Originally Posted by
tbyers11
I don't know for sure. And 5 minutes spent trying to find the source article using Lancet, Imperial College and Australia has been unsuccessful. I would guess that the COVID numbers are probably in some sort of masking, unvaccinated situation while the mumps, chickenpox, measles were in a maskless situation. But I hope a COVID based study would control for masking that in the calculation.
My main point was that while Delta is more contagious than COVID that was prevalent in the US prior to ~April 2021 (Wuhan, Alpha) and we should take precautions. However, saying that it is contagious as chickenpox or measles is likely a bit overstating for those that are familiar with respiratory infections.
But, in retrospect, most Americans don't have a good grasp on what an R0 of 18 for measles vs an R0 of 6 for Delta COVID vs an R0 of ~1.5 for seasonal flu means. So comparing Delta to chicken pox or measles might be a good idea to "scare" people into taking it seriously?
Also worth mentioning that although influenza, chickenpox, measles, and others had an R0 that was fairly homogeneous, for the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 that was not true; in other words, an R0 of 2-ish for something generally meant that each infected person would infect about two others, but with SARS-CoV-2 it was seen that although the R0 was similar, many people didn't infect anyone and then another person might infect 40 people (the so-called "superspreaders"). We talked about this earlier in the thread, but one writer, with an exaggeration meant to illustrate the point, noted that, if Jeff Bezos walked into a bar in which you and 25 other people were seated, the average or mean income of everybody would be in the tens of millions, despite the fact that everybody in the bar besides Bezos was actually making between 50K and 200K, for example. I'm not sure whether, with the Delta variant, we are continuing to see the same sort of strange spread, in which many or even most people do not infect anybody while others infect a LOT of people, but I suspect that perhaps the reason for the higher R0 is because the Delta variant is NOT following that same sort of strange distribution of spreading, but rather is spreading from pretty much everybody who becomes infected. No, I don't have data to back that up right now; that is just my gut feeling.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust