The key questions here are things like "how many children have actually caught COVID off other children?" I keep seeing studies suggesting that kids are very unlikely to catch it, and very unlikely to pass it on if they do catch it.
So it's not that kids are just asymptomatic at huge rates, but that they're actually teflon?
Here a big deal has been made of the high rates of infection/death among k-12 educators, but I don't actually know if it's just a heartbreaking story or an actual statistical thing to worry about.
Link what you're seeing, if you can find it easily? I've been seeing things on both sides of that -- kids don't spread it much, and kids are asymptomatic Typhoid Mary contagion reservoirs -- and I haven't managed to hold onto the bulk of what I've read to form a firm opinion one way or the other.
At first I heard that in China there were zero cases of children passing it to adults. Then I heard that was not true. I haven't heard anything about it in 6 weeks, unlike all the studies about drug treatments and symptoms.
In this country the timing of the outbreak has been convenient to say "eh, the school year is 70-80% over already, just muddle through with tele-teaching and we'll see what happens after summer vacation". Now that we approach summer vacation it becomes clear that uhh kids need to go SOMEWHERE if their parents are going to get work done, even if it is merely a camp or a day care rather than a school, and is that safe?
Given your goat-bothering profession, has your life during this been a nightmare of acquaintances hassling you for information and reassurance? It seems like people of your ilk must be feeling hunted these days.
I just don't see how to do childcare without a massive infusion of money, and instead I'm guessing that all the budgets are going to be slashed.
And it would make such a good public works project if done right. Let's do it wrong!
3: same here I'm afraid. Too much info and too many studies. But I'll keep my eyes open.
Perhaps the solution is boarding schools! There are a lot of empty hotels around.
5: People keep asking me what I think of certain studies. A lot of the scientific studies about how to treat the virus look like good news, but I just keep wanting to say that we need to do PUBLIC HEALTH MEASURES to track the virus and quarantine people AWAY FROM THEIR FAMILIES, and we need to do so much more testing of non-deathly-ill people than we are now doing, and also the government needs to try to prevent everyone from running out of money and losing their houses. Because really what we want is for the virus to not infect everyone, while simultaneously not having everyone be trapped at home and bankrupt. And the "good news" meaning the virus will still infect everyone but expensive medical care will save us from actually dying, is so much less appealing.
Jammies and I are in different camps: I think that everyone-ish will get infected, and I want to get it over with, so that I feel like we're safe to visit my parents. Jammies is worried that a lot of people are shaving ten years off their life with permanent damage to their lungs or who knows what, and would like to attempt to avoid the virus entirely until a vaccine comes out.
I'm sure we'll kludge along in the middle, and make proximal small decisions that add up one way or the other.
I'm basically just waiting till it gets into my mother's care home and everyone there dies. The British state has so completely half-assed its response that I don't think any other outcome is ultimately possible. They can't suppress and the price of mitigation is going to be immense.
Perhaps the solution is boarding schools! There are a lot of empty hotels around.
Tell the kids they got into Hogwarts!
What is the "suppression" / "mitigation" dichotomy again? The words sound like synonyms to me.
And, indeed, another one today!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/coronavirus-scientists-caution-against-reopening-schools
Jammies is worried that a lot of people are shaving ten years off their life with permanent damage to their lungs or who knows what...
Or who knows what also includes probability of death. Listen to Jammies.
Yeah. Spoke to someone yesterday who's recovered from it. He's got no lingering health consequences (in his 60s) but he said that for a week it was like having someone sit on his chest so that he could barely breathe. I don't think I like the sound of that, even with no lasting effects and no risk of death.
Plus, he probably had a lingering consequence. Just not an obvious one.
12: I think the idea is that suppression is hoping for no cases eventually, like SK seems to have managed. Mitigation assumes that that's either impossible or too damaging to society, so it's trying to keep case levels low enough that the health care system can manage them, but not trying to get down to zero.
I've heard it as containment vs. mitigation. And I think the big political problem is that it seems that some states are proclaiming that mitigation is the goal but reopening as if it's been contained.
Jammies is worried that a lot of people are shaving ten years off their life with permanent damage to their lungs or who knows what, and would like to attempt to avoid the virus entirely until a vaccine comes out.
My lungs are already bad so I am on team Jammies here. My plan is to not get it, and if everyone else gets it, then that will make my plan more difficult.
I just saw a grand rounds on testing with 2 case presentations. One was a 70 plus patient with intellectual disabilities with very mild symptoms who was kept in the hospital longer than normal, because he still tested positive by PCR, and they were concerned about his ability to social distance in hsi group home. He went back and did badly from a behavioral standpoint while isolated in his room, and was positive on follow up PCR testing. It took a 4th test to get a negative result.
Another elderly woman was very sick with clinical symptoms suggestive of COVID including chest X-rays, fevers, and myalgias but had multiple negative PCR tests. After a few weeks they did antibody testing and found that she was positive for antibodies. They allowed her family to be with her when she died.
This makes me think that the testing is not yet robust enough to be sure of anything. We currently require 2 negative tests before people can return to work which is stricter than the CDC guidance but why was that very sick woman testing negative - unless what was making her sick was not the virus itself but the cascade of her immune response.
8: My hospital system is testing all inpatients now regardless of symptoms on admission. (They were already testing asymptomatic pregnant women.) They are also testing any outpatients with symptoms (previously it was high risk by health or where you lived) who present to a Respiratory Infection Clinic.
We still need more.
Co-worker has had it for a month with the only symptom being a loss of smell. So weird how different people experience it.
This makes me think that the testing is not yet robust enough to be sure of anything.
I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to why fewer than 10% of the tests in Texas are positive for covid. Nationally it looks like it's over 20%. Especially when Texas has some of the lowest testing rates in the country.
Rich assholes with colds jumping the line?
24: You actually want a lower rate of positives. Think about it like this. If you test a thousand people in Texas, and they all test positive, it would be ridiculous to believe that those were the only thousand people in your state who had the disease. It's far more likely that there's a massive outbreak that you weren't able to test. If you test a thousand people and only a hundred have it, you should be a lot more confident that you're catching most of the cases, so you have a better idea of what the spread looks like in your state. States that are over 20% are states where the testing capacity isn't keeping up with the spread. Utah's now around 4.5%, which is the only thing about our plan to reopen tomorrow that has me happy. (Our original target was to have Rnaught below 1, and it looks like they decided 1.3 was close enough. One of the big population centers is still exploding so... fingers crossed that closing schools and churches is enough.)
The downside of a lower percentage positive rate, however, is that it seems to make it less likely that we've all already had mild cases that the librul media isn't telling us about and there's no chance of a second wave.
26: I think that without good treatments and aggressive contact tracing and quarantine, we'll have a second wave, and it might be worse if it coincided with flu season. Singapore had to go on lockdown despite having more robust public health system and doing contact tracing for a while.
I would like to see if we could get really aggressive with flu vaccination to reduce the morbidity from that when we will likely have more COVID cases in the fall and winter.
That all makes sense...but what do the other 90% of people have?!? Testing has been so shoddy that I don't think we're just testing the general population without cause. I imagine some of them are people who have been exposed, and/or health care workers, but the vast majority must be people with symptoms who ended up needing care. Even with a false-negative rate as estimated, I still feel like there's 30-40% of those tests which are unexplained. And allergies don't give people fevers.
28: Would be interesting to know if some of them had the flu.
But flu season should be long over, and even more so halted by the social distancing.
Roc is requiring three negative tests before release.
They're now going to test 100,000 people in the UK at random to get a good idea of prevalence - also going ahead with tests of home antibody tests, which https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/randomised-coronavirus-test-of-100000-will-determine-end-date-of-uk-lockdown they now think might work OK after all.
I have no clue what the right answer is, but my university normally has around 12,000 students living in one form or another of campus housing. At ~$4200 a semester that's $50 million in forgone revenue (where most of the cost is fixed so not appreciably lower if the dorms are empty) if they do all fall classes online so I would say zero chance of that. The business model demands students in the dorms even if it doesn't require students in the classrooms.
I expect the uni will try to require faculty to develop and offer both in-person and online versions of their fall classes with no adjustments made for this in terms of either teaching loads or compensation. They will say "we don't have the money to pay you extra for this," which unfortunately will be true though it won't stop their more idiotic capital projects, like the 2nd ice hockey rink. I'm waiting for the shoe to drop that they want to renegotiate (aka eliminate) the contractually-agreed raise pool for this year. Plus our contract (collective bargaining agreement) is up for renewal so that negotiation should be a real shit show.
Beyond the obvious similar health concerns, it's a whole different world to K-12 because K-12 is not critically reliant on student housing revenues to survive but is critically important as a form of child care for working parents.
