That’s actually not new news. There was something about it way back in March based on Chinese anecdotes. I even started a thread about it at that time, but can’t access it now. (The search engine comes up empty; Google sees it, but the board says it doesn’t exist.)
…latest update from New Zealand.
5 new cases: 4 in Auckland, 1 in Tokoroa, 1 of the Auckland cases they haven’t found a link to the current cluster but investigations are continuing. 18,000 tests yesterday so the numbers are coming down, but the labs are still working overtime to get the testing processed.
The “detective case” into the outbreaks is continuing. The testing of the Americold site has largely come back negative, which makes it extremely unlikely it came through frozen meat, and they’ve effectively ruled that out.
They have found a link between the Maintenance Worker and the person in managed isolation: they both used the same elevator within minutes of each other (they weren’t in it at the same time) . At the moment they can’t find any other overlap, so the elevator is likely to be where the worker caught the virus.
What this article describes is similar to what my father experienced. It wasn’t until months after he collapsed that we were able to determine by taking an anti-body test that COVID-19 was the most likely cause of his illness. My parents repeatedly asked for a test, but because he didn’t exhibit the classic symptoms he never got one. Instead they ran all kinds of other tests to determine what was wrong and came up with essentially nothing. Although he thankfully survived, he is moving around a lot slower than he used to. He is slowly regaining his energy but who knows when he will be back to normal.
//i\\
That possibility honestly concerns me more. It implies that the index individual has super spreader potential. If they spread it to one person who was in an elevator minutes later, no actual close contact, then they likely spread it more than that … hard to imagine not.
Potential doesn’t mean it happened but scary as a possibility.
Do they know if both were wearing masks at the time? That’s pretty scary to get it from the aerosolized virus floating in the elevator.
22,579,141 total cases
791,002 dead
15,301,257 recovered
In the US:
5,700,931 total cases
176,337 dead
3,062,331 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
A week from now the US will have more than 6,000,000 total cases and more than 180,000 dead from Covid-19.
…the question was asked at the press conference: the answer was there are no cameras in the elevator, but protocol was for everyone to wear masks, including guests and the worker, so they should have been wearing masks, but can’t (at this stage) know for sure. This will probably be one of the things investigated over the next few days. Its fascinating detective work because we have so few cases they can do a deep dive into each and every case, I’ll keep everyone updated.
Thanks for this, @Banquet_Bear. It’s fascinating to have a window into what’s going on over in NZ.
There was an earlier outbreak of 70 people which they think started from initial transmission in an elevator:
They think it was due to contact contamination from the buttons rather than air in the elevator.
That was on July 5th – I wonder if there has been a follow-up.
My money would be all-in on “it was the exhaled aerosols in the air, not the buttons” … but that’s more from an impression of how I believe (not know) COVID-19 works rather than hard evidence. I’ve come to dismiss any and all “lasts for X days on surfaces!” studies. From what I’ve read, if your not rubbing a veritable COVID-laden loogie into your eyes, you’re not going to get it from a surface. Again … belief, not knowledge.
One possibility might be that if someone is alone in an elevator, they may take off their mask to cough or sneeze and not be very careful about keeping the area sterile. It could be that both the air is thick with droplets and there are droplets on the surfaces.
Not sure there is any way to follow up …the CDC assessment at the time was based on the then current belief that aerosols were not a major factor and this article that demonstrated surface contamination, as measured by detectable virus using RT-PCR, not viral culture, in the rooms of outbreak centers, but which also recognized that their results did not demonstrate the presence of any viable virus on such surfaces. (And even “viable” does not necessarily mean of sufficient numbers to be a transmission risk.) Since then of course the potential role of aerosols in at least some cases has become more elevated, and the role of surfaces as a major transmission source is less favored.
Also just a belief - but my belief is that the estimated 10% of all those infected who are super spreaders (responsible for an estimated 80% of all the spread) include specific individuals with high lung viral loads (which may not correlate with nasal viral loads) and who effectively aerosolize it out of their lungs into the air. Biggest harms when these relatively few specific individuals do so in crowded closed environments, but still able to spread even by having left aerosols wafting in an elevator that they had been in a few minutes before.
Very much agreed. I wonder if there will ever be an easy-ish way to tell if an infected person is a superspreader.
I also wonder if most infectious pathogens are the same way – do individual people vary wildly in how well their bodies transmit flu, meningitis, mononucleosis, norovirus, measles, chicken pox, etc. Is there such thing as a person with a severe flu who is somehow physically unable to spread the virus to others?
I agree. That’s what scientists are now saying. The news article was published in July but the original preprint of the study was back in March when they had not yet discovered how much aerosols play a role in transmission. Since then, fomite transmission is now thought to be much more rare. It’s possible that he got on the elevator at some point right after she got off. Aerosols would still be present. Either no one was wearing a mask or she wasn’t wearing a mask and he was only wearing a light mask. That seems more probable based on the current understanding.
Looks like the data collection is moving back to the CDC. I hope this is a good thing, but I’m not holding my breath: Trump administration to put CDC back in charge of collecting hospitals’ COVID-19 data: Birx - MarketWatch
U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has covid.
Oh, and yeah: some people who went to the rally in Sturgis have covid:
How could anyone have forseen this?
Here’s some news:
22,861,685 total cases
797,105 dead
15,516,734 recovered
In the US:
5,746,272 total cases
177,424 dead
3,095,484 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison: