Friday, July 31, 2020

Dancing Outside

There is a small-ish group of older people near me who are getting together outside to dance for a couple of hours. They stay at least six feet apart, but most of them don't wear masks.

My initial reaction is: are they insane? Don't they know there is a pandemic going on??????

But maybe they're not insane; maybe the exercise and mental health benefits outweigh the risk. A few days ago I stumbled across some tools that let me do a rough back-of-the-envelope on the size of the risks, and I think we should encourage a lot more physically-distanced outdoor dancing (and singing and yoga and drumming and whatever else makes people happy).

Here's how I figure it:

If there are twenty people getting together to dance, there is about a one percent chance one or more of them have COVID-19 and are infectious but don't have symptoms. That's based the current infection rate of Hampshire County, Massachusetts (where I live) and calculated by this Coronavirus Risk tool.

If somebody is infected, what are the chances they'll spread it to somebody else in the group?

Assuming they all stay at least six feet apart so they're not breathing directly on each other (no large-droplet transmission of the virus), I can use a handy spreadsheet created by a chemistry professor who is an expert on air pollution to get an order-of-magnitude estimate for that risk. That is another one percent chance.

So the chances that somebody in the group catches COVID is the one percent chance somebody is infected, multiplied by the one-percent chance the infection spreads. Or a one in ten-thousand chance for somebody in the group to catch it, or one-in-190,000 individual chance.

Those are very small risks. To put those numbers in perspective, the average 75-year-old male in the US has about a one in ten-thousand chance of dying on any given day.

If you live in a county with a high infection rate... the risk will be much higher (e.g. in George County Mississippi right now the risk would be 1-in-300 somebody in the group would get infected). If you live in Mississippi, you should stay home as much as possible until infection rates fall.

If it is a larger group getting together... the risk would be much higher. Smaller group, much smaller risk.

Dance inside... higher risk, depending on the size of the space and how much fresh or sanitized air flows through it.

So, unless you live in a place where the virus is raging: go outside. Do something with a few other people; keep your distance, and be happy.


5 comments:

mm said...

That’s great that you can do math, Gavin. But if your assumptions are wrong your conclusions are wrong.

https://www.scribd.com/document/471185027/Paper-Virus-Lanka-002

The field of virology would barely exist were it not for the vaccine racket. It’s based on junk science and bought-and-paid-for conclusions.

Gavin Andresen said...

The evidence for viruses and the effectiveness of vaccines is overwhelming.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-a-vaccine-denier-20150320-column.html

mm said...

That lower court decision was reversed in the German Supreme Court in 2017 when two independent labs were used instead of a court-appointed expert as in the lower court.

>The evidence for viruses and the effectiveness of vaccines is overwhelming.

All evidence is overwhelming when you don’t use negative control experiments. Read the June 2020 piece I linked to. It should blow your mind. You shouldn't have faith in "science." Look at the experiments for yourself.

“Virologists believe in viruses, because they add to the tissue and cell culture allegedly infected blood, saliva or other body fluids—after having withdrawn the nutrients from the respective cell culture and after having started poisoning it with toxic antibiotics. They believe that the cell culture is then killed by viruses. However, the death of the tissue and cells takes place in the exact same manner when no “infected” genetic material is added a all. The virologists have apparently not noticed this fact. According to the scientific logic and the rules of scientific conduct, control experiments should have been carried out. In order to confirm the newly discovered method of “virus propagation,” in order to see whether it was not the method itself causing or falsifying the result, the scientists would have had to perform additional experiments, in which they would add sterile substances or substances from healthy people and animals to the cell culture.

These control experiments have never been carried out but the official “science” to this day.”

—Stefan Lanka, June 2020

Problitics said...

I think Gavin is correct. He can do a lot more than math, and if you have that little faith in his ability to research, calculate, and try to see things from every angle even yours, your assumptions are incorrect. I think it would be foolish to avoid vaccination at this point. There is a lot of scientific evidence as well as practical application evidence to back up the broad effectiveness of vaccination.

Unknown said...

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