Open up first for children under 10, wait a few weeks to see if it causes problems, and then slowly add grades. Do what you can to minimize movement of students between classrooms, and test teachers who are moving between classrooms daily. While you're doing that, investigate whether there are other options for increasing spacing, like university classrooms and other options mentioned above.
Also, start doing centralized quarantine, which does more to stop the spread than closing schools does.
I don't want to get quarantined with a bunch of people I don't know. What if they are Crooked Timber commenters?
33. I keep hearing different things from different people, but I think my college and my union have agreed to extend our CBA by one year so we don't have to negotiate under these conditions.
Moby being quarantined with a load of Crooked Timber types sounds like the setup for a remake of The Ladykillers. The Mobykillers? He potters around the place obliviously as they murder each other in the background, and next morning reports to the police that "they all just... disappeared during the night!"
"more idiotic capital projects, like the 2nd ice hockey rink."
Curling could be a socially distanced sport if they made the brooms a little longer.
Glad to see you're all still on here & healthy.
You also.
I feel lazy because Anderson Cooper got a whole baby and I've been quarantined longer than him and haven't even stolen a dog yet.
Roc is requiring three negative tests before release.
The St. Peter Principle.
Quebec is planning to reopen elementary schools on May 11 (a week later for Montreal). In terms of coronavirus cases and fatalities, Quebec has been hardest-hit amongst the Canadian provinces; and Montreal is the COVID-19 epicentre of Canada.
This plan just sounds crazy to me. The Quebec premier, François Legault, claims they have the disease "under control," but that's not even remotely true. So: it's not only American "red state" governors who are taking bad decisions in utter defiance of the facts on the ground...
Meanwhile, Ontario's Trump-lite premier, Doug Ford, has decided that he wants to eat dinner at the grown-ups table, after all. He is listening to the medical experts, and is talking about opening up the province only very slowly and cautiously, and he is fully cooperating with the Liberal federal government.
Strange times!
Nobody is going to have this this thing "under control" until an effective vaccine has been foound, tested and administered to everybody on earth including anti-vaxxers who can be strapped to a gurney by big people with guns if necessary.
Infection rates are falling in most countries because society is imposing extremely unnatural behaviour on people to achieve that goal. I see no reason why they won't rise again as soon as this stops.
How about open air schools? In winter, in Chicago?
I've been thinking that way more stores and congregation points need to be held outdoors. And consequently, more things need to be open outdoors between sunrise and 10 am, and then again from 5 on. At least over this coming summer.
re: 48
They do that in Norway and Scandinavia.
I had conversation once with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aslak_Sira_Myhre and he was laughing about the fact that on any given day, before they went to work in the city, either him or his wife,* would drive their little kids out into the frozen forest to drop them off.
* fairly badass in her own right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathrine_Sandnes
"each nation had its favourite epidemiological whipping boy: Poles and Galicians for the Germans, Russians for the Swedes, Irish for the English, Spanish for the French, Catholics for Protestants, while ... everybody feared the [so-called] Orient."
Despite being completely not the right person to give advice to organized religion, I have been wishing that churches in the south would start holding services, if at all, in tents outside. That seems like it might make a real difference, getting people out of crowded rooms with recirculated air, and also wouldn't be a huge imposition on the actual worshipping.
Tents would be pretty crowded as well, and I would imagine not very comfortable in hot weather. Unless you rolled up the sides - so you have just the tent roof? Or just have the services in the open air.
All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.
Right, I was thinking canopy for shade, open sides for ventilation and cooling. It'd still be hot in the South, but livable.
Aren't revival meetings in tents still a thing anyway?
Stand in a river. A shallow one. Say, knee deep. The flowing water is very cooling. Cattle and deer do it in warm weather, or when heated in the chase.
I think some churches do baptism that way still.
56: I occasionally see them on my drive to work, which passes through many decades over 30 miles.
Google's commonly asked questions include "Can the coronavirus disease spread through air?"
We've had online church, and they started doing Zoom coffee hour.
There was a group of boys jogging through the park, probably part of a high school team, and it started an uproar on nextdoor about how irresponsible it was to let six kids run together. The original complainer put up a picture of the boys shirtless (no faces) and got told they were at risk of getting in trouble for child porn.
We're at 453 positives on 14,000 tests, so just north of 3%. I'm sure most all of those tested are either symptomatic, or in close contact with someone who is.
We're at 16 deaths, and just 5 active hospitalizations, as of yesterday.
The governor is leaving school re-opening up to the districts -- which is a bit strange, because a few parts of town, like mine, are in separate elementary school districts. I suppose the smaller districts will follow the big one (which I think may not re-open) but they don't have to.
