What's a Coronavirus Superspreader?
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
The point is that superspreader have the same behavior elements of most of the other people on those places, and each of them potentially will go to more big meetings and parties taking few if any measures to avoid keep infeting. You are dealing with clusters of superspreaders, not individuals, that may infect "normal" people as well as not all their contacts with other people will be in big parties.
Good policies to prevent the spreading of the disease should take those clusters and cultures into account.
It takes a combination of 1) high viral presentation, 2) breath activity that generates lots of droplets, such as singing, public speaking, shouting, exercise, cough or sneeze, and 3) a location where lots of unprotected people will breath the same air for a significant period of time.
Preventing the 1st is difficult, we don’t know who is infectious. The 2nd is where masks as source prevention are critical. The 3rd is where social distance and 3C interventions help.
the fundamental attribution error strikes again.
also, you only need masks when you can't effectively distance (i.e., at potential superspreader events, like inside a bar, at a party, etc.).
socialize this one key modification to the rules, and you'd get more compliance and less pushback, with at least the same reduced transmission rate.
you don't need to lock down anything, just distance, and when you can't, mask. self-quarantine when sick. easy, and anxiety-free to boot.
What's the technical path to a airborne virus monitor? Something that sucks in air and detects viruses, and sounds an alarm like a smoke or carbon monoxide detector.
It doesn't have to be very specific to COVID-19, so you probably don't need RNA sequencing. Any significant number of viruses (except possibly a few harmless ones on an allow-list) should be reason to evacuate a building.
I'd also expect that the list of viruses that are worth evacuation over is much much shorter than the sum of all viruses in the air at one time. (Looked it up, looks like 219 viruses that can even just infect us[1] vs hundreds of millions [2])
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3427559/
[2] https://www.virology.ws/2013/09/06/how-many-viruses-on-earth...
It's also questionable if getting everyone to put their lips on and then breathe into the same tube is a good virus containment strategy.
If air (at least up to some height) carries virus in a similar way you should have a lot of usually harmless ones and a few ones in a deny-list)
Idk specifics but I remember reading about projects like these [1] 18 years ago and haven’t seen much development since. I’m sure one of us has more information than I. Maybe they’ve gotten past the perpetual 20 years in the future problem? Regardless, a silicon based particle detector based on the nose is the most promising direction I think to developing something functional.
[1]https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/ne10000000...
Edit: Sounds like some good ol media designed to get attention via fear.
There might be a few people carelessly running around spreading the virus. There are a few documented cases of this happening early on. Possibly there are some individuals who will do this again in time.
How would this invoke less fear than "super spreader"? You just enumerated all the scary things about the phrase.
The article defines a superspreader, but the definition isn't useful:
>"a generic term for an unusually contagious individual who’s been infected with disease. In the context of the coronavirus, scientists haven’t narrowed down how many infections someone needs to cause to qualify as a superspreader, but generally speaking it far exceeds the two to three individuals researchers initially estimated the average infected patient could infect."
Hmm, so granny kisses 2 grandchildren, she's not a superspreader but if she kisses 3, watch out! Pretty vague definition here.
Later the article states:
>"What makes someone a superspreader? We don’t yet know what it is about the biology of some people that causes them to be superspreaders. It might have something to do with increased viral loads and shedding more virus than is normal, but we still don’t know what would trigger this, let alone how to identify it through practical means."<
So it's a term they haven't established a definition for yet, a term for people they cannot identify, and, most of all, it is useless not only for epidemiologists' demonstrably invalid models which did not work before and continue to not work, nor is it useful for anyone else except scaremongers.
This article is beneath MIT. Shame!
Interestingly, people who claim everything about COVID-19 is a conspiracy by the media (or the elites, or whoever) to control the populace with fear are significantly more likely to be superspreaders. Why? Because all the simple, moderately-inconvenient precautions they refuse to take legitimately do slow the spread of the disease. Someone who frequently goes within 6 feet of other people while not wearing a mask and leaves their home more frequently than necessary has a much higher chance of getting the disease, a much higher chance of transmitting the disease to each person they come into contact with while contagious, and also a much higher number of contacts to potentially infect.
The term is actually incredibly useful, even on an individual level - if I'm considering who I'm willing to interact with, someone who's come into close contact with 500 people in the past week while not wearing a mask is significantly more dangerous to me and my loved ones than someone who has come into contact with 50 people at a distance of 6 feet or more while wearing a mask.