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Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

latimes.com

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Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#291

Post by lostlogin »

tomp wrote: post #278
lostlogin wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those killed in the story didn’t go to the party. As well as those who died, some number will have long term disability and illness. Many of them won’t have been guests at the wedding.

They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party

Some (all?) of the fatalities were rest home patients and many who caught it were prison inmates. They didn’t get to make any choices about who they saw or who cared for them.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#292

Post by cloverich »

quantified wrote: post #154
protoman3000 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we live good if there exists a significant amount of people rejecting seatbelts? We need to face the reality that on average people make bad choices which leads to substantial negative outcomes for any group. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic again confirms empirically that humans on average don’t have self-responsibility. How can philosophical ideas that are founded on principles such as “humans have self…

Not wearing a seatbelt hurts yourself only. If Covid were an STD there would be huge social pressure on it even though it would be passed less frequently.

I still remember the day I went in to my heart surgery rotation to find that all heart and vascular surgeries for the day were cancelled, because someone in a serious car wreck had used up all the blood.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#293

Post by totalZero »

modzu wrote: post #276
totalZero wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "super-spreader" was used to describe certain individuals in past disease outbreaks, including SARS. It means that there are some people who produce and share far more viral material than average (right-tail individuals, so to speak). There is no more a connection between "super-spreaders" and "super-predators," as there is between either of those two terms and "superman." https://www.technologyreview.com/20…

im familiar with the pareto principle. the point im trying to make is just that its usage by the la times is intended to trigger fear. super-man doesn't trigger fear -- thats the difference in analogies. it would be equally valid to say, "virus spreads via supertypical method around a supertypical gathering", imo

I think you're ascribing too much malice to the phrase "super-spreader." It just means "someone who spreads beyond what is typical." The pejorative connotation from "super-predator" comes from the "-predator" part.

If you're afraid of the word "spreader," then I suggest that you stay away from the lawn care section of your local home improvement retailer.

People are afraid of disease. That doesn't mean we should stop using the word "disease."

EDIT: I can't speak for the LA Times, and I'm not trying to defend them. Maybe they have an axe to grind. My comments are restricted to the terminology itself.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#294

Post by quantified »

wombatmobile wrote: post #202
quantified wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wearing a seatbelt hurts yourself only. If Covid were an STD there would be huge social pressure on it even though it would be passed less frequently.

> If Covid were an STD there would be huge social pressure on HIV/AIDS was that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS

Similar in some ways, but also very different. HIV/AIDS had a much higher mortality.

Covid-19 is interesting in that it's on the margin for death rates, and its long-term health effects are more varied and subtle than those for, say, polio.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#295

Post by ceejayoz »

tomp wrote: post #278
lostlogin wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those killed in the story didn’t go to the party. As well as those who died, some number will have long term disability and illness. Many of them won’t have been guests at the wedding.

They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently. I'm not saying it's easy to avoid such choices, but even things like going out to buy food - how many layers of mask are you wearing? What hours do you go shopping? How many months of food do you have stored at your home (inb4 "survivalists are just paranoid")?

> They still made choices to get in close contact with people who did go to the party, without having vetted them sufficiently.

Please, read the article.

Neither the residents of the long-term care facility nor the inmates at the jail are likely to have had any meaningful ability to vet their contacts.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#296

Post by otterley »

caeril wrote: post #269
otterley wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't only hurt yourself. Mandating seatbelts reduces the population's overall risk of injury. When you have a society that has a public fallback for health insurance, reducing the amount of serious injuries has a beneficial impact on lowering the cost of providing healthcare to society.

If this is the rationale, why do countries with public health insurance fallback not also have mandatory BMI or tobacco/alcohol limits, given the much much higher fatality rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer versus automobile accidents?

Because we live in an imperfect world and it takes time for public opinion to adapt to change.

Also, we do have BAC limits for driving, and public intoxication prohibitions.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#297

Post by nostromo »

theplague42 wrote: post #192
nostromo wrote: post #80

It’s interesting that the reporter here is shaming a wedding reception and not the long-term care facility where the deaths actually occurred. And not shaming for people for going to work with obvious Covid-19 symptoms, both to a prison and a long-term care facility . It’s clear the editors needed a story about family gatherings and not yet another story about old folks homes being high risk.

The wedding makes the jobs of the facility employees a lot harder.

The facility employees should never go to work with Covid-19 symptoms, including “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache”, regardless of the wedding.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#298

Post by otterley »

nostromo wrote: post #270
pjc50 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way they could have done this was .. preventing their staff from going to the wedding. Or maybe even preventing them from leaving the site.

Not true. The long-term care facility could just have required sick employees to stay home. From the article: > A worker at the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center, a long-term-care facility 100 miles from Millinocket in Madison, Maine, came down with a “fever, chills, cough, myalgia, runny nose, and headache” — all symptoms consistent with COVID-19. This worker’s child had attended the wedding reception, and…

But that's not enough. Since a person can be infected without having any symptoms, they can operate as a vector and infect the nursing home residents -- all without violating the policy.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#299

Post by goostavos »

maxerickson wrote: post #143
drcross wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing personal choice should sound alarm bells for anyone who has read Brave New World, 1984 or the Gulag Archipelago. If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start…

What I don't understand is why people don't make better personal choices? It's very strange that people won't just wear a mask (with it over their mouth and nose). There might be some tiny fraction of people that have a real issue with it, but not anywhere the number of people that feel the need to loudly object to it.

Is there room for a position of liking wearing a mask, liking other people wearing a mask, but also supporting people's personal choice to not wear one..?

Surely obvious, but there are people who will think that you make bad personal choices and need to make better ones. If those people also wield extraordinary power, well, it becomes less fun to find yourself suddenly having wrongthink.

Re: Super-spreading wedding demonstrates Covid-19 risk posed by holiday gatherings

#300

Post by [deleted] »

throw1122334 wrote: post #117
otterley wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the care facility deserve more blame?

Because it's literally their job to protect their patients from infection? It's not like we've just recently found out that the elderly are especially vulnerable to Covid-19. If a website left their admin portal open, didn't set a password and then got hacked, would you put the blame for that on the script kiddie who did it, or on the website's security team?

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