Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no…

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this pathogen. /1 https://t.co/O8QDN2U2Ud https://t.co/SbvQJIFHgv

This is what you’d expect, for a pathogen with a low dispersion parameter (k). That most people won’t spread it, but a handful will spread it a LOT. So the event a person goes to may be a superspreading event. In which case there’s a high chance of them being infected. /2

But if it isn’t, they may come home infection-free. Those two scenarios may *look* exactly the same, from the outside. Crowds of people mingling. Like these ‘Disco Clubs’, where women in their 40s and 50s pretend they’re 18 again. /3 https://t.co/Gnc0ZY54z6

Leading to people drawing the wrong conclusions about Covid and its dangers. If it’s the non-superspreading event, they may say this crowd has ‘good hybrid immunity’. When in reality there’s just no superspreader present. /4

This to me seems again the danger of framing Covid as something happening everywhere, all the time, and trying to tailor a response (or lack of response) according to that framing. Because that everywhere all the time model leads to nothing being done anywhere. /5

Minimisers use it to suggest it would be impossible to control Covid, without shutting society down. While people who want to control Covid launch impotent campaigns to get the entire population to control the virus themselves. They’re both situations that don’t exist. /6

Covid is not everywhere, all the time. It spreads from a tiny number of superspreading hubs. Sometimes. That can lead to everybody eventually getting infected, which is what’s happened. But not ALL AT ONCE. /7

Which is why people seem to get away with Disco Club type events sometimes, but other times catch Covid in seemingly unlucky brief encounters. The ‘macro’ picture is everybody getting Covid, eventually. But that’s like saying if you leave a small leak in the roof unchecked…/8

…eventually the whole roof will collapse. It may, but the cause was the tiny drip. Which could have been easily fixed. We’re using the dispersion characteristics of SARS2 to pretend we’re building immunity. The lived experience is reinforcing that mistaken belief. /9

Because many do avoid infection, doing many things. Until they don’t. The virus gets them eventually. It wasn’t hybrid immunity stopping them getting it those other times. It was their lucky avoidance of a superspreading event. /10

A pathogen with a low dispersion constant is much *easier* to control. That’s SARS-Covid-2. Easy to control. But we’re not controlling it, because we’re using the everywhere all the time model in our heads of how it operates. Target the hubs. /end

Thought I’d add a Wankpanzer to this thread, so that some male adolescent behaviour might balance things up for those who see the entire world through a particular lens. https://t.co/i3pU7Kh02q