Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here was about the network dynamics of Covid. /1 https://t.co/UBGTlYUJIR

It’s the reverse point to another I made a while back, that stopping yourself becoming infected is not just an individual act. By interrupting chains of transmission, you’re potentially preventing thousands of other infections. Your individual action *is* collective action. /2

The networked nature of infectious disease collapses our frameworks of thinking around local and global, individual and collective. The thread is saying, don’t portray the solution to Covid as fixing everything, everywhere. That’s unnecessary and why action doesn’t happen. /3

Because the solution seems too big, too disruptive, too expensive. But it doesn’t need to be, we just need to find the superspreading sites, that generate the networks in the first place. That’s schools. The hub of the infection networks, stretching into the entire community. /4

This same network dynamics is why we don’t even need ‘sterilising’ vaccines. We’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. We just need to reduce viral load enough, in peoples’ bodies and in collective air spaces, to slow transmission, below Ro = 1. /5

Once we do that, exponential decay does the rest. That’s how networked things work. What allows viruses to spread is also their greatest weakness. Once you find the breeding hubs, targeting them collapses the networks everywhere. /end