Outlook

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Figure 2. Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people. What did Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam do right that the other countries didn’t? Better testing, efficient contract tracing and isolation, and early use of face masks. Source: Our World in Data.

Almost a year after the first SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China, the transmission dynamics driving the pandemic are coming into focus. It now appears that a high percentage (as high as 80%?) of secondary transmissions could be caused by a small fraction of infectious individuals (10 to 20%?; Adam 2020); if this is the case, then the more people are grouped together, the higher the probability that a superspreader is part of the group. It is now acknowledged that aerosol transmission plays an important role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission (Morawska 2020b, WHO 20200709, Prather 2020); if this is the case, then building a wall around this same group of people and putting a ceiling above them further enhances the probability of SARS-CoV-2 infection. It finally appears that shouting and speaking loudly emits thousands of oral fluid droplets per second which could linger in the air for minutes (Anfinrud 2020, Stadnytskyi 2020, Chao 2020, Asadi 2019, Bax 2020); if this is the case, then creating noise (machines, music) around people grouped in a closed environment would create the perfect setting for a superspreader event. Over the coming months, the scientific community will try and