A comparison of transit usage and COVID cases early in the pandemic in 52 urban areas found that heavy transit use was strongly correlated with greater numbers of COVID infections. “Increasing weekly bus transit usage in metropolitan statistical areas by one scaled unit was associated with a 1.38 times increase in incidence rate of COVID-19; a one scaled unit increase in weekly train transit usage was associated with an increase in incidence rate of 1.54,” said the researchers.
Plan to wear a mask for the rest of your life. Photo by Jacques Paquier.
The correlation was strong even if New York City was eliminated from the dataset. As I’ve often noted, New York is such a big transit market that it often biases any analysis of transportation across American cities.
The report admitted that “physical distancing of riders, sanitation of train cars/buses, improved ventilation, and mask usage for riders” might have been able to reduce infection rates, but did not estimate how effective any of these would be. For a disease like COVID, which is spread by aerosols that can hang around for awhile even after a person leaves, it is likely that none other than masks would be very effective.
Early in the pandemic, no one was sure whether the coronavirus was spread by aerosols, so no one knew whether masks would be useful. Until April 3, well into the pandemic, the CDC even urged people not to buy (and presumably not to wear) masks. The same kind of uncertainty is likely to apply to any future epidemics or pandemics.
This means that future urban travelers who want to be safe from disease have a choice: wear masks at all times while on board urban transit or don’t take transit. Since masks don’t protect the wearer as much as they protect others from any diseases the wearer may have, even that won’t work if everyone else on board the bus or train isn’t wearing a mask. For many, then, the logical choice will be to not ride transit.
Let’s get real here. Cloth masks have been shown to be completely ineffective at preventing the spread of covid. Surgical masks are mostly ineffective. (Have you read the disclaimer on a box of surgical masks that state they do not prevent covid transmission?) N95s can be effective—after removing all facial hair, passing a medical exam, being fit tested, and receiving training in their use.
I suspect Covid transmission is one of the biggest reasons people are fleeing dense city centers for the suburbs. It’s tough to even keep a car in Manhattan or San Francisco much less use it to commute. Not a problem in the suburbs where most houses have built-in garages.
Japan and South KOREA have transit and high density dependency of transit galore……their infection rates were lower than US.
As Antiplanner mentioned a year ago, it’s “Class not race” And classes of people have habits, Japan and South Korea in particular are vast sticklers to personal hygiene and sanitation. LONG before COVID-19, seeing Asian people with masks on was a common sight through out. Most westerners looked at as a certain degree of paranoia.
But their preference goes back to post-war. After WWII Japan underwent a radical medical modernization, bodies found in the Post war rubble, thousands dead in bombed out cities their deaths were attributed to starvation and warfare conditions…….but US occupation of the islands and the insertion of medical examiners offices (autopsies) later attributed their deaths to tuberculosis and diseases of toxic environment and condensed settings and miserable hygiene. South Korea during Korean war, healthcare; what little was available publicly collapsed. And thousands of US army/navy medical personnel were the only lifeline for a huge bulk of the Korean people. And remained so after the war. Knowing full well US forces would inevitably leave, the 1950s those nations anticipating a US withdrawl took Every possible step to boost it’s health regimen as a matter of public policy and conscious effort. Knowing full well they didn’t have the resources to counter a public epidemic or have enough doctors available in case of a severe health shortage, they went on a two step method, One they subsidized state education to crank out more physicians/surgeons. But mostly they turned preventative medicine into a cultural mindset. Diet, physical activity, personal washing, outdoor sanitation are all stables of Modern asian culture. So much so those nations surpass the west on factors such as life expectancy, resiliency, etc. It’s not class or race, it’s culture.
Vitamin D makes one nearly immune to COVID-19. Most people are deficient in Vitamin D and most elderly are severely deficient. Your body creates Vitamin D naturally when sunlight penetrates the skin and interacts with the fat underneath. Thanks to fun with technology, working from home, people spend much less time outdoors and some elderly people never feel sunlight, especially during the winter months. Darker skin is vastly more difficult for sunlight to penetrate so such urban people are often severely deficient in Vitamin D, which explains their higher proportional rate of COVID-19 deaths. Vitamin D is rare in food so most people get little. Experts agree on this, yet our governments never mention the need to take Vitamin D supplements or getting out into the sun, they just scream about wearing masks. Namely because sales of Vitamin D provide no profits for the politically well connected pharmaceutical industry
Lazy Writer’s entire last paragraph was stolen word-for-word from blogger Carlton Meyer at G2mil. Was going to point out Lazy Writer’s false clam that “most people are deficient in Vitamin D,” but it’s not even his claim or writing. Lazy Thinker just copied and pasted someone else’s erroneous claims without first verifying them because he couldn’t be bothered to pull silly claims out of his own arse.
Quality.
Maybe time to get your own blog, Lazy Bro.
https://www.g2mil.com/empire_nova.htm
Well, staples of the modern Japanese, Singaporean, and Taiwanese culture, anyway. Walk the streets in any big city in the People’s Republic of China or the Republic of India and you’ll see find less of some or all those things.
My guess is that most or all coronavirus diseases originated in Asia over the past thousands of years and its inhabitants naturally have more immunity to them.