Air conditioning! As near as I can tell, “indoor air conditioning” is the key mechanistic story for “covid in June”.
You can skip the rest if you like, but for details and speculation… This result is actually kind of happy/surprising to me!
When the right was protesting against the covid shutdown I saw a lot of morbid covid speculation about how bad it would be on the left. Then the left was protesting against the police, and some on the right were complaining about how bad it could make covid… But I haven’t been able to find any big structural/demographic signals related to any of these protests. We seem to have gotten lucky with the protesting: it didn’t increase the plague much! I was worried about it, and so this feels like a relief to me.
More happy news in the structural department is a salon in Missouri that functioned as a natural experiment. Two hairdressers test positive. One was cutting while symptomatic and may have given it to the other somehow during a work week in the same room. Both wore masks. All customers wore masks. 140 customers tracked by computer. 46 of them consented to testing. All came back negative! Maybe there’s structural censorship of key data (lying officials, or broken medical test) but if not then ZERO positive customers is a non-trivial signal about mask efficacy! :-)
The one person who seems to have gotten infected by the hairdresser was maybe the other hairdresser in the shop. This loops back around, in my mind, to “sharing a building” and and also calls attention to “air conditioning” as a key mechanistic driver...
As in the OP “Houston and Phoenix and Miami” are hotspots now and I think the common denominator is that in June those are all pretty hot places where the heat drives people indoors to get some AC (which tends to be recirculated air).
Spending a lot of time breathing recirculated indoor air looks like the boogey man to me at this point.
Air conditioning! As near as I can tell, “indoor air conditioning” is the key mechanistic story for “covid in June”.
You can skip the rest if you like, but for details and speculation… This result is actually kind of happy/surprising to me!
When the right was protesting against the covid shutdown I saw a lot of morbid covid speculation about how bad it would be on the left. Then the left was protesting against the police, and some on the right were complaining about how bad it could make covid… But I haven’t been able to find any big structural/demographic signals related to any of these protests. We seem to have gotten lucky with the protesting: it didn’t increase the plague much! I was worried about it, and so this feels like a relief to me.
More happy news in the structural department is a salon in Missouri that functioned as a natural experiment. Two hairdressers test positive. One was cutting while symptomatic and may have given it to the other somehow during a work week in the same room. Both wore masks. All customers wore masks. 140 customers tracked by computer. 46 of them consented to testing. All came back negative! Maybe there’s structural censorship of key data (lying officials, or broken medical test) but if not then ZERO positive customers is a non-trivial signal about mask efficacy! :-)
The one person who seems to have gotten infected by the hairdresser was maybe the other hairdresser in the shop. This loops back around, in my mind, to “sharing a building” and and also calls attention to “air conditioning” as a key mechanistic driver...
As in the OP “Houston and Phoenix and Miami” are hotspots now and I think the common denominator is that in June those are all pretty hot places where the heat drives people indoors to get some AC (which tends to be recirculated air).
Spending a lot of time breathing recirculated indoor air looks like the boogey man to me at this point.
I wonder how things would be different if people used air filters on the recirculating air.