Are Indigenous communities under-tested? Undoubtedly. Eyeballing the map, it could be that as many as 20 of the 450 positives are on reservations, and I suppose you could expect a higher than normal number of the 70+ Billings cases would also be Natives.
IPMHB, family legend has it that my grandfather got the Spanish Flu during his senior year in high school, and it left him with one of the kidney ailments known at the time as Brights disease. Which they knew would kill him, but through lifestyle choices etc took about 20 years. Didn't make 40, left 3 young orphans to be raised by his sister and brother-in-law.
I'm pretty unimpressed with 'we'll all get it, and only a few of us with die of it right away.'
64: if they were wearing masks, I'm ok with that. Joggers who don't wear masks enrage me. Well cyclist are worse. I want to throw rocks at their wheels.
I have not seen a single jogger wearing a mask and I jog without one. There's no way to get enough air to maintain a run while wearing a mask. You just keep away from people.
Yeah, I run without a mask and dodge off paths onto grass and so on to stay away from people. I tried running with one and it was awful.
68: they are on a heavily trafficked bike path and don't stay 6 feet away. I know a doctor who does it. I'm pushing for a requirement for everyone over age 3 who doesn't have some kind of disability to be required to wear coverings over their mouth and nose in all public places. People can do calisthenics inside if they don't feel that they can manage that.
My overall sense of what I've been reading about patterns of contagion is that contact tracing finds somewhere between no and very little outdoor transmission. Open air circulation seems to make a big difference. So I'm pretty comfortable with maskless running, with an effort to maintain distance, as not very likely to cause spread.
I'm having trouble getting enough air while out biking even without a mask -- it being the beginning of the season, and me being out of shape. I'm not getting anywhere near anyone. None of the joggers I see, or other bikers, are wearing masks. It's not that we don't believe in it, either: mask wearing is pretty good at the grocery store, and I was downtown yesterday, and easily half the people walking around (very sparse and very well distanced) had them.
The thing I don't do, that those kids did, was jog in the park. The park is too crowded with families and people with dogs to jog on the trails until you get well away from the entrances. There's just no way to move quickly without coming across a group blocking the trail where you can't go around. The sidewalks are fine if you avoid the business district.
69: I have to dodge people by going on grass, cause they don't - especially on the bridge where I can't dodge them.
Also, I'm certain the kids were moving much faster than me. That pisses off people with different ideas about how far apart you need to be because they have no time to move more.
This is the sort of thing I'm thinking of on outdoor transmission: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-transmission-chinese-study-shows-covid-more-likely-spread-indoors/
73: On the sidewalks they still come on top of you. Not wearing a mask is like smoking near people and forcing them to breathe 2nd hand smoke.
71 is my sense also. I think you'll just add misery for no reason by trying to stop outdoor exercise.
71: you might be comfortable with that, but if other people who know that their protection depends on what other people do aren't ok with it, then maybe it's not ok. My boss is a kidney transplant recipient and now immunocompromised, but she's very active (Like a couple of years ago she did a 20 hour run:). She is not in that good shape anymore, but she has managed to hike and run with a mask.
If I'm walking briskly on the street and I see you running towards me or biking quickly without a mask, I have no way of knowing that you're going to dodge me, and a I'm justified in being afraid.
I usually cross the street as soon as the other person can see me. If somebody is on both sides, I run in the street. If traffic blocks that, I walk up into a driveway and wait.
Mostly other people are doing the same.
So the bike path runs in 2 directions and the whole path is 8 to 10 ft across. So if a I'm on the far right by the grass and the other person is on the far left, then maybe that's ok. Not as much on the bridge. Throw in a cyclist without a mask who decides to zoom past us or a jogger.
The other thing is that six feet is really quite close. Someone who passed me fast on a bike within six feet (that is, close enough to touch hands if we both reached out) I'd think was obnoxiously close regardless of contagion. So if people on bikes are buzzing you like that, I think you're justified in being very annoyed.
I still think that a blanket rule would be better.
LB - I thought masks were required in NYC.
And this is all clearly an argument for closing more streets to car traffic to let pedestrians spread out.
85: I believe it's indoors and within a 6-foot distance, not at all times outside the home.
84: it's usually more like 3 feet away. Each lane is about 4-5 feet across.
I'd think was obnoxiously close regardless of contagion.
