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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's around 23.69% if my math is correct. I mean, it's not nothing, but I wouldn't say "practically guarantee".
A 23% chance of a 1 in 10,000 chance thing happening every 14,400 chances? That can't be right.
p(a') = 1 - 1/10000
1 - p(a')^14400 = 0.76308930063962
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I’m not sure you can count the probability this way. Each touch is a separate event, and for each touch you have 1 in 10000 chance of infection. So, it’s 1 * 720 / 10000 * 720.
Maybe its not that accurate to count it that way, but 1 in 10,000 would mean to the layman that every 10,000 times you do this you should expect 1 case of C19, and i do this at least 720 times at every delivery. With more than 20 deliveries through the pandemic last year i have potentially touched 14,400 contaminated items which would practically guarantee a case of C19. Now i know not all of these would be contamina…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe its not that accurate to count it that way, but 1 in 10,000 would mean to the layman that every 10,000 times you do this you should expect 1 case of C19, and i do this at least 720 times at every delivery. With more than 20 deliveries through the pandemic last year i have potentially touched 14,400 contaminated items which would practically guarantee a case of C19. Now i know not all of these would be contamina…
If you touch a parcel a second time then the first time doesn't count to anything. It's 1/10k again. It's like with a lottery: you can buy a coupon every day for years and win nothing, because every draw resets your chances.
Now a 1/10k taken twice is 2/10k, so taken 14 thousand times it is 14k/10k. Okay so this isn't technically how you add statistics, but its close enough to see the utility in washing items.
I’m fairly certain information like this or similar was communicated very early on in the pandemic. A lot of people I know were sanitizing things from the grocery store for the first few weeks but then it quickly spread that surface transmission was very rare so everyone stopped.
I don't know (or heard about) anyone who wiped down a cereal box or similar in the last year. This probably varies by country and the communication that was there early last year.
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Yeah, same. It's kind of become a mindset now, and the way I see it, the habit is a net positive so I will likely retain it for years to come.
Opportunity cost. Keep in mind that those conditional probabilities multiply: Surface has been contaminated * chance of transmission * chance of dying All three are (for most people here) similarly small numbers. Do you want to spend your time doing something that can save you with probability < 1/(10^15)?
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> Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS. All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two…
Firstly, population density of the whole country is irrelevant. Population density of urban centres (e.g. Sydney + Melb > 10M pop.), is comparable if not greater than many cities in the US. We are largely self-sufficient for most food stuffs. I assume most of the US is too (I doubt that closing your borders would lead to empty food shelves). But we are entirely not self-sufficient for just about anything that's manuf…
I wrote that it is trivial to prevent people entering and leaving AUS/NZ, as you also stated in your comment "We shut our borders to people (mostly) not goods."
I did NOT write it was trivial "locking down" cities. Europe is under going similar lockdowns, so Australia is far from alone. According to the press, there are 30-40,000 of your fellow citizens that still have not been able to return home 12 months after all this started, precisely for the reasons above.
> population density of the whole country is irrelevant.
It's completely relevant. Even more so that if you live in Perth, you don't just jump in a car and drive to, say, Sydney, whereas in Europe you can drive from London to Birmingham in a couple of hours, or Paris to Brussels, and so on. Australian towns and cities are very widely spread compared to Europe and the USA. Which is reflected in the speed of transmission (and lack of) across the country.
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You prefer laypeople debating to scientific consensus? Because scientific guidance already involves debate within the scientific community, just with people actually qualified to debate it. It seems some people are taken aback by their exclusion, but no one is stopping you from becoming a virologist and partaking in the debate.
I never said laypeople. How did the debate amongst virologists go down?
Who were you thinking would be left to debate those guidelines when the guidelines are based on the debate of experts?
Guidelines change because the experts are still free to debate them, where there is little room for debate is following the results of said debate.
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And what on earth are you asking me how the guidelines from virologists went for when you're the one arguing for leaving room for debate against them?
One would imagine you'd have some very clear pictures of missteps that can't be excused by the fact we were trying to fight an unknown virus killing people at an alarming rate if you're saying there's room for debating if we should follow their guidelines.
I mean go look at the evolution of discussion on COVID fomite transmission yourself.
In March we were getting studies showing long lived presence of COVID in some form on surfaces for weeks, but there was debate on if those were actually infectious amongst experts.
By April here's a virologist pointing out that the results showing weeks didn't mean it was infectious:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/coronavirusfrontlines/2020/04/0...
And for those who will not read the article but will try to respond based on the url... the conclusion was still supporting possible transmission, just for days instead if weeks. And it was still recommending aggressive disinfection:
> This suggests that risk of infection from virus on objects or surfaces in the environment can be minimized by diligent cleaning and disinfection practices.
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The very nature of the guidelines is including the fact no all experts are going to agree, which is the point of an organization like WHO.
There is little room for debate in following what their guidelines. It's very easy to come up with armchair opinion showing how misguided that is where they were wrong, but their recommendations are based on accounting for the fact we had a global pandemic to deal with.
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You had me nodding along until last paragraph, where I can’t help but ask you to remind me what the population of AUS is, and the population density. Aren’t you also on an island with relatively harsh immigration policies? Obsessively cleaning bags from the grocery store and cereal boxes may not be the explanation for why your COVID experience seems saintly compared to contiguous regions with 10x the population and 4…
> Not saying it isn’t horrific out here, but not all of us live on a desert island in Oceania. :/ Greenland has faired even better than AUS but I doubt it’s because they have better surface disinfecting practices, just less surfaces and people in general compared to AUS. All of this. So many people are holding up AUS and NZ as the way the rest of the world should have handled it. But as you correctly say, they're two…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:COVID-19_Outbreak_World_M...
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How do you link hand sanitizer to Maxwell and Epstein?
Fair question but at some degree of bad faith flagging and moving on is more effective.
The challenge (for me, at least) is discerning bad faith from other, more correctable issues in a conversation.
