Lockdowns are the crudest possible form of public health intervention. Far better is to identify the correct mechanism of spread for a pathogen and use that insight to control the infection at its source: just as we did with cholera in the 19th century
In London, cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 killed a total of 14,137 people, because the Thames had become severely contaminated by overflow from sewerage. They'd got the mechanism of spread wrong, thinking it was spread in the air by "miasmas" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broa…
The "miasma" theory is very archaic. "Malaria" for example means "bad air" in Italian. Medieval plague doctors wore respirators with aromatic scents in them to ward off the foul-smelling "miasmas" to avoid getting infected en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_do…
It took a huge struggle to overcome the miasma theory of cholera spread before the waterborne theory was accepted. As with the idea that #COVIDisAirborne physicists took the lead. Michael Faraday wrote to @thetime in July 1855 about testing "the degree of opacity” vs. white paper
Like our aerosol physicists today, Faraday's warnings were ignored. In 1855, Dr John Snow published arguing it was a waterborne disease. It was universally ignored. Snow did not live to see the success of his theory which wasn't fully accepted until 1866 collections.nlm.nih.gov/ext/cholera/PD…
It was not until things got so bad with the Great Stink of London of 1858 that parliament finally took action. Led by engineer Joseph Bazalgette, a system of public sewerage was installed. As a result, cholera was eliminated from London theapricity.com/forum/showthre…
City after city that emulated London in installing public sewerage systems eliminated cholera without antibiotics or vaccines. Snow and Faraday were right: cholera was waterborne, not airborne. Once they'd got the mechanism of spread right they could control it at its source
The problem with the idea that #COVIDisAirborne is that it sounded to opponents too much like the archaic miasma theory. The evidence for aerosol spread is now overwhelming compared to that for droplet theory. As with cholera, we now know how to control the disease at its source!
Just as cleansing the water eliminated cholera in the 19th C, then our task today is to clean the air. We have the technology to filter the air. We must mandate the use of these + high-grade masks (N95, KF94, KN95) for everyone until COVID is eliminated. Because #COVIDisAirborne
Lockdown is a crude tool that comes from the Middle Ages. Social distancing at 1.5m doesn't work against aerosols that travel distances and linger even after a person leaves a room. If you rely on these, you'll need longer/harder lockdowns to compensate
The moral of the story is that the model of lockdown/social distancing works poorly when #COVIDisAirborne because it fails at primary source control of the infection unless it is made so draconian people have zero contact with each other
In a cholera epidemic you wouldn't tell people it's fine to keep drinking faecally contaminated drinking water as long as you're vaccinated. So why say the same thing for an airborne virus? #COVISisAirborne
A more in-depth review of the history of the theory behind aerosol spread of disease, covering much the same territory poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?I…
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