The Experts Dont Know Where People Are Getting Infected – TheStreet

The Big Unknown

Nearly a year into to the pandemic, the Big Unknown Is Where People Are Getting Infected.

In Germany, authorities say they don’t know where 75% of people who currently test positive for the coronavirus got it.
In Austria, the figure stands at 77%.
In Spain, the health ministry said that it was able to identify the origin of only 7% of infections registered in the last week of October.
In France and Italy, only some 20% of new cases have been linked to people who previously tested positive.
In the US, we know even less.

Failure of Contact Tracing

Falko Liecke, city councilor for health and youth in Berlin’s popular Neukölln district, said his contact tracers often run into the problem that people who test positive “can’t remember or don’t want to remember” where they were exactly, and with whom, in the days before showing symptoms. A current time lag of up to a week in getting test results is making matters worse, he said.

Smartphone apps that warn you if you’ve been in close contact with someone who later tests positive are supposed to help address this problem, but they haven’t been widely adopted enough to be useful, experts say.

In France, authorities only began requiring restaurants to gather this information in early October, more than four months after the country emerged from its first lockdown. Even so, this information is rarely being used. In restaurant-dense Paris, local health authorities say they haven’t conducted a single investigation using customer data.

Key Points

The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 in the U.S. reached 69,455, a record.
The U.S. added more than 100,000 cases a day for the past 12 days.
The daily death toll in the U.S. has averaged over 1,000 for the past seven days.
The cumulative death toll is 251,000.
Covid-19 deaths among vulnerable nursing-home residents are surging again, with the virus increasingly spreading to rural facilities.

Hot Spots

How is is Spreading?

People don’t wear masks.
They catch it but are asymmetric spreaders.
They catch it and go to work anyway.
They spread it to their family.
Their kids spread it.

Despite over 250,000 deaths, a huge percentage of the population believes it it their right to go anywhere they want without a mask.

And they still believe Covid is some sort of scam.

Anywhere and Everywhere

The experts might be struggling but add it all up and the obvious answer to how it is spreading is Anywhere and Everywhere including church, bars, restaurants, schools, and stores.

Given eight months of Trump dissing masks and proclaiming Covid would soon go away, anywhere and everywhere was the expected result.

250,000 deaths is not a scam. It’s a tragedy.

Mish