Thread by @petermbenglish

I was just told "my son went to the Latitude festival, and he and all the people he went with have Covid".

This begs so many questions!

Transmission is predominantly airborne, and mainly occurs when aerosolised respiratory droplets can accumulate, and you spend enough time in the space to breathe in an infectious dose.

That's what most of us believe.

An anecdote like this suggests so many hypotheses that could be tested by investigating transmission patterns at events like Latitude.

Who are the people the son went with? What did they do together? Can you identify clusters or chains of transmission?

(Detailed genomic analysis of the viruses would help.)

What are the most likely exposure routes; and do they support or undermine our views on how transmission happens (and therefore how best to control it)?

Did they all travel together, spending a long time in the confined space of a vehicle?

Did they all sleep in the confined space of a tent or small caravan/cabin?

Were people who got infected more likely to have spent time in the confined and crowded space of a bar or nightclub?

Or does it seem likely that people were infected outdoors? Was this associated with loud singing, for example?

Is there evidence that spread might have been (contrary to expectations) via other routes eg fomites? What about toilets, are they associated with transmission?

The Latitude event was presumably one of the supposed research events.

If only the resources required to study these sorts of questions had been made available, it could really firm up our understanding of how the virus spreads, and how to stop it.

Or maybe they were? Perhaps this is being analysed right now? (Sadly, I doubt it.)

As an aside, one of the reasons I retired from @PHE_uk recently was disillusionment that we were being used as petty bureaucrats, rather than as the communicable disease epidemiologists we've spent decades becoming, and generating and finding ways to test hypotheses like these.

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