Day 169: The Massachusetts Miracle

Massachusetts has gone from below-average unemployment for the country to the #1 spot, clocking in at 17.6% unemployment for June. The Boston Globe blames it on our coronavirus response. Also not very encouragingly, our case count is up a third of a percentage point today.

A new preprint from the Netherlands concludes that aerosol transmission is "inefficient" compared to droplets, especially in those with few to no symptoms. They studied only a handful of (healthy) subjects with lasers to determine what sorts of spray volumes they coughed up. In line with previous research, they found not much variation between people in their spray production regardless of size, age, or sex, but they did have one super-moist subject (17 times more volume than average) whom they postulated might be a super-spreader, were they infected.

For coughing, the volumetric distribution measured using laser diffraction shows that on average 98 ± 1% of the volume of the spray is contained in the large drops (100-1000 μm).

The paper becomes less satisfying when the authors fall back on the physics and some experiments with artificial aerosols to determine what happens to the remaining ~2% of spray, but there are some entertaining graphs to compensate for the high level of speculation.

The American Constitution Society takes a whack at the question of whether face masks are constitutional, and answers yes.