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As far as I understand it not every contact between a Covid19+ and an uninfected person means the uninfected persons gets infected. For the sake of simplicity
by blensor 6y ago
As far as I understand it not every contact between a Covid19+ and an uninfected person means the uninfected persons gets infected.
For the sake of simplicity lets call each breath the Covid19+ person takes a contact, with a probability that they infect you at 0.5%
The it will make a huge difference if you passing them by or are sitting next to them for an extended period of time.
- Someone 6y agoThat’s exactly what my question is about. By that model, if you wait long enough, the risk of getting infected by that one person you’re sitting next to approaches p, the fraction of people who are contagious (that person either is contagious, and you’ll get infected, or they aren’t, and you won’t ever get infected) and the risk of infection of serially being in the danger area of multiple persons (effectively taking independent draws of that 0.5% risk) approaches 1.0 (eventually, you’ll have encountered so many contagious persons that you’ll get infected, too) Typically, you won’t meet enough people on the street to even get close to that 1.0, but it isn’t a given that that probability stays below p. Things would be different if there were a minimal load (in a simple model, say, of V virus particles in a minute) needed to run the risk of infection. I can see this swing both ways, depending on various factors.