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A comment on Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said. Parent comment

Re:Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most pla... by usrusr on Friday May 14, 2021 @04:10AM (#27151938)
The “not aerosol“ hypothesis was based on the assumption that the spread rate would have been much higher than observed with an aerosol capable virus. Turns out this one just happened to be quite bad at spreading amongst humans, despite being capable of residing in the air for quite a while. It's rather unsurprising then that we now see many mutations that fix some low hanging fruit "bugs", bringing the spread closer to what people would have expected. Arguably hope may have been a factor in weighing that hypothesis, but that's truly nothing anyone should be blamed for.
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Re:Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most pla... by avereveard on Friday May 14, 2021 @04:59AM (#27152255)
pneumonia and influenza whose main transmission vector is contact:
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Re:Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most pla... by usrusr on Friday May 14, 2021 @07:33AM (#27153102)
Droplet is the "popular" middle ground. Contact is completely overshadowed by both types of air travel unless air travel is either completely out of the picture (non-respiratory viruses like various herpes) or if the virus particles excel at durability outside the body (e.g. the rhinovirus family, whereas being bad at this is an outcome of the defining property of corona viruses, they are short-"lived" almost by definition).

And droplet basically translates to: "yes, masks would help, but simply keeping a few feet of distance will be just as good". Unfortunately, distance does to aerosol transmission what soda cans do to a wildfire.

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