"A Japanese investigation of 110 cases found the probability of transmission to be 18.7 times higher indoors compared to an “open-air environment.” And a more recent study, which looked at transmission between 18 infected construction workers and 496 of their close contacts, showed that the infected individuals were nearly 25 times more likely to spread the virus to coworkers in enclosed spaces compared with outdoor settings. They transmitted the virus to 26 percent of their indoor coworkers while infecting only 1.4 percent of their outdoor workmates — this despite being significantly more likely to share meals and talk loudly while working outside."
Does it EVER spread outdoors? Sure. Is it very likely to? Not even close. We've known this for a long time, and yet we still have municipalities welding basketball hoops shut and filling skate parks with sand.
There's a restaurant close to me that's got "outdoor" seating. Its a tent with the sides down and heaters. It happens to match the legal requirements for "outdoor seating" in my county, but we all know that COVID19 is spreading everywhere inside that small tent.
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Its not like people are social-distancing at national parks. People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
> There's a restaurant close to me that's got "outdoor" seating. Its a tent with the sides down and heaters. It happens to match the legal requirements for "outdoor seating" in my county, but we all know that COVID19 is spreading everywhere inside that small tent.
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And yet, the declarations are also ridiculous, which is the point that OP was making (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880264). In the past (and maybe now, not sure) people have been required to social distance at national parks - or even forbidden from going to them at all.
On the other side of "ridiculous": 6 feet of "social distancing" wasn't enough to begin with. Building and elevator capacities were a sham. And, my employer (and likely many others) skirted all of these ridiculous rules in ridiculous ways - which is the point, that regardless of how people behave (which isn't relevant for this discussion, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up), some of the rules are still bad and useless.
The vast majority of covid-related rules are unnecessary, hygiene theater, woefully inadequate, or some combination of all of those - and, yet, governments and people of a particular inclination insist on following this charade anyway and using various logical fallacies (e.g. strawmanning, as you did above) and emotional attacks on those that have the audacity to question them.
> On the other side of "ridiculous": 6 feet of "social distancing" wasn't enough to begin with
Its not enough for you as an individual.
But such a rule lowers the "blast radius" of who gets infected when a case comes up. People's breath travels like 20 feet. If everyone is 6-feet apart, you only get ~3 people in front of you sick.
If people are ~2 feet apart instead, you infect 300% more people.
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There's a thing about big groups. What's good for the group isn't necessarily what's best for the individual.
Read the quote I pulled: outside = "open-air environment".
> People are abusing these declarations in ridiculous ways.
And this is being obtuse about "these declarations" to avoid acknowledging the fact that the person at the top of this thread is correct: COVID, statistically, almost never transmits outdoors. It's been studied, multiple times, all coming to the same conclusion.
This is a pretty blatant strawman - OP's exact words were "COVID-19 doesn't effectively transmit outside" (emphasis added), not that it doesn't transmit at all.
COVID19 is _effectively_ spreading to the entire Ohio deer population.
> The investigators said the prevalence of infection varied from 13.5% to 70% across the nine sites, with the highest prevalence observed in four sites that were surrounded by more densely populated neighborhoods.
Furthermore, it seems like we humans are spreading it to deer, with the deer in higher-density human neighborhoods reaching ~70% infection.
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I don't think we humans are sitting around talking to deer indoors. Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
> The number of deer who've caught COVID19 in Ohio seems to suggest otherwise.
It doesn't suggest anything.
You're conflating two uses of the English word "effectively". One means "efficiently", which is the only one in use in the thread above, and the only one under debate. The other means "functionally" or "the effects are the same as", which is what you used in this single comment - but not even correctly. 1/3 of the deer population is not "effectively" the entire Ohio deer population in the sense that you meant it.
Furthermore, COVID19 does not spread effectively (in the sense of "efficiently") outside, as a comment that you've already read has pointed out[1]. 18 to 25 times less likely to spread to co-workers in an "open-air environment" (which kind of implicitly is still not like being in a park) fulfills the definition of "ineffective".
> Any reasonable application of Occam's Razor is that humans are spreading COVID19 to deer through some kind of outdoor setting.
Nobody claimed that there were no cases of outdoor human-to-deer infection - you were suggesting that the virus spread effectively outdoors in [2], which Occam's Razor does not support in the slightest.
You also moved the goalposts from "The fact that there's a bunch of infected deer means that covid effectively transmits outside" to "There's some outdoor transmission", and those two positions are completely different.
So, yes, Occam's Razor does support your (silently) revised claim in this comment, but definitely not the comment you originally invoked the Razor in.
> You also moved the goalposts from "The fact that there's a bunch of infected deer means that covid effectively transmits outside" to "There's some outdoor transmission", and those two positions are completely different.
The deer samples were anywhere from 14% to 70% COVID19 infected.
You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population (and likely, that deer have spread to each other). All of which happened outdoors.
> The deer samples were anywhere from 14% to 70% COVID19 infected.
...with an overall rate of 36%, which is given in that very article that you linked. It doesn't matter if 70% of the deer at one site were infected, if the average is significantly lower than that.
...which isn't even relevant, because again, you're moving the goalposts, as stated above.
> You're grossly underestimating the amount of COVID19 we have spread to the deer population
I'm not underestimating anything, as one of the researchers said: "there is no documentation of deer transmitting the virus to humans or vice versa"[1] (another article which you have linked but apparently failed to read).
...and, as a previous study found[2], the virus does not spread effectively outdoors.
You're literally fabricating claims from thin air. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for effective human-deer or deer-deer COVID transmission.
I mean, I can't really imagine a world where the deer have mostly be infected by humans. It would seem more likely to me at least that there were a few human-deer transmissions, but way way more deer-deer transmissions.
The GP isn't really arguing in good faith - they didn't even fully read (or purposefully omitted sections from) one of the articles that they linked, in which one of the authors of the study says that there is no documentation of deer transmitting the virus to humans or vice versa[1].
"A Japanese investigation of 110 cases found the probability of transmission to be 18.7 times higher indoors compared to an “open-air environment.” And a more recent study, which looked at transmission between 18 infected construction workers and 496 of their close contacts, showed that the infected individuals were nearly 25 times more likely to spread the virus to coworkers in enclosed spaces compared with outdoor settings. They transmitted the virus to 26 percent of their indoor coworkers while infecting only 1.4 percent of their outdoor workmates — this despite being significantly more likely to share meals and talk loudly while working outside."
Does it EVER spread outdoors? Sure. Is it very likely to? Not even close. We've known this for a long time, and yet we still have municipalities welding basketball hoops shut and filling skate parks with sand.