Doesn't this depend on the infrastructure? Didn't you use to bike commute on the West Side bike path? You always passed people with six feet? How? You'd swerve into oncoming bike traffic.
https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/coronavirus-mask-rule-nyc-what-you-need-know
Only where you can't maintain distance.
87: It's any time you're not able to socially distance, whether indoors or outdoors.
This was basically the argument on Nextdoor also.
89: Always is an overstatement, and I said fast. But mostly you could either swerve to give people room, or slow way down. Six feet is really quite close -- someone closer than six feet to you, if you both reached out, you could touch hands.
I am not wearing a mask while out in public exercising. It is not required, and there's also no evidence (techbro wind tunnel included) that passing by someone for seconds within six feet has transmitted the virus. I'm avoiding public use paths like the proverbial plague (and the actual one) because they're crowded AF right not and dodging walkers and toddlers on scooters is no fun. But I'm not going to pull into traffic if someone is running on the sidewalk next to the bike lane. Throw a rock at my wheel over it, well, seems like an overreaction to me, unless I'm allowed to push clueless joggers.
The only difference is that the joggers are not yelling about people who walk three or four abreast on trails in the park.
If the weather cooperates, I go out in the rain. People stay home for the slightest sprinkle.
95: no, they choose to run in pairs though.
You always passed people with six feet? How?
Technically they were human centipedes.
97: not here. I thought it might, but it wasn't enough.
94: are the kids on scooters wearing masks? I don't mind them that much if they cover their mouth and nose.
Nobody is putting masks on toddlers here.
I am deeply sympathetic to somebody trying to get a small child some air/exercise/frustration release. They should be given space even if I have to back up and change direction to give them it.
Anyway, I also go jogging without a mask. And I never pass anybody besides people parking in the shade.
So my experience contributes nothing to the conversation.
101: No one is required to wear masks out of doors (and iirc, even enlightened masked Japan doesn't require it of toddlers, because any masked toddler will be masked for about two seconds and then they'll be touching the mask.) In my area, I'd say maybe ten percent of people are wearing masks outdoors, and I haven't been out anywhere else enough to have a good enough sense of whether it's widespread here indoors here. Probably not, because Utah.
I'm skittish about things like that Chinese study. That's initial data, but it makes me feel like we don't have a good theory/model of the mechanics of how it really spreads, then. Runners exhalations should be expelled with greater velocity just given their own velocity, never mind that they're breathing harder. So they're spraying over a long distance in the direction they facing. The study might have further issues: yes, most spread was indoors as it was post lockdown. Under lockdown conditions, how do Chinese people behave outdoors relative to how Americans behave outdoors, in particular, behaving the way described here? I'm a little out of it and don't have the energy to read the paper, apologies, but it really sounds like people are mixing up P(outdoors|spread), which is what the headlines describes, and P(spread|outdoors).
I think the precautionary principle says that people should still be wearing masks all the time when in near contact with strangers. It makes me uncomfortable when people don't, which is the vast majority of them here. I've never seen even 20% of people outside wearing masks. It's a pretty trivial imposition even if the actual degree of necessity is unknown.
102: These are 8 year old kids. If they can't wear a mask, they should avoid a heavily trafficked path.
The ones on scooters, I'm thinking of, are not necessarily toddlers. There are some 3 year olds on scooters.
107: Seconded in its entirety.
I think it's more important to get the small kids out of the house even though they are going to be horrible at masks (even at 8). They've lost school, they lost all usual physical activity, the playgrounds are closed. They need to run around when possible and adults need to adjust.
Could there be a worse idea than using any Chinese study? New York City is pushing 13K deaths and China is claiming their 1.5 billion person country had 4600.
107: Utah's data shows that only about 10% of infections are community spread. The biggest vector seems to be family contact, nursing homes (after the initial hotspot which IIRC was a club in Park City.) Early days, but it supports the China study. Runners are exhaling more but they're also not in contact for long (and cyclists even less.) I don't think we are going to have a measure of a spread in tenths of seconds. As another small data point, everyone's been out on the trails here because there's nothing else to do and as a state we've crushed the curve. I could be wrong, but I think all-masks-all-the-time is overcautious, and I think being able to freely enjoy the sunshine is going a long way to making other measures, like having everything else being closed, much more bearable.
108: I see absolutely no reason that kids should have to wear masks when the guidance from the state doesn't require it for adults. Throw rocks at my kid because he passed you on the street on his bike and you're going to have a lot more problems that just start with me ignoring social distancing regulations, you know what I mean?
