times that the UK has identified already and they reckon they have missed another 3,000 of them. Apparently covid only has 23,000 bases so may have done 75% of mutations already. But, itâs getting better.
Glad I brought you this news Dan, will save us a random twitter link in a couple of weeks time.
Not sure on the English of your post but yes, Brazil and SA variants are already shown to reduce efficacy, not effectiveess yet as we havenât measured that, by up to 30% - so not entirely dodging but reducing efficacy by a third and effectiveness may drop further.
Correction: it was un-canceled. Apparently it was a system error that generated a bunch of cancellation notices. No potential problem there or anythingâŚ
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