Guy

Not cool, please don't.

you stated that we don’t need to have ventilators in closed rooms

When you're alone, in your own apartment, with a closed door, yeah. That's why lockdowns were effective at preventing transmission. I also said ventilation was necessary when in rooms with other people, especially when you can't distance.

I have better things to do than listen to you pretend that you didn’t say something that’s factually incorrect.

I corrected myself to be more specific when I realised I hadn't been clear enough, and I backed up the specifics with science. I'm sorry that you feel that isn't sufficient. Feel free to do the things, I'm out.

I'm upset that you're ignoring the science, even the science you provided. The comments are whatever, which is why I suggested reconsidering the definitions of the terms for future actions instead of reinstating the comments.

Water droplets, or, if you prefer, respiratory droplets, or even aerosols, is how COVID travels through the air and settles on objects. That's what the link you gave me explicitly says, and it is what I said. It does not waft around without that medium, to suggest it does is factually incorrect and not backed by any science.

From the link you gave me, emphasis mine:

First, larger respiratory droplets that rapidly settle onto surfaces, typically within 1–2 meters of the source, are amenable to hand hygiene, social distancing, and face masks. Second, albeit with more limited direct evidence, is aerosolization and spread of smaller respiratory droplets, or droplet nuclei, primarily <0.5 micrometers in final size, capable of staying suspended in air for hours and requiring filtering or ventilation for interdiction (2–4).

This is the same thing as what I said. Complete with caveat that you need to mask, wash your hands and not touch stuff. I get being cautious but... you've removed a comment which said the same thing as your correction, including choice of word.

Annex C: Respiratory droplets from Atkinson J, Chartier Y, Pessoa-Silva CL, et al., editors. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2009.

Additionally, the definition of an aerosol is a suspension of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in air or another gas.

I'm fine with leaving the comments gone, but in the interests of good intentions and being mostly right, I think it's worth reconsidering the aerosol/droplet reasoning for future mod actions.

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Still debated, probably not a significant vector, but definitely possible: Lin, N., Zhang, B., Shi, R. et al. Decay pattern of SARS-CoV-2 RNA surface contamination in real residences. Sci Rep 14, 6190 (2024).

Key quote from conclusion:

The environmental contamination of object surfaces by SARS-CoV-2 RNA in residences of COVID-19 patients is low, but cross-contamination caused by water taps and washing basins may have hidden transmission risks. Generally, fomite transmission played a limited role in COVID-19 spread. Even the residence was contaminated by SARS-CoV-2, it was reduced by 90% three days after the patient left.

Edited to add: I mention it mostly because where I live is a high-traffic part of the building with people constantly using the elevators and opening doors. That's why I'm still careful about it. If I lived in a lower density place I probably wouldn't go as hard on the "no touchy" thing.

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References weren't paywalled, so I assume this is the paper in question:

Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P.R., Jurafsky, D. et al. AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. Nature (2024).

Abstract

Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing^1,2 to informing hiring decisions³. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans^4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement^8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.