I am more afraid of bored toddlers than I am of Michigan militia people with guns. The latter has never bitten me.
China is a big place. Despite what both the CCP's lovers and haters both want you to think, it's not a monolith. This is a scientific paper, and without knowing the field or personalities involved in detail, I think it's reasonable to presume some independence until shown otherwise. It's still a preprint, though, so let's see what happens.
And yes, there's obvious bullshit in the national statistics. Take national statistics with a grain of salt, take provincial statistics with an entire shaker. But elsewhere, you need to judge who's saying what by different standards. Same as everywhere else.
Honestly, throwing rocks at kids will keep them from biting you.
The biggest vector is meat packing. Don't go near anybody in the park who is cutting up a pig.
113: I'm not going to throw rocks at kids. Just the cyclists - especially the creepy guy who mouthed a kiss when I stepped away from him. My town is actually advising people to wear masks on the bike path. I guess the health director is the one who can mandate it, not the town manager, and it has not been mandated yet, but they ask everyone to. Town Meeting was postponed, and they are not meeting so they can't vote on the issue.
I think that the duty to care about other people is really high right now. The inconvenience is minimal and the potential risk to others is high, and until we know a lot more we should err on the side of caution.
I do know that when my hospital required universal masking, employee rates of infection dropped in half. Yes, that's indoors, but I think that speaks to the importance of everyone behaving as though they are infected.
Go ahead and throw a rock at that guy.
I punch cars. I don't have room to judge.
118: Don't throw rocks at me, either. Creepy guy would deserve a rock even without the pandemic. I rate the inconvenience factor a lot higher with exertion. I have a mask that I attempted to use for cycling and it was like having an asthma attack going up hills. I pack one with me in case I have to stop or be around people but it's definitely fallen into the category of an inconvenience I'm not doing without more evidence or state policy, although as I said, I'm staying off the multiuse paths for now so six feet is pretty easy to maintain. Over forty miles last weekend I think I passed three joggers and two cyclists.
I'm with Cala. I disagree about the level of inconvenience -- for me it's prohibitive for running. And I think the duty of care is satisfied by maintaining distancing. You're lumping together reasonable anger at people who aren't making an effort to give you space with what seems to me to overstated worry about anyone visible outdoors without a mask.
121: So my personal comfort from somebody running or biking is more like 15ft. But we're going to disagree. For me, this is as big of a deal as the issues raised in the Curious thread are for others.
I didn't read most of that thread.
122: I disagree with you about the risk - unless you're really out in the middle of nowhere. I value the rights of people who want to walk or cycle unperturbed by people who run without a mask over those of runners. There's a lot of intensive exercise peo0le can do inside if they find they can't exercise outside without a mask.
If I see you running without a mask, I have no way of knowing whether you will respect my space. If you wear a mask, I can evaluate from a distance whether it's safe, and you are signaling that you value my health and safety.
Well, if they make an official order, I'll follow it. If it's just my worries against somebody else's, I'll give them as much space as I can but keep jogging topless.
I do think, as I said above, that cities should be doing a lot more closing streets to car traffic to give pedestrians space to distance from each other.
Also blame leadership, we should be closing more roads to cars and using that space to let people maintain extra distance. (Also using that space for outdoor dining, but that's a more complicated question.)
I don't think we are going to have a measure of a spread in tenths of seconds.
I'm finding the wording here confusing. I also think there are a lot of assumptions here that should be clearly stated. I think it's something like--and I'm not trying to strawman you, just get these clearly stated, please let me know which ones you don't agree with--
1. Few (zero?) droplets will get exhaled on you if you contact somebody in a short time.
2. Contacting many people, each for a short time--due to running in opposite directions--despite the multiplicative factor still leads to few droplets. (Or few infected droplets; the product could still be small if few people running in your area have the virus.)
3. Droplets you do come in contact with must reach some critical size and/or number to have enough viral content to be likely to infect you.
4. There is insufficient evidence for hypothesized aerosol transmission, or if there is, it doesn't apply to this case because of ambient wind or whatever; there's no concern about running through an aerosol cloud and getting infected through eye mucous membranes or whatever.
