This is not related to the topic of this particular post, but here's something I've been wondering.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the received wisdom was that SARS-CoV-2 was primarily transmitted by droplets, hence the emphasis on hand washing and staying six feet apart. Now that we know that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, should we be re-thinking the received wisdom about transmission of other common respiratory viruses, such as influenza and the various common-cold viruses?
I think that it has become clear that our understanding of these transmission events is more limited than we might have thought, yes. However! I do not think we are very wrong about influenza transmission, because we have good animal models for such transmission. Close contact does seem to matter quite a lot for that disease, which I think bears out in its reproductive coefficient that hovers just over 1 most of the time. Viruses that we know to spread effectively through airborne aerosols have much higher reproductive coefficients.
A question arises with regard to common cold coronaviruses, though. Have they been spreading primarily through the air all this time, and we miss a large number of asymptomatic or subclinical cases, so we don't know? I am not expert enough on these particular viruses to comment. Perhaps someone does already have this knowledge; perhaps it should be investigated further. Getting the grant money to do that might be a challenge, though. Science is eternally underfunded, and as the pandemic gets less politically important I don't think we're going to do the smart thing as a species and increase research funding into these basic questions. If we did, we might be better prepared for the next pandemic. But we had a warning shot with SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, and we clearly didn't do enough to prepare then. So I don't see us doing much more, now.
It's oddly gratifying for me that what you wrote is very largely my exact reaction, except I don't know Peter Hotez and didn't reach out to him.
This is not related to the topic of this particular post, but here's something I've been wondering.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the received wisdom was that SARS-CoV-2 was primarily transmitted by droplets, hence the emphasis on hand washing and staying six feet apart. Now that we know that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, should we be re-thinking the received wisdom about transmission of other common respiratory viruses, such as influenza and the various common-cold viruses?
I think that it has become clear that our understanding of these transmission events is more limited than we might have thought, yes. However! I do not think we are very wrong about influenza transmission, because we have good animal models for such transmission. Close contact does seem to matter quite a lot for that disease, which I think bears out in its reproductive coefficient that hovers just over 1 most of the time. Viruses that we know to spread effectively through airborne aerosols have much higher reproductive coefficients.
A question arises with regard to common cold coronaviruses, though. Have they been spreading primarily through the air all this time, and we miss a large number of asymptomatic or subclinical cases, so we don't know? I am not expert enough on these particular viruses to comment. Perhaps someone does already have this knowledge; perhaps it should be investigated further. Getting the grant money to do that might be a challenge, though. Science is eternally underfunded, and as the pandemic gets less politically important I don't think we're going to do the smart thing as a species and increase research funding into these basic questions. If we did, we might be better prepared for the next pandemic. But we had a warning shot with SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, and we clearly didn't do enough to prepare then. So I don't see us doing much more, now.