JonathanFor those of you new to the game of viral transmission and denying airborne, this is how it works.
[This thread was originally posted on twitter on May 24, 2022]
3. From 1910 to 1980/1985, measles, TB and chickenpox started off as "droplet" and were ultimately accepted as being "airborne"
4. All outbreak reports in humans (as opposed to animals by vets) will try to pin transmission on droplet. When they cannot find the source of the "droplet" (i.e. contact within 1m, 1.5m, or 2m contact - because depends on your country of course), they will
4b. make something up to explain it as droplet (for SARS this was AGMP, or "aerosol generating medical procedures", for which there is no proof. Just poorly done "studies" that mis-use statistics).
Side note, when the outbreak reports see transmission and the transmission occurs in hospitals, and the nurses are wearing surgical masks, this leads to the explanations that:
side note a. the nurses touched their masks and infected selves (not true); and
side note b. why “break room” PPE errors are blamed. Sometimes community transmission but in this context that’s rarer.)
5. Animal studies showing animals breathing virus out are dismissed as “not human studies”
6. Vet studies aren’t even looked at, because they’re not in the Lancet. These studies have answered most of our questions.
8. When virus is found in the hospital room but is not viable, it is dismissed as "no viable virus"
10. meta-studies, or studies of multiple studiers, are run on this biased collection of "droplet" studies to conclude that overall "droplet" is likely to be the explanation, but the whole collection of observed information is tainted from the start.
* I mean, "droplets" exist, but as a mode of transmission "droplet transmission" that flies 2m and falls to ground is not how respiratory (and many or all GI) pathogens transmit.
I will try to link in some other interesting threads as I have time.
Oh the book is Chapin's Sources and Modes of Infection and he got almost all of the puzzle correct except because he saw most spread short range he thought "must be droplets".
If you had to read one article, I commend to you this one by Drs. Wells and Wells, a wife and husband team:
Finally this is a good list of airborne transmission review articles, meaning overviews. Skim, read, etc.
There is no droplet review article because droplet is not a thing. House of cards my friends, house of cards.
If you see a respiratory pathogen infect all the time, it does so by air and it does it well.
If you see a respiratory pathogen infect only sporadically, it is still doing so by air, but it does it poorly.
If you want to know more about this, look up "dose response" or ID50.
You got to the end so you earned a moment of humour:
skuaSo they've made Chapin into dogma and treated it as basic to their Transmission of Respiratory Diseases paradigm?
Humans ... smh.
buo@skua @jmcrookston I highly recommend Carl Zimmer's book "Airborne" (https://carlzimmer.com/books/airborne/). It's fascinating, but also infuriating how airborne transmission is denied time after time, in the face of all evidence. It makes one realize that, at least in this field, many scientists are not really doing science.
The book looks good.
And the link has so very many resources.
I used to hold to there being an ideal way for science to happen. But I'm now seeing science being intrinsically a very messy project, by a huge community of very fallible humans, from which tentative knowledge about physical reality emerges.