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[deleted] OP t1_j2ceqfq wrote

Reply to comment by PoopIsAlwaysSunny in Was there a decrease in other infectious diseases other than Covid due to wearing masks during the past 2 years? by [deleted]

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Doleydoledole t1_j2ch0di wrote

>The flu is much less contagious. It spreads only through droplets.

This has long been accepted wisdom, but isn't true. There was a misreading of a study decades ago, so public health folks thought aerosols were much smaller and less numerous than they actually are (was long thought they were 5 microns. They're more like 100). Our public health guidance has been misguided for a while.

The pandemic helped bring this to light, but unfortunately it seems that the message was 'covid is uniquely airborne!' and not 'aerosols are far larger and more numerous than we'd wrongly believed, and aerosol transmission is more important than we've thought - for all respiratory viruses.'

Here's a good summary of what we relearned during Covid:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

And you can find plenty of older studies that point to more aerosol transmission.

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Figueroa_Chill t1_j2dg2f2 wrote

Or could it be that during the Pandemic anyone who was ill just got put down as having Covid, so it disappeared purely by not being classified properly. I live in Scotland and virtually everything was put down as Covid. People started joking that you could go into the hospital with an axe embedded in your head - and it would be Covid.

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DoomGoober t1_j2cizrp wrote

>The flu is much less contagious. It spreads only through droplets... Droplets also fall to the ground quicker than airborne particles

This is not confirmed. Flu is also known to spread via aersols: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/influenza-general/study-confirms-flu-likely-spreads-aerosols-not-just-coughs-sneezes

However, flu does appear less contagious than SARS-CoV-2 but there are many possible reasons why (fewer days of infectiousness, flu is more susceptible to the body's defense, more viral load needed to induce infection, etc.)

Flu being spread mainly through "large droplets" and "large droplets" not being airborne, was the result of a medical community mistake where droplets above 5 microns were labeled as large and unlikely to remain airborne. The actual size is closer to 100 microns before a droplet readily falls out of the air. Thus many, many more droplets are actually airborne than first considered. Thus even if flu requires larger droplets it turns out those droplets can actually behavior as airborne. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/five-micron-mistake

Overall flu is less contagious but probably not because flu transmitting droplets are not airborne. They probably are.

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Tough_Oven4904 t1_j2d9lni wrote

>It’s not surprising. The flu is less contagious than COVID.

And...I got the flu a (Easter 2022) before I got covid (a month ago) 😩 flu was worse initially but covid is still hanging around driving me nuts

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