health

Superspreader events key driver in COVID-19 pandemic

12 Comments
By Kelly MACNAMARA

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Wonder if trains will run more often in big cities like Tokyo this winter.

Each train - specially peak hours - has all the characteristics of a super spreading event.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Each train - specially peak hours - has all the characteristics of a super spreading event.

Not really, it has the crowding and the bad ventilation (depending on the line) but not the talking, shouting, singing part; and in general people remain with their face covered.

Both Japan and South Korea have used backwards contact tracing, which has been credited with helping them curb their epidemics, along with other control measures.

Except that, for the information that is openly available, South Korea and Japan are doing a very different kind of tracing. Japan cases are most frequently people infected from an "unknown" source and that is where the tracing ends, backwards zero steps. Without increasing the number of tests nobody can actually know where exactly the infections are being spreading in Japan, which leaves no solution to stop its increase.

5 ( +7 / -2 )

Japan published highest ever suicide deaths ever... More people took their life's in October than all of those socalled covid death past 8 months together... priorities!

And what are the numbers for October last year? and what would be the predicted numbers for the economic and public health troubles of unrestrained spreading with overloading of a fragile medical system making anybody in need of hospitalization a possible fatality?

Priorities do not mean assuming that everything was completely fine before or that it would be without measures.

6 ( +7 / -1 )

Superspreader events key driver in COVID-19 pandemic

In other news, the sun rises in the east and water is wet.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

America is disgraced because of lies and misinformation by a false messiah. And now the numbers sick are over half a million. Shame.

4 ( +6 / -2 )

Starpunk, total U.S. cases are 12.5 million and 258,000 deaths as of today with approximately 5 million recovered.

3 ( +4 / -1 )

CV likes to party!!

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Sturgis Motorcycle rally was a really bad event. 500k people, mostly maskless, hanging out in bars, motorcycle shops and tattoo parlors for days. It seems to have seeded throughout the entire plains. Now rural areas with poor health systems are being overwhelmed.

But the bikers got to exercise their FREEDUMB, so there is that......

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Two past superspreader events come to mind, and a third one is in the process of happening.

The first event was when Trump let more than 40,000 people return to the US from China without testing or treacking them. They went all over the US, and we got our first wave.

The second event was the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of bikers assembled in Sturgis, mostly without masks or social distancing. Those hundreds of thousands then returned to the rest of the nation, especially to areas in the Mid West.

The third event is underway. Despite pleas for people not to travel or socialize this Thanksgiving holiday season, over two million people have already flown around the nation, without any attempt to test or track them.

The vaccines may be widely available within six months, but it looks like we may have hundreds of thousands more deaths before then.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

In other news, the sun rises in the east and water is wet.

There is value in corroborating things that appear obvious, sometimes obvious is wrong.

On the other hand this is not even one of those times, by the original modeling the key for the pandemic was thought to be not superspreader events but the usual community slow spreading from everybody in general, with superspreader events as some rare occurrences that did not really contributed that much to the situation as a whole. This way of thinking is now changing.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

"Superspreader" is in the name for a reason.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Superspreader" is in the name for a reason.

So is "key driver" which is the main point of the findings. There are superspreaders in many other infectious diseases, but differently from COVID-19 they represent only isolated events that do not change the behavior of outbreaks in general. For COVID-19 the current situation appears to be dependent on their presence.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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