One, two, three, skinnifation.

Yeah.

Welcome to the ZDUG MD show where live it's October 1st, the first day of fall, about 4, 20

PM Pacific time. California's on fire. What else is new? 2020's on fire. That's been going on

for months. So I wanted to talk today, though, and there won't be bad language or anything like that,

like in my last live broadcast. So this is really about sharing this because there's a new piece

out in the Atlantic, which has been plus or minus for science. Occasionally, they hit it right,

and I think this piece was really intriguing. And it's about a metric for understanding COVID that

we haven't been talking about enough publicly. And that is something called dispersion or

Kappa, something like that. None of that really matters. Here's what you need to know. The article

was super long. I've linked to it in the description. It can be summarized, thusly. Influenza flu

spreads in a pretty different way than COVID. And it really occurs like this. In flu, each person

who's infected can be roughly equivalently infectious as the next person. So in other words,

it's kind of a linear infectivity. If you're infected, you're likely to infect other people,

and those other people are likely to infect other people in a similar way. It's not perfect. There's

outliers and it's more complex than that. But that's how you think about influenza. And that's how

we have been treating COVID. In other words, every case, every single case is considered a massive

threat for infection. What's going on with COVID is something different because instead of like the

reproductive number, in other words, how many other people a single person on average can infect.

What this article was talking about is something called the dispersion number. So in other words,

how uneven is that infectivity? How clustered is it? And it is these that is considered

over dispersed like COVID, like SARS, the original, like MERS, Middle Eastern, the syndrome thing.

...