I’m very confused. Reading this confirms to me that we know quite a lot about how colds spread? Coming from a physician perspective, and relative to our level of knowledge about most diseases, this sounds like pretty damn good knowledge...
It spreads through body fluids the more direct the more transmissible
I think there’s at least a few senses in which “we” don’t “know” how colds spread:
The “state of the art” in terms of “scientific knowledge” seems slightly underconfident about small-particle transmission maybe not being a meaningful factor in practice, given the available evidence.
As a society, I don’t think there’s well-established common knowledge of our best guess of the relative likelihood of transmission by various routes. i.e. what would happen if you asked multiple different doctors (GPs) how to best avoid catching a cold in various situations? I, personally, expect that you’d get overly-broad (and therefore expensive-to-follow) advice, with relatively poor inter-rater agreement, compared to if you asked them how to avoid e.g. some specific STDs.
Our “best guess” is extremely flimsy, and the sort of thing that I could imagine a single well-designed, medium-sized study overturning. (See the various caveats about how many different viruses cause “colds”, questions about humidity/viral load/etc in other comments, and so on.) This is not the kind of situation where I can tell someone “do [x] and you’ll reduce your risk by 80%” and feel at all confident about it! Or, like, I can in fact give them an extremely broad [x], but in that case I’m pretty sure that I’d be destroying a bunch of value as a result of empirical uncertainty which seems in-principle quite possible to resolve, with a sufficient application of resources.
I’m very confused. Reading this confirms to me that we know quite a lot about how colds spread? Coming from a physician perspective, and relative to our level of knowledge about most diseases, this sounds like pretty damn good knowledge...
It spreads through body fluids the more direct the more transmissible
I think there’s at least a few senses in which “we” don’t “know” how colds spread:
The “state of the art” in terms of “scientific knowledge” seems slightly underconfident about small-particle transmission maybe not being a meaningful factor in practice, given the available evidence.
As a society, I don’t think there’s well-established common knowledge of our best guess of the relative likelihood of transmission by various routes. i.e. what would happen if you asked multiple different doctors (GPs) how to best avoid catching a cold in various situations? I, personally, expect that you’d get overly-broad (and therefore expensive-to-follow) advice, with relatively poor inter-rater agreement, compared to if you asked them how to avoid e.g. some specific STDs.
Our “best guess” is extremely flimsy, and the sort of thing that I could imagine a single well-designed, medium-sized study overturning. (See the various caveats about how many different viruses cause “colds”, questions about humidity/viral load/etc in other comments, and so on.) This is not the kind of situation where I can tell someone “do [x] and you’ll reduce your risk by 80%” and feel at all confident about it! Or, like, I can in fact give them an extremely broad [x], but in that case I’m pretty sure that I’d be destroying a bunch of value as a result of empirical uncertainty which seems in-principle quite possible to resolve, with a sufficient application of resources.