Influenza is actually much more contagious. It spreads dry in the air as a particle rather than in aerosolized water droplets.
That makes it for example literally spread on the wind even outdoors and makes it easily defeat most commercial HVAC air filtering systems.
It can also be extremely persistent on things like clothing and surfaces.
The big problem with CCPV is that you can spread it much longer, up to several weeks even symptomatically where as with the typical seasonal flu you’re only contagious for about 3-5 days and only after becoming symptomatic.
It was possible when it hit our shores. See Taiwan, SK and a handful of other countries who got it out of the population enough so as to contain any future occurrences without shutting down.
Had we had accurate testing and a national tracing program in place, we could have realized Trump’s dream of driving it down to zero in early April.
No that was never going to be possible since we now know the first cases almost certainly came to the US in December thank’s to the China/WHO Cover-Up.
With hundreds of flights daily directly from or connecting to flights out of China and passengers disembarking all over the country for six wees while China/WHO covered up the severity and nature of the outbreak the disease already had a broad foothold in the US before we even had confirmation of Person to Person Transmission.
lol, this ain’t taiwan or sk. contact tracing in nyc is not even remotely possible.
the good news is nyc should be approaching a level of herd immunity that will prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed; and, the cuomovirus has killed enough seniors in nursing homes to make any future losses seem acceptable.
There’s not a country similar to the US anywhere on the planet that has done as good a job as we have.
Taiwan is a tiny Island nation with very limited international travel and it is all heavily controlled, they didn’t have tens of thousands of people flying in from all over the world daily that have potentially been exposed to the virus.
Taiwan also was the first country to confirm Person to Person transmission but when they reported it to the WHO it was simply buried and ignored for more than 10 very critical days while the virus spread across the globe.
Contact tracing anywhere with a heavy reliance on mass transit is a nightmare.
You’d basically need ever passenger to be recorded every time they got on/off the train/bus/etc. That’s going to require chipping or maybe some sort of PT “ID/Pass” with RFID tracking capability.
How is contact tracing supposed to be effective when you ask where they have been and the answer is, well I walked through Times Square, went to Macy’s and then took the subway home? Ok now, how do you find out who was in Times Square, in Macy’s and on the subway at those times?
There’s not much concern about transmission in large open areas, even big stores.
Where there’s high rates of transmission is in environments that have you in close/intimate contact with others such as subways, elevators, buses, or in tight quarters in homes and offices.
Even at that, it would require a level of tracking most Americans would never tolerate.
You could set up a phone App similar to apps that have proximity detectors to let you know a known infectee is close but who’d want to volunteer for that?
If we can even reach 40% we’ll be well on the way.
Studies show in areas like NYC there’s a very good chance the rate of infection is actually 20-50% the estimates so they are way ahead of much of the country.
In this particular case, you are asking (what is known in legal circles as) leading questions. which means you are looking for a particular answer without asking the question you want the answer to.
Yes. New Ro’s for the COVID virus have actually elevated it from a 2.5 to a 5.7, which would make it 4 times more contagious than the Flu. Hell, the Spanish Flu was below 2.0 but that was a different time.
Measles, by the way, has an Ro of over 15. Very contagious stuff.
