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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
Having read some papers, I’m confident saying that while the flu is much less contagious than omicron, it’s airborne too, and this has been obvious for a long time.
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Will Saletan
@saletan
"Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection," says Gottlieb. "This is an airborne illness." "A cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission," he says. It can protect you from flu droplets, but not "this coronavirus."
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
Seems like one woman with influenza infected 72% of people on an airplane without a working ventilation system in 72 hours despite most of them not having direct contact with her! Must have been aerosol, I assume. The 6 people who got off the plane right away didn’t get sick.
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
I like Gottlieb, and I’m not trying to pick on him in particular, but talking about “airborne” transmission as though it mostly means much more contagious than “droplet” transmission is inconsistent with the studies we have, and points towards wrong solutions.
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
It seems good for people to wash their hands in general, and I think hand washing probably does efficiently prevent the spread of fecal-oral diseases, but I highly doubt it makes much difference for the flu. How did the “wash your hands to prevent the flu” meme get so popular??
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Divia Eden 🔍
@diviacaroline
“Using the guinea pig model, we demonstrated that transmission of influenza A/Panama/2007/1999 (H3N2) virus through the air is efficient, compared with spread through contaminated environmental surfaces (fomites).” ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P
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Nicholas Schiefer
@nschiefer
Replying to
@diviacaroline
I've not dug into this myself, but I trust
@jljcolorado
who seems to think it's a combination of intellectual fashion---especially associating airborne transmission with outdated "miasma" theories---and deep confusion about aerosol physics. Great thread:
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Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez
@jljcolorado
45/ C. concludes that the evidence for transmission through the air is overall weak, and that contact and spray-borne infection is a better explanation of the observed patterns. He was especially fighting airborne transmission over v. long distances, nearly impossible to avoid
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Nicholas Schiefer
@nschiefer
Replying to
@nschiefer
@diviacaroline
and
@jljcolorado
This story about how medical folks ended up confused about basic aerosol physics is totally wild:
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Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez
@jljcolorado
83/ What seems to have happened: - Tuberculosis was the main airborne infection of concern - TB can ONLY infect if aerosols reach alveoli (< 5 microns) - Someone confused reaching the deep lung (< 5 microns) w/ falling to the ground within 1-2 m (>100 microns)
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