Much of the material in these studies comes as a surprise to people, says Erin Bromage, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who recently got 11 million views to a blog post he wrote on how the disease is transmitted. People think if you get exposed, you automatically get sick or become infectious, he explains. But even people exposed to sick family members in their homes don’t always get sick.
Sharing a home or office does make transmission more likely, since length of exposure matters as much as distance from other people. People passing by you in a supermarket are unlikely to infect you. Outdoor environments appear much safer as well. In one study, which followed hundreds of cases, all but one transmission occurred indoors.
“I’d like people to stop wasting mental energy on the wrong things,” Bromage says. “To stop worrying about outdoors and bike riders since it’s such a low risk.”
Bromage doesn’t think strict lockdowns have to remain until we get herd immunity or a vaccine. But he would like to see businesses use the data available to start up without fueling major outbreaks. He sees hope for restaurants and hair salons in the new normal, and is advising such businesses in his community on how to minimize exposure.
As Harvard population medicine professor Julia Marcus recalled in a recent piece in The Atlantic, 20th century doctors eventually relented on advice for unpaired people to remain celibate until there was a cure for AIDS. They started talking about safer sex. Now it’s time to do the same with life under the coronavirus.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She has written for the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Psychology Today, Science and other publications. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology.