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The update hasn't made its way here yet, so I'll copy the relevant paragraphs from the updated blog post:
Good news! In an edit to correct a previous version of this post, Dr. Fauci has NOT thrown in with the eternally sacrificing scaremongers, who hereafter will be referred to as the Doom Patrol, by telling us that the vaccines will not block infection. I apologize to him and to all for the error. Instead, it is the headline writers and summarizers who took his true statement – that the vaccines are being tested and measured for preventing illness rather than testing for whether the person is infectious – and transformed that into “Dr. Fauci says early Covid vaccines will prevent symptoms, not block infections.”
That’s what the Doom Patrol does. It takes everything and uses it as a tool to show everything in the worst possible light.
The Atlantic has an excellent article on the importance of super-spreader events to transmission of COVID-19. It explains how some countries have had better success by taking super-spreader events into account:
This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic: It’s not R.
Here are two key paragraphs:
Oshitani told me that in Japan, they had noticed the overdispersion characteristics of COVID-19 as early as February, and thus created a strategy focusing mostly on cluster-busting, which tries to prevent one cluster from igniting another. Oshitani said he believes that “the chain of transmission cannot be sustained without a chain of clusters or a megacluster.” Japan thus carried out a cluster-busting approach, including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters. Japan also focused on ventilation, counseling its population to avoid places where the three C’s come together—crowds in closed spaces in close contact, especially if there’s talking or singing—bringing together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission, as well as presymptomatic and asymptomatic transmission.
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Overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. In fact, we may need to turn them upside down. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward so that we can warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. But that’s not the only way to trace contacts. And, because of overdispersion, it’s not necessarily where the most bang for the buck lies. Instead, in many cases, we should try to work backwards to see who first infected the subject.
Thank you for keeping profanity out of your articles.