I am being lazy and not reading all the papers you referenced—do many of them discuss the viral load of the person who is infected?
I worked on PCR covid testing during the pandemic and the viral load of samples that went through our labs would often be multiple orders of magnitude different between samples. Some people seemed to just have way more virus in them than others, it did not obviously correlate with symptoms.
I was likewise very shocked at just how little was known about how virus actually spread on a practical level. How do people not know whether humidity affects how long virus remains active?, temperature?, dry vs wet surfaces?, rough vs smooth?, recently disinfected?, plastic/metal/material?, daylight (UV) vs artificial light, which of these factors is true regardless of particular virus?
Working with viruses is (I am told, I no expert) very hard—but I agree completely that this is an area that seems woefully underfunded vs related areas. I would be surprised if there were not cheap and effective 80⁄20 effects here that could be used to drastically cut infection rates in real world scenarios.
I am not that close to any of it any more and maybe it has, but I have not seen any of the post-covid enquiries raise this knowledge gap either.
I am being lazy and not reading all the papers you referenced—do many of them discuss the viral load of the person who is infected?
I think a couple of them did; I don’t remember if any of them found strong effects. Might ask a language model to check later—agree that this seems like one of those big open questions that could imply huge differences in worthwhile interventions, though I think that if viral load turns out to be the only key factor in transmission likelihood, such that other interventions have basically no effect if effectuated w.r.t. spreaders with high viral loads, that’s pretty bad news, since testing for high viral load might be much harder/more expensive than e.g. putting on a mask if it turns out that “large particulates” are most of the problem in the case of a specific illness. (Though I guess we do still have the problem of knowing what illness a given person has, to know what intervention to apply...)
I am being lazy and not reading all the papers you referenced—do many of them discuss the viral load of the person who is infected?
I worked on PCR covid testing during the pandemic and the viral load of samples that went through our labs would often be multiple orders of magnitude different between samples. Some people seemed to just have way more virus in them than others, it did not obviously correlate with symptoms.
I was likewise very shocked at just how little was known about how virus actually spread on a practical level. How do people not know whether humidity affects how long virus remains active?, temperature?, dry vs wet surfaces?, rough vs smooth?, recently disinfected?, plastic/metal/material?, daylight (UV) vs artificial light, which of these factors is true regardless of particular virus?
Working with viruses is (I am told, I no expert) very hard—but I agree completely that this is an area that seems woefully underfunded vs related areas. I would be surprised if there were not cheap and effective 80⁄20 effects here that could be used to drastically cut infection rates in real world scenarios.
I am not that close to any of it any more and maybe it has, but I have not seen any of the post-covid enquiries raise this knowledge gap either.
I think a couple of them did; I don’t remember if any of them found strong effects. Might ask a language model to check later—agree that this seems like one of those big open questions that could imply huge differences in worthwhile interventions, though I think that if viral load turns out to be the only key factor in transmission likelihood, such that other interventions have basically no effect if effectuated w.r.t. spreaders with high viral loads, that’s pretty bad news, since testing for high viral load might be much harder/more expensive than e.g. putting on a mask if it turns out that “large particulates” are most of the problem in the case of a specific illness. (Though I guess we do still have the problem of knowing what illness a given person has, to know what intervention to apply...)