Originally Posted by
NWIFlyer
I’ Either we have a quite brilliant set of scientists who understand this better than anyone else, or there are other factors at play.
You may want to cast your eye on this piece of research via St. Andrews University (22 step thread, you have to click through):
Dr. Cevik's analysis essentially shows that
generally speaking two thirds to three quarters of infections come via symptomatic patients spreading the disease to their partner, to their family and in health care settings. Casual contact, contact via door handles, supernarket squeeze passing, joggers - particularly if outdoors, particularly with asymptomatic cases - doesn't cause infection on any scale. Unforutnately our lockdown doesn't greatly help with those cases that are happening and it's not easy to resolve..
RIght now, in the UK, the majority of cases are heath care settings, if we include care homes. In other words community infection in the community is now very low., particularly in London When you have approximately 7,000 a day landing at Heathrow, even if 1% are symptomatic, way over a plausible level, having self solation as an added restriction makes no sense since 70 x R is statistically unmeasureable when N = 66 million. Dr. Cervik puts transport related infections at around 11%, so aviation would be tiny. But this is in a context when arriving travellers and the public are both suposed to be mainly staying at home and greatly reducing personal contact.
Going forward, imagine a situation - for example early June - when the lockdown could be reduced, there won't be a presumption of staying at home, working from home, the context therefore changes and lockdown won't be the norm. Therefore with a low level of community infection as a baseline, even 70 x R becomes an issue and hence the suggestion that arriving passengers are treated differently. Or rather these passengers would continue to do what they are supposed to be doing now.
I hope this makes the logic clearer.