Of course. The real scandal is how bean counting has failed millions of Californians. Are that many people really eking out an existence so marginal, it has no impact on prices for homes, equities, goods and services? Or is there something wrong with what we’re measuring?
Depends substantially on how many people have to work face to face with strangers, and how large households are.
Everyone living in a multi-generational household with e.g. grocery store clerks is at significantly higher risk than a couple of childless yuppies working from home.
Nine months into this it would be nice if we had good data on the risk factors of transmission. I know it’s a tricky virus to trace but shouldn’t we have better info on which activities demographics, etc are the most risky by now?
We do know the risk factors. It's a respiratory disease that spreads when people who are breathing are near each other. We don't need a random control trial to tell us that practicing with your brass band can spread it. The solution is to stay very far from everyone until the disease is wiped out. Only very intelligent libertarian contrary Americans think we don't have the information we need.
That is not very helpful advice when you have to manage risk while trying to eat, work, live, and stay healthy. Stats certainly exist on where some of the 16,000+ cases in San Mateo were transmitted.
There's no way to get the information you desire without Big Brother level tracing. And even then the error bars are huge. Symptoms set in days after exposure, and transmission is uneven at best.
Full disclosure: I've had covid.
We assume we were exposed at the clinic, where our kid needed emergency medical treatment. But if so, only one of us was with the child indoors -- in a cleaned room with a doctor in full PPE and us in masks -- and treatment lasted less than 5 minutes.
But by the time we experienced onset of symptoms, days later, we had been in close proximity with my in-laws (they need care and were part of our bubble) for over 24 hours. Luckily, they developed no symptoms and tested negative.
So 5 minutes of exposure to an asymptomatic carrier at the clinic likely transmitted the virus to us, but 24 hours in close contact failed to transmit the virus to my in-laws.
The delay of onset and inconsistent transmission patterns make this virus exceedingly difficult and expensive to track. Your questions are unanswerable.
>There's no way to get the information you desire without Big Brother level tracing.
As I responded to the sibling comment, I don't think that is accurate. Of course many, if not most cases can not be traced, many certainly can be. Some people know exactly where they got covid, and who they exposed, and where.
The US has 50,000 full time contact tracers working to collect this information. Surely there is some data by now?
>Your questions are unanswerable.
IF the question is categorically unanswerable (which I don't believe), contact tracing programs should be disbanded.
Contract tracing != "gathering evidence of transmission in any particular location/context."
Instead, please think of it as "one of the most powerful, non-medicinal, mechanisms for interrupting disease transmission."
It accomplishes this through its overt actions: attempting to alter the behavior of potential and exposed contacts by encouraging quarantining for an appropriate length of time and to get tested if symptoms develop.
> Contract tracing != "gathering evidence of transmission in any particular location/context."
I disagree. Understanding how and where COVID spreads has been an essential part of contract tracing in all of the countries that have successfully implemented it. This data is absolutely collected by tracers.
It’s dangerous to not put much credence in where people think they got the virus. We have all kinds of biases that mean we are not going to be very good at this.
You log it as "unknown community transmission". While you obviously can't trace everyone, California has 10,000 contact tracing staff [1] and has spent most of the pandemic with less than 5,000 confirmed cases per day [2]. These individuals are working every day to collect data, so I am sure it exists.
If you get a positive test, contact tracers may ask you where you went and who you interacted with. They then call those people and ask them to get a covid test. IF the contact tests positive, then rinse and repeat. [3]
If I live alone and only leave my house to grocery shop, it is pretty clear where I got covid. Similarly, if Bob had covid, I had dinner with Bob, and now I have covid, it is pretty safe to assume I got at dinner.
Anecdotally, I had a friend who tested positive and the contact tracer told them that they had likely contracted while it shopping at a big 5 several days earlier.
