Thread by @DrEricDing

Airborne aerosols in a Liverpool 🇬🇧 nightclub— I’m sure if the smoke cannon was an actual virus plume, nobody would get infected right?

Crowded indoor nightclubs anyone if you’re not vaccinated? #COVID19

2) Yes, I’m aware the UK is conducting a research study in Liverpool. My concern is that we know the #sarscov2 Coronavirus has a tendency to either superspread or not due to the K dispersion factor — the transmission R is highly variable. One study enough?
bbc.com/news/newsbeat-…

3) “in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all. In fact, the latter is the norm. “The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero. Most people do not transmit.”
sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/w…

4) “That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters. The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people.”

5) One study estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.

wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67

6) “That could explain some puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including why virus did not take off sooner after it emerged in China, and why some very early cases elsewhere—such as one in France in late Dec 2019, reported on 3 May—apparently failed to ignite a wider outbreak.

7) “If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself”

8) “Timing—Emerging evidence suggests COVID-19 patients are most infectious for a short period of time. Entering high-risk setting in that period may touch off a superspreading event. “2 days later, that person could behave in the same way and you wouldn’t see the same outcome.”

9) Sidenote—there is also evidence that the #B117 variant might be infectious for a longer period of time. “B.1.1.7 may even remain in human hosts nearly 2x as long as non-B.1.1.7 SARS-CoV-2, extending potential contagious period from ~ 8 days to 13 days.”
google.com/amp/s/www.forb…