Why admitting Covid is Airborne is so hard

We have to realize that medical doctors are not, as a rule, scientists. They typically get their doctoral degrees without personally ever doing any actual science, beyond pre-cooked experiments in lab classes. Instead, they have read a great deal about what other people who did science said. But what people say is not the same as what they do, and paying attention to what they say is not a substitute for doing what they did.

Instead, doctors are obliged to memorize a great deal of what they are told are facts. Probably most of what they are told really are facts. But there is nothing systematic distinguishing facts with a great deal of support from those that are just repeated lore, like the business about airborne disease transmission.

Doctors have rejected evidence for airborne transmission because it contradicts what they were taught are facts, with no warning about how shaky any asserted fact is.

Another source of resistance is that facts, to be believed, need a theory. A fact without a theoretical mechanism by which it must operate is rejected. We saw that for cholera before germ theory made sense of it.

For a current example, in doi:10.1093/gerona/glab115, it turns out that having had a recent TDAP vaccine (which you can ask for at any pharmacy) turns out to predict, very robustly, a 40% decrease in onset of dementia among patients at an age where they are at risk for it. A 40% effect size is enormous! At this point, nobody knows why. Is it the tetanus, the diphtheria, the pertussis antigens? Or something else mixed in? Nobody knows. But without a demonstrated mechanism, nobody can allow anyone to see them to take it seriously.

Airborne has special meaning. Clearly covid spreads "through the air" that doesnt mean it is airborne.

One problem is there is no strict definition of airborne. There is no doubt that covid can spread via an airborne path, but it may not be the dominant path.

The original variant had about a .7% infection rate through casual contact. For people living in the same household it was something like 12%.

When people talk about airborne, one implication is that it floats in the air and is infectious for a long time. This generally means a much higher rate of transmission. One factor in this is the infectious dose. The lower the infectious dose, the more likely it is to be airborne. A TB infection can start from one bacterium. So even though they are huge, it is airborne.

Delta is 2X more infectious than the original, that means it likely needs a smaller infectious dose and is more likely to transmit via airborne particles.

Just because covid can transmit via an airborne path doesnt mean it is the main way it is transmitted. When we think of airborne we think of highly infectious viruses like the measles virus.

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Measles is so contagious that if one person has it, up to 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.

Measles virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace after an infected person leaves an area. >>

The answer is simple, you don't need an entire article on that. It's all politically motivated. Accepting it as airborne would force governments to accept the costs of fighting it.

Forget that "keep the 2m distance" nonsense. Airborne means you need N95 required everywhere. Public gatherings are out of question too.

And if you fight the narrative, you can easily be labeled as "anti-science", whatever that means. Did you all forget how the mask guidance was changed overnight around April/2020? All in the name of "new science information".

Take any information from the CDC or WHO with a large grain of salt.

I don't think it's necessarily political.

One of the issues is that airborne diseases have a totally different set of requirements for hospitals, and they're much harder and more expensive to comply with. Specifically, patients with contagious airborne diseases need to be kept in rooms with lower pressure than the rest of the hospital to prevent contagions leaking out. I would imagine we have even fewer of those than we have ventilators and ER beds.

Of course, we can free doctors of that restriction, but I don't know how much we stand to gain versus any losses that occur in the transition period as hospitals wonder what the guidelines are.

The other complication is that as I understand it (and I could be wrong), airborne vs droplet is not a hard and firm line, it's more of a spectrum. The distinction seems to be largely in how long a space will "carry" the disease. Things like the flu aren't typically considered airborne because they don't hang in the air for very long. If someone coughs on you, you might get infected. If you walk through a grocery store an hour after someone with the flu walked through, you're probably not going to get infected.

Measles is a classic airborne illness because the space is infections for ~2 hours after someone with measles walks through.

Some think the distinction is outdated, and anything that spreads via the air should be considered airborne. Others seem to think that larger particles should be considered airborne.

At any rate, I can see some validity to attempting to maintain the status quo. Several regions are in the midst of severe COVID outbreaks, and given the upheaval an airborne recognition would create, I think the CDCs stance of strongly hinting that it's airborne without declaring it such is reasonable. They don't seem to be denying it's airborne, just not officially declaring it so.

We can loop back and formalize the airborne status later, when hospitals aren't swamped. I don't want to stress already stressed hospitals, and I don't want to overly stress our healthcare workers. They have it hard enough, and we are having a hard time getting enough of them.

I also think that part of the resistance to calling Covid transmission "airborne" has to do with containing mass hysteria. Droplets are "things," matter we can wipe away, dodge like bullets in The Matrix. A virus being airborne instills an even greater level of fear then is already apparent, because "airborne" takes the control out of it. "How can we clean the air?" Air isn't a "thing." Even the arguments for the airborne theory (which I'm partial to believe) are basically trying to make manageable a concept that seems impossible to manage--the cleaning of the air, the idea that airborne does not necessarily mean "out of our control."

Would COVID being airborne mean that one should wear an N95 mask rather than just surgical masks? Analogous to when doctors perform procedures on patients that may produce aerosols?

The evidence that sars 1.0 was airborne was already in medical journals. I am not a scientist or a doctor, but I found it on pubmed in feb of 2020.

While the history of science aspect to the denial is important, we cannot discount good old fashioned greed. If Airborne Covid is the messaging, then people don't want to shop, fly, or do lots of things where they spend their money. If however we have messaging about 6 feet apart, wash your hands, etc., then folks will still spend money.

I am surprised nearly all measures around the globe ignore the fact that the main method of infection is the aerosol one. People still damage their lungs inhaling alcohol vapors and other toxic disinfectants, still waste resources wiping stuff up, and washing frantically their hands, wear masks that do little, instead of focusing PPE on protecting the eyes and wearing aerosol-filtering masks like KN95, N95, KF94, FFP2, and higher grades!

Covid-19 is the disease which one can get from the virus.

The actual virus which is spread around is SARS-CoV-2.

I would only hope that those speaking about this would understand it by now.

The article mentions masks only once. What is the point of a mask but to suppress airborn transmission?