How has COVID changed the way we study virus transmission?

Submitted by tigertoothdada t3_y22dh0 in askscience

When the COVID pandemic first started, there were a host of countermeasures that we now think of as unnecessary, such as sanitizing groceries. It seems that scientists have learned a lot about how COVID is transmitted since the beginning of the pandemic. Did we really not understand how viruses are transmitted? Was it just this virus? Do all viruses have different transmission mechanisms? How has the science of virus transmission study evolved since 2018?

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Mauricioduarte t1_is1f008 wrote

We actually understood a lot about how viruses are transmitted at the time.

Those countermeasures we now think unnecessary at the time we’re necessary. Ineffective but necessary. Covid was a new disease killing a lot of people. We didn’t have enough knowledge about it so it was safer to overestimate safety measures. Like if we took every countermeasure for every kind of virus, then we know it’s airborne, so we take a step back to only those effective to airborne viruses. We dropped countermeasures as we discovered more about that specific virus behavior, but in general it’s within what we already knew about transmission.

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carrotwax t1_is1ku7z wrote

I think saying ineffective but necessary is a contradiction, unless you mean it was a political necessity to appear to be doing something. If an action is ineffective by definition it's not necessary.

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gnathan87 t1_is1nsr1 wrote

Not OP but no, neither of these. It was a moral necessity. If you know there's a killer virus on the loose, and that some of the practical countermeasures {W,X,Y,Z} are likely to prevent a bunch of deaths (but not exactly which), it would surely be negligent if you didn't recommend all of them until you knew more.

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HiCanIPetYourCat t1_is2qgd0 wrote

No. It was a novel virus, we didn’t know anything about it and it was killing people en masse so taking every possible precaution was the correct reaction.

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carrotwax t1_is2ymod wrote

I don't want to rehash old discussion too much, but even in April 2020 we knew the prevalence (Ioannidis) and risk by age, along with existing pandemic plans that had been created to deal with pandemics of this magnitude. People forget the precautionary principle is exactly for these occasions: be cautious of all the side effects when making massive society wide changes. Not to do nothing but to be cautious.

Do I agree Covid was serious and that we needed action at that time? Yes, absolutely. Not a denialist. I'm just more a fan of getting clear data and educating to empower.

The problem with overreaction via laws and regulations is that lawmakers rarely get bothered to remove them. For instance, many of the extreme cleaning regulations to stop fomite transmission are still around. To you and me this may not be a big deal, but it is to low wage workers who had this thrown on them on top of overwork. It kills the soul to be doing useless actions over and over - in fact it's a known way of breaking the spirit. In virtual isolation those in power were completely disconnected from the realities of the those struggling, and as a result we're dangerously polarized.

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baldeagleNL t1_is1oqyb wrote

It didn't?

Coronavirus isn't so different from other viruses as some people think. It's just like some of the many we already knew, but mutated in such a way it became easily transmissible and quite deadly. Models of how the virus spreads were already quite accurate, and were quite good at predicting how the virus would infect the world.

I think we learned the most about how countermeasures affect the spread of viruses on an international, national, regional and local level. Much was unclear about the actual effect of lockdowns, limiting group sizes, et cetera. Of course models existed, but they were never tested at such a massive scale.

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SaisteRowan t1_is34cly wrote

We also learned how many armchair experts there are for RNA and epidemiology 😂

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coolflower12345 t1_is1ezyy wrote

Different viruses are transmitted differently -- think HIV vs. the common cold. We are always learning new things about viruses, but in this case the virus was new that we didn't know as much about the most prevalent transmission methods. There are specific papers and sites such as the below discussing the research of this. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33200716/ https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/sars-cov-2-transmission.html

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jourmungandr t1_is211vg wrote

It's the first time we've had the biotech to follow the evolution of a viral pandemic in real time. We already mostly knew how it transmitted. Most of the discussion was really around the edges. We knew coronaviruses transmit mostly by air. But there was a really technical quibble about how far the particles that carry the virus could spread. Some viruses spread with very small particles in the air and can stay in the air for a long time. For others the particles that carry enough virus to get you sick are too large to stay in the air. They mostly settle out fairly quickly. The sanitizing groceries thing, it's still possible the virus might transmit that way a very little bit. It's not enough to be important however.

The hard part about studying transmission is that you can't do the most direct experiments that would settle the question. It's considered very unethical to intentionally infect someone, even infecting healthy informed volunteers is pretty controversial. Which is what would be need to answer the question directly. So you have to watch for "natural experiments" where things just happened in a way that you can get the information. You have to be pretty lucky to find them unfortunately.

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