[michaelmrose]

We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.

[corty]

There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.

[native_samples]

Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example.

Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect.

Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.

[michaelmrose]

It seems vastly more likely that the virus lied dormant upon supplies that were kept cold and was by happenstance later carried back into the warm than to imagine it carried across thousands of miles in the upper atmosphere.

Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios.

A lot of arguments against public health measures seem to bear a strong resemblance to yours. It is formulated like bullet proof vests don't stop hellfire missiles ergo we should stop wasting our time and money making swat team members deal with the sweat and discomfort of wearing vests!

It's only tolerable as an argument between people who have already decided that such protective measures are bad. Had the same sort of argument been made on a topic which they found controversial their reason should immediately have suggested 7 different counter arguments.

It seems like dubious reasoning to imagine that individuals spending 90% of their time in their homes and going out to the grocery store once a week wearing masks or not at all with curbside should spread disease just as much as when people mix normally.

[native_samples]

The investigators did look at the fomite/supplies idea but couldn't find any records or recollections of new supplies being opened.

"Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely"

Isn't this just an assumption based on your pre-existing intuitions? How do you know?

"nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios."

Lockdowns and masks don't decrease the spread. That's the point, that's why alternative explanations are necessary. Go look at case graphs for regions where you aren't familiar with the local laws, and try to draw a line on the graph where mask mandates/lockdowns were brought in or removed. You can't do it, I've tried. The graphs are always basically smooth and organic looking except for measurement artifacts. If these tactics worked there should be sharp, clearly artificial jumps and drops in case numbers 3 days after a mask mandate / lockdown is brought in or cancelled but that never happens. In fact in the UK, their "freedom day" where mandates were cancelled was followed three days later by a sharp DROP in cases. That's the exact opposite of what you'd expect. It doesn't mean anything though, it's just a funny coincidence, as becomes clear when you look at a wider span of data.

Now you're claiming that viral spread on the wind is incredibly unlikely. Epidemiologists do not agree. They agree for SARS-CoV-2 but for other epidemics in the past this idea has been taken very seriously and is the subject of entire research papers. Even Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, Mr Lockdown himself, based his models for foot-and-mouth disease on the assumption of long range windborne transmission. Ferguson has never claimed those models and understandings were wrong, in fact after the event he claimed victory (the tactic that time was mass killings of farm animals). Somewhere between 2000 and 2020 his team lost interest in windborne transmission without ever explaining why. It's not for microbiological reasons. No epidemiological predictions have any link to microbiology.

You're claiming motivated reasoning by me, but that isn't true. At the beginning I thought lockdowns and masks would work too. I was very surprised when they very clearly had zero effect on case curves, and very angry when lots of people decided to simply ignore that fact for what looked like ideological reasons (like loyalty to the academic "expert" classes). I know about these cases where airborne transmission was taken seriously exactly because after the 6ft droplet model failed to generate useful predictions I went digging to try and figure out why.