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Replying myself to add reference, here:

https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30354-6/pdf

This is all well understood, and studied in considerable depth.

The media overreaction is typical, but here at HN we are better than that and we should strive to rely on established science (where available). No need to throw out extreme or unreasonable numbers!

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See my other comment. I was comparing to one of the viruses that causes a COLD not influenza.

Colds are quite different to flues.

Of course in many ways they are different, but not in the important ones for this discussion.

I used influenza because it was convenient in terms of available research, I could grab in a minute or two, but I'm sure if you care to look you can find similar data for rhinovirus.

Rhinovirus and influenza have very comparable R0's. R0 is the epidemiological measure of the "contagion" factor of a pathogen.

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