I don't feel confident that we have enough evidence that 1 through 3 combined yield safety. The droplets have to go somewhere, and if you're meeting more people you're getting hit by more. But YMMV. I accept that 4 doesn't have much evidence (but I don't think anyone has disproved?), which would be great if so.
the level of inconvenience -- for me it's prohibitive for running
Yeah, I agree, it's probably prohibitively inconvenient to run while wearing a mask. You know what I'm going to say about that, though. I'm not a runner, but I walk *a lot* and I've hardly walked outside in the past two months. It sucks. (I did get a 40k step day almost completely inside, which you can take as evidence that you aren't discussing this with a sane person.) I've only gone to a decent park once. But, like, on the scale of prohibitive inconvenience, I can't complain. It still seems like a small sacrifice.
I'm glad everyone's out on the trails. I'm envious. The trails here are too packed. Maybe even by some of your definitions, definitely by mine. So are the sidewalks, and they're a lot smaller than in the US.
Ouch that's some pwnage.
And 100% agree that cities should be closing more roads to open them to pedestrians. And then maybe they should keep them closed or semi-pedestrianized indefinitely. But that's my bias. (If anybody, especially NYers, aren't listening to The War on Cars podcast, it's recommended and relevant.)
I think there's pretty compelling evidence of aerosol transmission, but maybe only in the context of singing and/or shouting. The chorus practice that infected 100 people. The superspreading soccer match was outside, which is the main thing that worries me about outside stuff.
132: Ugh.
Anyway, I need to get outside, and I'm going to try to do what I did to isolate the one other time I went to the park: walk on the grassy areas. Fewer than 1 in 20 people were doing that last time. Hope I'm not violating some sacrosanct local custom, but whatever, these aren't normal times.
The superspreading soccer match was outside, which is the main thing that worries me about outside stuff.
But it was extremely crowded.
In general COVID just isn't as contagious as these arguments seem to make it sound. With no social distancing whatsoever and likely 2 weeks of being contagious the typical person still only spreads it to no more than 4 other people! Now we still need to be cautious, and we especially need to be careful not to be that one person who spreads it to dozens via the air conditioning or whatever, but if we're generalky being responsible the odds of some minor chance encounter spreading it is very low. This isn't the measles!
134: Enh, maybe 35-38k of them inside, the balance in the garden. Our flat is narrow but long, and we have an undivided main room on the basement floor where I don't have to feel like it'll be obnoxious to anyone else. Many Pokemon were caught and hatched.
135: Indeed, which is why it doesn't make me worry about joggers, but does make me a little hesitant about "open everything back up but only if it's outside." (Which I still think is worth a try.)
Someone who passed me fast on a bike within six feet (that is, close enough to touch hands if we both reached out) I'd think was obnoxiously close regardless of contagion.
So my personal comfort from somebody running or biking is more like 15ft.
This seems like a lot of personal space. Say you have a standard city street, where you can park cars on each side and still have room for two cars to pass in opposite directions. That street is about 29 feet wide, kerb to kerb. So you're standing on the sidewalk, and someone is cycling past on the far side of the street - they're 15 feet away. And that's as close as you like them to get? Even six feet seems a long way. That's "here I am, on the sidewalk, and one car's width away from me a cyclist is going past. Obnoxious!"
My own street, what I am looking at as I type, is only about 21 feet wide. If LB was standing on one sidewalk, and Bostoniangirl was standing opposite her on the other sidewalk, it would be impossible for anyone to run or cycle down the street without getting far too close to one or other of them.
129: Our sidewalks are pretty full too. It does suck. I'm hoping to get out to some woods that I heard were pretty empty this weekend. I'm less sanguine about 4 than you are. Even flu can be aerosolized. But I'm not competent to have strong views on the subject. I thought either Marc Lipsitch or Michael Mino had a paper on that. Or maybe it was just in his twitter feed.
139: 10-12 feet, maybe since you are probably expelling more germs. But basically, that's why I'm advocating for universal face coverings.
Here's an article on why 6 feet may not be enough.
I just go out holding an M67 fragmentation grenade, as the maskless joggers get close I hold it up and put my finger in the pin and get ready to pull it and toss it their way. Problem solved.
My boss is a kidney transplant recipient and now immunocompromised, but she's very active (Like a couple of years ago she did a 20 hour run:). She is not in that good shape anymore, but she has managed to hike and run with a mask.
If someone is immunocompromised, the advice here is that they shouldn't be going outside at all!
