Quote:
Originally Posted by O.city
Stop it?
You don't. Slow it down? Sure. Stop it? Not until there's a vaccine.
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And man, the things you can do to slow it are so straightforward that merely not being a stupid jackass will help immensely, especially as we learn more.
The asymptomatic carrier thing is really important to think your way through. Yes, you are capable of shedding the virus still and technically still contagious. But man, it sure looks like you've gotta work hard to spread it at that point. I haven't seen anything credible to this point to indicate that this can be spread through anything other than 'lung fluid' (or whatever the hell the real term is). It's...I dunno...expectorate? Is that a fair way to use that term?
So if you're asymptomatic, theoretical transfer is absolutely possible. But actual real-world transfer? Man...you just have to be completely careless at that point. You have be licking your fingers or picking your noise and not washing your hands. You have to have seasonal allergies and be coughing/sneezing on hard surfaces/people.
It isn't that the symptoms make you more contagious - it's that they're force multipliers that make you more likely to spread it in the real world. They make you more likely to put expectorate (?) out in the world for people to contract the disease from.
So if you take those that are showing symptoms out of the equation and put them at home, you might just have the perfect 'sweet spot' in slow spread from those who are asymptomatic out in the world.
Am I making that as clear in type as it seems in my head? There's an analogy to put together here somehow but I don't know how to put it together. Maybe a garden hose vs. a sprinkler? Throw a garden hose on the ground and yeah, it's gonna be wet there and if you grab the hose and swing it around, you'll splash water on people. And there's a lot of water coming out (again, assuming viral loads are higher for the asymptomatic). That's the 'asymptomatic illness' people. The slow soak of water on the ground will get a few people wet, and probably the amount you kinda want to have to create that acquired immunity - but not an overwhelming amount. Meanwhile if you toss a sprinkler on the end of that hose, it'll shoot the same amount of water out, maybe even less, but it's gonna be spraying it everywhere and get more people wet and at that point far more, far faster, than you intended. So just take the sprinkler off by keeping sick people at home.
I think that analogy works as I'm typing it while parsing through it. It might be stupid if i read it later but it seems to work right now.