| > Exposure is a function of pathogen concentration and contact time, so if you can reduce either of those, you can better avoid infectious diseases. What these articles don't talk about are the real-life challenges of concentration and contact time. For example, being a parent with a kid in school they might randomly sneeze or cough in my face while being completely asymptomatic. Then of course we all come down with covid later on. Secondly, the claims about viral load and shedding have conflicting science on new variants too: > https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01816-0#Sec7 i.e > Nevertheless, in our study, correlation between RNA and infectious VL was equally low between fully vaccinated and unvaccinated Delta-infected patients, indicating that factors other than mucosal neutralizing antibodies may be important for the reduction in infectious VL > Within 5 DPOS, we found higher RNA VLs but lower infectious VLs in swabs of unvaccinated patients with pre-VOC infections compared to Delta. These results disagree with other studies that analyzed only nucleic acid detection and found 3–10-fold-higher RNA copy number in Delta-infected patients compared to pre-VOC-infected patients > Although VL is a key element of transmission, the process of human-to-human transmission is complex, and other factors, such as varying recommended protection measures, overall incidence, perceived risks and the context of contacts (household versus community transmission), can influence outcomes in the studies reported. The best point from this article is the following: > Transmission dynamics are complex, but the interventions we can take to protect ourselves are comparatively simple. |