They're at extremely high risk of infection and should be staying indoors at all times, and not going out even for shopping or exercise - and staying 2m away from other people in their household if possible. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/people-at-higher-risk-from-coronavirus/if-youre-at-very-high-risk-from-coronavirus/
129: I believe (and, you know, wrong kind of doctor) that standard for "contact" is not "passed within slightly less than six feet for a half a second" but more like "within six feet for an extended period of time." So, count me out for full stadiums in the outdoors where people stand around for hours on end in close proximity, or even on trails where we'd be passing people all the time. (We don't go out on trails on weekends for this reason right now.) I think I'd agree with your 1, 3, and 4, with 2 depending on locale. And then it's just one of those Fermi problems. We have to estimate the number of droplets, how likely they are to be aerosolized and how long they hang out in the air, how likely they are detectable outdoors, how long they are contagious outdoors, how much virus is in a droplet, and how likely it is that virus from a droplet will land somewhere on you that can make you sick. I don't think SARS-CoV-2 is that contagious even without social distancing measures (R of somewhere around 4?)
144: Mostly, I think she's not, and a I'm not sure how immunocompromised she is. She had a kidney transplant that did not require immunosuppressant drugs for 15 plus years and then she started developing antibodies. They wanted to see if they could suppress them with chemo which is what they did before her transplant, so she was kind of compromised 8 weeks ago. They were holding off on starting her on low dose immunosuppressants until it's safer since her kidney function hasn't declined yet.
One of the small things that saddens me about this pandemic is that it is strengthening the fear and disgust that people feel for bodies and touch. I worry that will linger after there's a vaccine; I occasionally see things like "I hope the handshake never comes back."
Either from my (now dormant) athletic background or more likely from my hippie inclinations, I think bodies are amazing and beautiful. Consensual touch is wonderful. I see others who default to 'bodies are gross' and now they're going to add 'bodies have cooties' to that. Both of those sadden me, not least for the implicit self-loathing.
143: A variant on the Richard Pryor solution.
And now it's required if you can't socially distance. I do think there should be accommodations for people with disabilities, e.g. autism.
145: Not a doctor, not even the wrong kind of doctor. I hardly ever doctor photos, even. Thinking of it as a Fermi problem is useful. If you're not seeing that many people, that proportionally decreases N (handwaving that not all contact is the same and you gotta rejigger and weight them appropriately and so you get a sum of products, not just a sum). What you're saying here, "even on trails where we'd be passing people all the time", makes me feel a lot better. Based on the park and sidewalks, I'd guess that on the main trails here you'd be meeting a new person at least a couple times a minute. Which I'm guessing is not your experience.
I realize I'm being a bit overcautious, but again, I think the harm in being a bit too overcautious is worthwhile balanced against the unknowns, plus the fact that my caution levels are just a target. I still try to act as if I'm infectious, and any outflow of mine could be a potential infection. (I don't not think I'm infectious, and even if I were I agree that yes, in any given incident the probability of infection is low. But not zero, and I'd certainly assign blame to myself if it happened.) And I think I'm in a very different situation than you, density-wise.
Moby, how crowded are the parks and cemetery? The best paths through the robber baron's park would get so crowded, I wonder if people have started spilling over into the cemetery.
I don't go to the cemetery, because of ghosts. The paths are very crowded at Blue Slide. The only difference is no kids in the playground. I haven't gone past that to go in except when raining. In the rain, there's maybe only one person/group passing you every three minutes.
The sidewalks in the business area are much less crowded than in the before times. The one in the residential areas are more crowded than before.
I'm not endorsing this article, just noting its existence: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/runners-masks-coronavirus.html
(The only part of it I'm ready to endorse is where she rolls her eyes at people complaining at other people not distancing on sidewalks that are objectively too narrow to distance on, as if other people are obligated to step into the street constantly. Honestly the people who complain about this should just walk on the outside and then they should bloody well walk in the street.)
I don't go to the cemetery, because of ghosts.
Ugh, too crowded?
Just showing respect. Only go to a cemetery to visit a local.
Maybe they don't want to catch anything from you.
150: I suspect you're right about the density difference. A typical mid-day hike has us seeing a few people per hour. Weekends the trailhead parking lots have been packed. Cycling here too is basically six miles of small city riding and then country roads. If I were back East I'd probably have lost my mind by now.
I'm as dense as it gets, in Manhattan, but I haven't had a hard time staying six feet or more away from people. I'm a couple of blocks from a big park, and I do tend to run or walk in the street to get there, because the sidewalks are narrow. But once I'm in the park, while I can see a lot of people, there's room on the grass to avoid them. (Running in the morning, that is. I'd prefer to run in the early evening, but that does get too crowded.)
It's been kind of cold and nasty, though. It may get much worse as the weather gets nicer.