Let’s say LA had 50 super spreaders vs. 25 in SF. I’d expect LA to have more than 2x the cases because of the exponential spread of the virus.
And I think the idea behind masks was not that they’re a cure, but a 2nd best option if the best option of social distancing isn’t possible.
And even if they’re 30% effective, the idea is to get R (the number of subsequent people an infected person goes on to infect) to go down. Because a 30% reduction in transmission has a huge effect over time, even if it’s not perfect.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...
indoor and speaking/singing is the key combination for aerosol based transmission.
The problem in California might be crowding, ie it's not designed for the population density and so everyone has roommates or lives with an extended family. That would cause more indoor transmission, and I believe a lot of cases in CA were among working class people and Latinos.
(Case numbers from usafacts.org.)
Personally, I try to only use excess death figures, because case counts are not comparable due to local policies. E.g. once vaccination started, Israel categorically stopped testing vaccinees unless they show clear covid symptoms; whereas it demands weekly test from many unvaccinated even though they have no symptoms.
Deaths are great measure of how bad you’ve been hit overall, but even if they (when you use excess rather than COVID-attributed deaths) are arguably more reliable numbers, they are a much worse proxy when you are trying to compare effectiveness specifically of infection control measures..That’s because they are extremely sensitive to when a region was hit during the pandemic (because we learned a lot about treatment over time), geographic distribution and time concentration of infections compared to local healthcare infrastructure (was treatment capacity exceeded anywhere, and by how much for how long?), as well as the population age distribution that you can try to adjust for by age normalization.
Every other measure has all of the problems you listed, and in addition it is subject to testing policy differences (including who to test, cycle threshold, and other variables), diagnostic policy differences (e.g., in the UK, death within 28 days of a positive PCR test is classified as death from corona, regardless of what happened since; Death more than 24 hours from a vaccine is assumed unrelated to the vaccine), and explicit number fudging.
There are a near infinite array of othere measures besides exceess deaths that are both comparable between countries and not, even approximately, measuring the thing being discussed, which is COVID infections, like GDP per capita PPP.
Are you aware of any other metric for covid infection, comparable between different countries?
Please pay attention to the examples I already gave about how numbers from Israel and the UK make, specifically, "cases" and "deaths from covid" non-comparable.
And remember that I do not dispute that "excess death" is far from perfect. My claim is that -- inherently -- every other measure of covid infection suffers from the same problems that "excess death" does, and then some.