The people who wanted to propagate the "droplet" vs airborne fiction got lucky until now.
1. The serious diseases like Ebola, which is also in the air, always necessitated N95s anyways because they were so serious.
2. And for many other diseases like flu RSV rhinovirus adenovirus etc, (which are in the air), droplet precautions weren't doing anything.
BUT, people don't typically die in great numbers from these viruses.
So, nobody really cared.
For serious diseases the severity scared people into wearing top protection.
And for the lesser diseases, it didn't matter to those in charge. They could get away with "droplet" despite they probably knew it was airborne.
Until, along came a virus that was right on the border. One or two percent case fatality instead of 0.01 or 0.02.
But, as I have said before, but it bears repeating, all these things are in the air, with us seeing more or less airborne infection depending on the contagiousness of the virus. That is, how well it binds to receptors, usually in upper respiratory tract (urt) for more spread.
And lo and behold our natural experiment on this last point is flu to pandemic flu.
Flu binds well to lower respiratory tract because our receptor there is what is similar to animal receptors.
It doesn't spread well. Lower is not good for spread. SARS and MERS for ex.
When a flu "goes airborne", which is a term used in the literature but is stupid and meaningless because flu is already airborne, it adapts to bind better to receptors in the URT. At that moment you see more spread, the R0 has jumped, and you have a pandemic.
You see the same thing in the virological studies when they adapt to flu to bind better in the upper and lo and behold it spreads over a distance and they call it "making it airborne" or some stupid phrase like that.
In reality it was always in the air.
All of these things are in the air.
Sorry no references right now but I will try to fill in later when I get some time with some of the studies on flu.
Can you please let me know why you say everyone will catch delta? (Pic below)
This is an incorrect but commonly repeated idea. For example not everyone caught the 1918 flu. Nor measles (pre-vax). Or chickenpox, over a lifetime, now.
Thanks.
This part (pic) made no sense to me at all.
Can you describe what you mean by "reckless adults"? You are suggesting kids ought not pay for their transgressions, but who are they and what are they doing?
Also, in terms of mellowing, measles guessed to have split from rinderpest in ~600 BC
yet in 2600 years, rinderpest never mellowed for cattle because its mortality was around 100% in ~ 2000 AD
& measles didn't seem to have mellowed for us humans in 2000yrs either
Anyway just noting the disingenuous phrasing referring to measles' cousin as "a cattle virus" to make the point that its something to be brushed off and not relevant to anything grounded in reality.
@jvipondmd Dude I've walked through construction sites and never got hit with a brick, so we know paper party hats are protective.
We also asked workers repeatedly, incessantly, almost to the level of harassment, and in the end they admitted they took the party hats off in the break room
/s
@jvipondmd In fact, we looked at April to June 2020 where there was no brick work being done on the construction site, and there were 5500 hours of workers in paper party hats, and yet not one got hit with a brick. I have an email testifying to that, which I wrote myself, as proof /s
@jvipondmd But no, you cannot look at our records, and if you found someone who during that period got hit with a brick, they definitely got hit at home, even though we don't test bricks, and it's kind of weird because construction sites have more bricks and bricklayers than homes.
/s