Every country should be going crazy doing studies and RCTs to understand (a) most likely causes of transmission, (b) PPE and ways of organizing work/public spaces to minimize risk. Under lockdown, it should be much easier to work out the cause of infection. There are also enormous numbers of hospitals and large care homes all around the world (E.g. janitors and cleaners would seem higher risk if surfaces/aerosol is a major mode of transmission.)
We also need much more work on outdoor/indoor transmission, as this would be a super cheap intervention if it helped. Is there any study of infections by job, say in Germany where the volume of tests is high? Under lockdown, most infections will be from work. So compare indoor vs. outdoor jobs. (What about houses with gardens/decks vs. not in the same area, in a place where the weather is nice in March/April?)
For human interaction while avoiding droplet transmission: we need an app for this. You see a stranger 10m away and want to talk to them. The app would ping their phone via bluetooth and initiate a call. So you can see/gesture to the person but the app enforces a safe distance. Everyone interacting with the public (stores, public transport) should use this app. (Over time, the app could factor in indoor/outdoor and even estimate the safety of indoor spaces based on ventilation).
At many superspreader events (e.g. Korean call center) there are a bunch of people who seem to have very similar exposure to the virus. Yet a substantial proportion (50% in the call center case) don’t get infected. This will partly be due to randomness in droplets. But I’d a substantial part of this is variance in infectability. Are some people less infectable in general, or just relative to a particular person? (Younger people seem less infectable in general, and I’ve heard the suggestion that antibodies to other coronaviruses may provide weak immunity to covid). Natural (weak) immunity would also help explain why if someone in your household is infected you have only a ~20% chance of being infected by them). Someone should use the SSE case studies and try to tabulate this.
Every country should be going crazy doing studies and RCTs to understand (a) most likely causes of transmission, (b) PPE and ways of organizing work/public spaces to minimize risk. Under lockdown, it should be much easier to work out the cause of infection. There are also enormous numbers of hospitals and large care homes all around the world (E.g. janitors and cleaners would seem higher risk if surfaces/aerosol is a major mode of transmission.)
We also need much more work on outdoor/indoor transmission, as this would be a super cheap intervention if it helped. Is there any study of infections by job, say in Germany where the volume of tests is high? Under lockdown, most infections will be from work. So compare indoor vs. outdoor jobs. (What about houses with gardens/decks vs. not in the same area, in a place where the weather is nice in March/April?)
For human interaction while avoiding droplet transmission: we need an app for this. You see a stranger 10m away and want to talk to them. The app would ping their phone via bluetooth and initiate a call. So you can see/gesture to the person but the app enforces a safe distance. Everyone interacting with the public (stores, public transport) should use this app. (Over time, the app could factor in indoor/outdoor and even estimate the safety of indoor spaces based on ventilation).
At many superspreader events (e.g. Korean call center) there are a bunch of people who seem to have very similar exposure to the virus. Yet a substantial proportion (50% in the call center case) don’t get infected. This will partly be due to randomness in droplets. But I’d a substantial part of this is variance in infectability. Are some people less infectable in general, or just relative to a particular person? (Younger people seem less infectable in general, and I’ve heard the suggestion that antibodies to other coronaviruses may provide weak immunity to covid). Natural (weak) immunity would also help explain why if someone in your household is infected you have only a ~20% chance of being infected by them). Someone should use the SSE case studies and try to tabulate this.