Here’s how coronavirus may actually be getting more like flu - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/03/more-uniformly-infectious-more-treatable-more-genetically-predictable-how-
Lidia Morawska at Queensland University of Technology found that the Delta variant is less reliant on superspreading events, with a k of 0.49. Her team hasn’t yet repeated the work for #Omicron, but she expects that its preference for the upper respiratory tract, where it replicates at astonishing rates, probably results not just in more transmission, but more uniformity in who transmits to others.
“Even a very short time is sufficient to inhale enough of this virus to be infected,” Morawska said. “Short enough that #ventilation may not have had a chance to remove the virus from the #air.”
That’s why she and others are now pushing for the use of germicidal #ultraviolet light, which can zap infectious viral particles in the air, killing them in an instant. This technology could have prevented the Gridiron superspreader event last month in Washington, University of Maryland aerobiologist Don Milton argued in a recent New York Times op-ed. Disinfecting UV light “should become the norm for large indoor gatherings where meals are served and masks cannot be worn,” he wrote.
But the virus is just one component of what makes for a superspreading event. The other is the host network where it lands — which is a function of the current levels of population immunity and how many contacts people are making.
“Based on everything we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, the underlying population susceptibility seems to be the primary driver of spread,” said Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. “I think that’s more important than changes in the virus itself.”
That means that even as #SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to be more contagious, it is encountering a small and ever-shrinking proportion of the population whose bodies have never seen some version of it before. Most people, through prior infection, vaccination, or a combination of the two now have immune systems capable of fending off the deadliest outcomes of contracting SARS-CoV-2. And that’s starting to look a lot like what happened when pandemic flu transitioned to seasonal flu.
