Links: About those holiday gatherings

[sonia]

In case anyone needs arguments to convince recalcitrant friends or relatives.

After Big Thanksgiving Dinners, Plan Small Christmas Funerals, Health Experts Warn by Ashton Pittman, Mississippi Free Press, Nov 16, 2020 via rydra_wong.

Thanksgiving Dinner during COVID: Overview of Aerosol Transmission Risk Modeling by J. Alex Huffman, Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Denver, Nov 17, 2020. Colorful graphs backed by solid data and analysis to estimate risks of COVID-19 transmission in different sized rooms with different numbers of people. Outdoor and masked gatherings also evaluated.

Thanksgiving and other holiday meal gatherings will be tremendously dangerous for the community.
• COVID rates are skyrocketing, breaking records
• Indoor meal gatherings imply no masks while eating/drinking
• Gatherings often large numbers of people of mixed households/pods
The purpose of this document is to provide rough estimate of HOW risky a gathering could be to help aid decisions and encourage civic responsibility.

And, Scientific Brief: Community Use of Cloth Masks to Control the Spread of SARS-CoV-2, updated Nov 10, 2020. Short article that concludes, "Experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*takes notes*

[sonia]

Glad the links are useful!

[jesse_the_k]

That Mississippi Free Press article is a very well-crafted punch in the gut.

I'm pleased that non-profit foundations are getting in to the news business, since (as Poynter.org reports in detail) all news outlets -- print, radio, tv and web -- have been laying people off and cutting back.

Alt-weeklies, which grew fat in the 80s–90s thanks to event advertising, have been particularly hard hit. Madison's Isthmus has found support as a non-profit four months after the print edition folded.

[sonia]

Wow, I didn't realize about the newspaper die-offs. Glad becoming a non-profit is a viable path for Isthmus. On the one hand it seems obvious that newspapers should be non-profits, and on the other hand I'm not sure what that means in the current use of the term.

I like the personal sentence from Ashton Pittman's bio: "A trained photojournalist, Ashton lives in South Mississippi with his husband, William, and their two pit bulls, Dorothy and Dru."

[silveradept]

Ware the visualizations and graphs on the "Thanksgiving Dinner" slides, as several of them are on vastly different scales even if their graphs look the same. I have sent feedback to the creator pointing out the discrepancies of scale that are easily missed, overlooked, or could be put to malicious purposes.

[sonia]

Which graphs look problematic? The "assuming a superspreader" looks strange on slide 5, but the rest of them seem relatively consistent with either probability of infection or number of cases.

I'll be interested to hear what the creator says!

[silveradept]

Page 17 has very similar-looking graphs, but their scales are 0-14 and 0-2.5, for example. I don't think any of the data is suspect, but it's a much clearer picture of the page 17 data on page 9, for example, when the data is on the same scale and space.

Pages 20-23 are also things to examine the scale of, since they're all packed together instead of spaced out.

[sonia]

I see what you mean. I will admit to not studying the Full Results. Yeah, either some scale is mislabeled there, or that is poor data representation. It could be so much more dramatic on the same scale!