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Doleydoledole t1_j2ch0di wrote

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

>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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