The author seems to ignore the obvious confounding factor here of selection bias -- super spreader events all seem to deal with people who are in the same social circles rather than outside them, as would be the case in public transportation, movie theaters, gyms, etc. The reason being that events with people in social socials are readily traceable to an infected individual attending, whereas contact tracing for anonymous infection in a shared area is much more difficult.
Even diseases with low transmissibility are known to be disseminated by public transit, such as tuberculosis.
I didn't get the sense that he was claiming any kind of authority, and he was pretty up front about selection bias. He wrote:
> I am not an epidemiologist, let alone a virologist. And the data I am working with is substandard anyway, as there are all sorts of obvious selection biases at play, including the editorial biases of the journalists on whom I rely for local reports.
Adding a disclaimer like this to the middle rather than all the places in the article where they might be implying that SSEs only occur in certain documented situations is disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst, in my opinion.
Is it really disingenuous at best? Like you think the best case scenario is that this guy is being insincere. I sincerely think this approach of just assuming bad faith is not useful.
The articles elaborate. In Japan and Singapore contract tracing is much easier,
Japan
> Less than two weeks later, she tested positive for the virus, and the authorities swiftly alerted others who had been at the club. As more infections soon emerged from three other music venues in the city, officials tested concertgoers and their close contacts, and urged others to stay home. All told, 106 cases were linked to the clubs, and nine people are still hospitalized.
Singapore
> Singapore's biggest cluster of Covid-19 patients, traced to a restaurant in Jurong, had more than just a dinner in common, said Ministry of Health director of medical services Kenneth Mak yesterday.
> "We've recognised that many of the individuals linked to this particular group of people getting infected had many common social activities," said Associate Professor Mak, pointing to other gatherings such as singing classes that infected individuals had taken part in together.
> "So, in fact, their social interactions went well beyond the dinner in that particular location, and as a result of those close activities... that's where the spread is actually occurring," he said.
Washington was at a choir, where everyone would have known each other
> Health officials said all 28 choir members who were tested for COVID-19 were found to be infected. The other 17 with symptoms never got tested, either because tests were not available or — like Comstock and Owen — the singers were under the impression that only people in dire condition were eligible.
I think more importantly, it's much easier to pull a list of people attending a particular concert or other ticketed mass gathering, compared to getting a recursive enumeration of people whose paths intersected with any of a set of suspected people on mass transit during the course of a couple of days.
Well, I'd say there's a big difference between sitting silently in chairs at an opera or symphony and standing/moshing/yelling loudly in extremely crowded quarters at a rock concert.
I get that, and the comment I was replying to was specifically refuting the "ballistic droplets" theory in favor of a "confounding variable" of them just happening to be in the same social circles.
High risk for mortality, yes. But are they higher risk for actually catching the bug when exposed? I don't think anyone knows that.
I'm not even sure how you could come up with numbers on how much viral exposure is needed to infect someone, short of controlled experiments with volunteers. The odds of killing a few volunteers seems pretty damn high, especially if you are testing with more vulnerable folks to establish a differential estimate. That's not a study I'd want to be involved in on either side of the clipboard.
Even diseases with low transmissibility are known to be disseminated by public transit, such as tuberculosis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338233/