I have a serious point of contention with grouping household and social transmission together.

If someone does not know they were infected, they should still be following guidelines in a social setting and there’s a level of personal accountability to consider in those cases 1/

When household transmission occurs, in my experience, it occurs because the person did not know they were exposed and spread it to their intimate contacts, with whom they do not have guidelines on distancing to follow. That occurs because of a failure to adequately trace and 2/

notify, not because of a lack of personal responsibility.

Grouping current spread statistics of household and social transmission together is disingenuous, and undermines the trust I have in measures being implemented because the statistics are not transparent.
3/

As someone who sobbed over her six month old who was refusing to eat because she was in so much discomfort while she had Covid, I am intimately aware of the impact of household transmission. I also have the ability to analyze our household transmission and quick response 4/

to symptoms and the evidence is unwaveringly clear, the only thing that would have mattered would have been knowing exposure had happened so that in home isolation could have started before the 48 hours prior to onset of symptoms. Waking up at 2am beside some with a 5/

sudden onset, high fever, chills and body pain and immediately moving to a separate room and that person going full isolation, and Lysol-ing the shit out of your home is not likely to be enough. You still woke up beside their symptomatic body, and are probably 48 hours or less 6/

from symptoms yourself. May the odds be ever in your favour, but it doesn’t look good for you in that case my friends and you couldn’t respond sooner to what you didn’t know. So no level of personal responsibility would have changed our household transmission, but knowing 7/

sooner would have. Knowing sooner would require increased funding for the already overwhelmed contact tracing though, and would require people not being ashamed to admit where all they have been or fear retribution for admitting all their contacts if it makes them 8/

responsible for leaving work short handed, or forcing others to isolate and miss income. If we actually want to change the trends, not just postulate about what might work, my anecdotal experience would suggest we increase our contact tracing efforts and invest in a provincial 9/

sick/isolation benefit or mandate employers to do so, because those things will help people isolate sooner, and help contact tracing be effective. Imagine how much better we could be combatting Covid with the money we’ve spent on the war room being invested here instead. 10/10

Addendum: to make it abundantly clear, we were fully transparent in our contact tracing, but given that we have no confirmation of where it was contracted my working assumption is that exposure came from someone who did not fully disclose.