Read on Twitter
1/ One thing people are finding it difficult to get their heads around in terms of pandemic statistics is the question of transmission statistics. Both "sides" (if you want to call them that) in debate in Ontario are getting tripped up on the same thing, I think
2/ Some of the "open it up" crowd point to statistics from Aug/Sept showing that direct infection numbers from closed bars/restaurants were low to say "see, it wasn't the bars that drove the infection, it was _________".
3/ And on the other side, people are making fun of @fordnation now for focusing on interprovincial/international travel because only 1-2% of infections come directly from travel or contact with travellers. But I think these arguments suffer from the same conceptual error.
4/ Twenty years ago Malcolm Gladwell wrote "The Tipping Point", which essentially was about the epidemiology of ideas. He distinguished between "mavens" (ppl who knew a lot of others in a concentrated field) and "connectors" (people who knew people in widely disparate fields)
5/ Basically - and I am simplifying a hell of a lot here - connectors spread ideas widely and mavens spread them deeply. You need both for a pandemic to really get deadly. (MG has a third category of "salesmen", but in the context of a disease this is less relevant)
6/ Most COVID outbreaks happen in limited, constricted, settings: factories, depots, etc. They are "maven" outbreaks in the sense that they spread quickly among people who share the specific characteristic of working in an infected space.
7/ But the bastard thing about COVID is the way it travels *between* disparate groups that otherwise would not meet each other. It's connectors, *meeting with other connectors from disparate places* that make the virus jump from maven outbreak to maven outbreak.
8/ Our COVID statistics don't capture this connector effect because they don't link back to n earlier sources. A traveler infects a contact, who infects another , and this chain may eventually lead to 100 infections - but only 2% are considered "travel-related".
9/ Anyways, my point here is: closed bars & travel are very similar in the way they act as connectors between physically disparate COVID outbreaks but are both minimized as outbreak sources in the stats. If you think one is serious and the other not, you need to think again
(where "closed bars" means "enclosed" not closed shut, obvs.)
