News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Distancing. Parent comment

Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by tzs on Saturday June 27, 2020 @04:46PM (#23664557)
> Similar is the pretense that the race protests wouldn’t explode the transmission of COVID — how could they not?

Well, so far its looking like they did not. There seem to be three reasons:

1. High rate of mask wearing,

2. They were outdoor events where people were moving about a great deal, and

3. Only 1-2% of the attendees were infected.

You need to get a certain amount of a given virus to actually get infected. For most respiratory viruses if you are just briefly near an infected person and they do not do something to emit a large number of viruses at one (such as cough or sneeze right near you) you won't get enough viruses from them to become infected.

Here's an article about this for the Minnesota protests [1].

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/what-minnesotas-protests-are-rev...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by rickbad68 on Saturday June 27, 2020 @05:26PM (#23664816)
This is absolutely false. Exposure to a higher number of viruses might increase probably of an infection, but a single virus can certainly lead to a full blown infection in an individual.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by FabHK on Monday June 29, 2020 @02:40PM (#23680842)
There seems to be some evidence that a higher infectious dose will not only increase the probability of an infection, but also its severity.

(This makes sense in a simple thought model where the virus starts replicating once it "hits" you, and then your immune system needs N days to ramp up and attack it back. The bigger the initial load, the more the immune system will have to fight back once it's operational. - Not saying that's how it is, just that this is a simple model to make plausible what appears to be empirically seen.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by tzs on Saturday June 27, 2020 @08:06PM (#23665717)
The infectious dose for most viruses is higher than that. See [1] and [2].

[1] https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_infective_dose

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Steven Pinker on the Tribal Roots of Defying Social Dista... by ponker on Monday June 29, 2020 @01:45AM (#23674721)
It's a probabilistic process. 1 virion of any virus can infect a host, but for some viruses that probability will be vanishingly small while in others it will just be regular small.
[ Parent | on HN ]