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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

This is an important distinction for experts who know the terms of art, but for regular people it is maybe misleading to keep insisting that "it isn't airborne".

It is traveling through the air, you can get it, through the air, if you are near another person.

I have seen this misunderstanding in real life. People who think an outdoor festival is safe because "it isn't airborne"

As well, at least one expert, in South Korea, states that it is possible to become aerosolized and actually airborne in the right conditions (many people, singing, shouting, in a small area). Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAk7aX5hksU&t=1559s

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When you tell people who have zero experience or understanding with/of this sort of thing, you end up accidentally convincing them they can only get it through direct contact with an infected person. Without the additional context it also conflicts with the explicit guidance for staying at least 1m away from people.

The “explicit guidance” is also minimally scientific: it varies from 1m in (parts of) Europe, to six feet in the US. These things are being made up on the fly.

There is no solid science for how far apart people should be, and there are so many complicating factors (what kind of room? how much airflow?) that any such guidance is a rough guideline, at best. Folks who are stringently trying to stay six feet apart from each other while walking down the street in Manhattan, for example, are more than a bit silly.

The GP is a reasonable statement of the current scientific knowledge: it isn’t airborne, and you actually do need fairly intimate contact to get the virus “through the air”. Spending hours together in an unventilated room is probably sufficient, even if you never get closer than 1m; conversely, it probably doesn’t matter much if you pass right next to someone on the street(unless they cough directly in your face).

This was one of the things that came up in the meta-discussion last week.

HN loves to make "well ackchuyally" posts that are technically correct but meaningless to the layman. It's a result of the "points scoring" format of the site, same as Reddit. It leads to people having to make cumbersome posts that fully specify every single point that might possibly be the subject of any disagreement, and that's antithetical to good, informative, concise content.

Pedanticism is not the same thing as content. In fact, it usually crosses the rules of the site into "not giving the most gracious possible reading of a comment". And yes, you have to strike some balance between being pedantic and being accurate.

To the layman, if you don't already understand the difference between aerosol and airbone transmission, there really isn't one in practice. Being around an infected person can cause you to become infected yourself, without direct physical c. That is the short and long of it. It doesn't shed off their skin, just when they breathe, or talk, or sneeze, or cough, and potentially can linger for hours. There is no meaningful difference in how you would behave if this was airborne vs aerosol.

Everyone thinks their particular "well ackchuyally" is important, but usually... they're not.

The intentional misspelling comes off as mocking and derisive, which risks undermining the point.

But to that point... I'll admit I have been there. At times, if I'm just relaxing, constant corrections can feel pedantic, endless, tiring, and uncharitable.

I see the other side too though. Other times, I really need a place for careful discussion of ideas, where we all try to contribute what we know and learn from each other, as a refuge from all the places dominated by anti-intellectualism.

So I know it can be draining, but I'd hate for peer pressure from a vocal minority to chill useful intelligent contributions in other threads. I don't want anyone to feel like they'll be made fun of for simply trying to contribute to a discussion.

Unimportant "well actually" posts can be downvoted or ignored. There's no equivalent workaround for overcorrection, no way to save the insightful addition someone never posts to avoid the risk of getting made fun of.

FWIW, the YT video you recommend has a lot of interesting info from the person who’s reportedly Korea’s foremost expert. Among other things, he mentions cases of reinfections.

The reinfection debate has been murky. Is it just a testing artifact, etc? Notably, he did not mention any of these alternate explanations. He stated rather plainly that they have seen cases of reinfection.

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