A Couple of Pretty Obvious CV-19 Findings

It was pretty apparent early on in the epidemic that scientists and public health officials were suffering from collective amnesia, forgetting or ignoring earlier learnings and wisdom.  One of those was that respiratory viruses are spread exclusively, as the name suggests, through the air and into the respiratory tract.  Lot of nonsense was spread about picking up the virus on skin or by other methods, so people wore latex gloves and wiped every surface in the universe down with disinfectants.  Had a huge impact on the spread of the virus, as we know have only about 95% of the US population infected at least once.  The World Health Organization, second only to the CDC as a purveyor of misinformation, has issued a report trying to come up with the right terminology to describe airborne transmission of respiratory viruses, which sounds like a classic bureacratic project.  But along the way, it was apparent that the organization had concluded, wait for it, that CV-19 and the flu are spread almost exclusively, well, really exclusively by transmission through the air.     (WHO Report)

And for several years public health officials scared us about how easily CV-19 was transmitted, that if we were within 100 miles of an infected person we were in mortal danger.  A challenge study is one in which you attempt to infect persons with a particular pathogen either to look at prevention or treatment measures.  An article in Nature finds that researchers are having a very difficult time successfully infecting people in these studies, largely because so many people have been infected and have immunity, which means that any exposure results in the elimination of the virus pretty quickly.  So it wasn’t nearly as easy to get CV-19 as suggested, and once you did, you had a very good immune response to any subsequent exposure.  (Nature Article)