This kind of spread means that most social distancing measures are unnecessary (though we may not know which ones!). That further implies that large sections of the country might be able to get away with ignoring them, which would further polarize pandemic response politically
-
-
Show this thread
-
An article of faith in the educated elite so far has been that there will be a comeuppance for any states or cities that try to re-open too early, and that they'll be sorry. If this hasn't happened yet, by this logic, it's only because of a time lag between infection and outbreak
Show this thread -
But if a very small number of people drive infections, you can end up with large areas that don't socially distance and do just fine, at least for a while. This gives a pessimal situation where the pandemic is real and deadly, but the deniers are at least partially vindicated
Show this thread -
The virus's politics are weird. It's clearly very pro-environment, anti-meat, and has shown a commendable affinity for rich countries over the poor, but it also seems to want to sow maximal discord at a time when we can't handle much more of that
Show this thread -
An important thing to note about the superspreading hypothesis is that it refers to *events*. It's unclear whether that means individual people, special circumstances or locations, behaviors, or a combination of them all. Still, don't go on the retired meatpackers' karaoke cruise
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
I think the other two percent will be very upsetpic.twitter.com/MMVOUB5d8u
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
I'm a little wary of this because of the "everyone has more friends than you" effect in these kinds of distributions. The big events are more likely to be somewhere in the transmission path, so are more visible. They're also easier to manually trace.
-
There's more to it, though. We have lots of examples of extravagant numbers of people getting sick from a single event (choir practice, cruise ship, workplace), yet in the broad population the disease isn't as highly contagious. This is one way to square these two facts
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
You're thinking of this as the root of a tree of infections. But this means something different, that very few infected people will go on to infect anyone else, but a small number will directly infect many.
End of conversation
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.