Current Events > NYT: Outdoor transmission of Covid likely below 1% contrary to CDCs 10% estimate

(+) Yeah! (+)

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that less than 10 percent of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.

But the number is almost certainly misleading.

It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark 10 percent so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.

That benchmark seems to be a huge exaggeration, as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) Its both true and deceiving.

This isnt just a gotcha math issue. It is an example of how the C.D.C. is struggling to communicate effectively, and leaving many people confused about whats truly risky. C.D.C. officials have placed such a high priority on caution that many Americans are bewildered by the agencys long list of recommendations. Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, writing in The Atlantic, called those recommendations simultaneously too timid and too complicated.

They continue to treat outdoor transmission as a major risk. The C.D.C. says that unvaccinated people should wear masks in most outdoor settings and vaccinated people should wear them at large public venues; summer camps should require children to wear masks virtually at all times.

These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.

Todays newsletter will be a bit longer than usual, so I can explain how the C.D.C. ended up promoting a misleading number.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html

Now it makes more sense why there werent spikes in Covid when all the protesting was going last year


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David1988 posted...

Now it makes more sense why there werent spikes in Covid when all the protesting was going last year

Well, yeah. It was pretty much only right wing people trying to create their own reality pushing back against the early evidence of this

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