PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: Another Bogus Study—Tall People in the Crosshairs
Every genre turns toward parody eventually. The summer rush to aerosolize the coronavirus brings us one of the silliest pieces of science yet.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
Around the time Fauci increased his personal click rate by suggesting aerosols might kill us, which was about a month after Donald G. McNeil at the New York Times pretended that aerosols might kill us—after the protests and riots made it impossible to maintain the fiction that gathering outdoors would kill us all—we got a rash of stories telling us that tall people were especially likely to be infected by the coronavirus. Why? To make the case for aerosols, of course.
We had moved beyond fear-mongering into the realm of fantasy. The articles tell us about an unpublished Oxford study claiming that while the average British man is 5’9”, people taller than six feet are twice as likely to get infected. The authors decide that this disparity suggests that aerosols are at play. Imagine the logic: the virus doesn’t just remain in the air at full potency indefinitely; it rises exactly four inches. When a 5’9” person coughs, his sputum climbs to infect someone 6’1” but no longer poses a threat to people of average height like himself. Jeff will be fine, but Mutt is in trouble.
Credulous journalists reported the claim as if it could be true (though we have to wonder, as always—do they believe this stuff?). Many of the stories appeared in British publications (probably because of the Oxford origins) but the headlines appeared everywhere. Every story implicated aerosols. “Findings indicate Covid-19 transmitting through air, as height would not make a difference if it were carried only through droplets” (Telegraph). “Tall people could face a greater risk of getting Covid-19, according to research that adds weight to the theory the disease is airborne” (Daily Mail). “Individuals over 6ft tall seem to have more than double the chance of having a COVID-19 medical diagnosis or testing positive. The researchers said this suggests that aerosol transmission is very likely” (Yahoo!). “The findings provided more fuel for the belief that the virus may remain airborne longer than commonly believed” (ABC).
The media were committed to the aerosol explanation, and the language was eerily familiar across all the stories. The New Zealand Herald said, “Scientists said taller people would be at no more risk if the virus was mainly spread through sneezing or coughing, which produce larger droplets that fall to the ground quickly.” Then it added, “Health officials have so far ruled out that Covid-19 is airborne. But admitted recently they are reviewing ‘emerging evidence’ that it is.” As usual, the authors don’t tell us who these “scientists” or “health officials” are, and they don’t cite any evidence. They plant suggestions, which we nurture into truths. If necessary, they can find a few assistant professors to lend a sheen of credibility by saying perhaps or more research is needed. Any hint that Trump dismissed an idea will create millions of passionate believers instantly.
If aerosols posed a risk, they would infect tall people, as droplets do, but there’s no reason to believe they would be vastly more likely to infect tall people than short or average-height people. What about standing people? Are they more at risk than sitting people? Are diners in restaurants killing their servers? Should we mandate wheelchairs and mechanics’ creepers in addition to masks and gloves? Should we ban high heels and offer tax breaks for basement restaurants, recumbent bikes, and Miatas?
To believe this nonsense, we’d have to believe a lot of impossible things. First, while the argument is always that aerosols could exist or might exist or that the information calls for more studies, we know that droplets are the primary mode of transmission. Even if aerosols account for some portion of spreading (and there’s no evidence that they do), it is a minority, and they would affect people of any height. Smoke, pollen, fog—true aerosols—do not rise to an exact height and hover in place. If they did, we would just duck. Smoke fills a room. Fog settles in a valley. You can’t poke your head above or below aerosols any more than you can poke your head above or below the air itself.
Because droplets fall (at differing rates depending on humidity and airflow), by the logic of the study, short people should be at risk, not tall people. A person standing 6’1” could go around infecting everyone in his downward drift but would himself be above it all. We should be mandating stilts and pogo sticks instead of masks, gloves, and sanitizers. A short person of only 5’ would be wading through a shitstorm of the virus. Women, who are shorter than men on average, would get infected and die at higher rates than men, although the opposite is true.
Droplets and aerosols exist along a continuum. Light droplets in dry air linger longer than heavy droplets in wet air. We know from the tracing studies that people can become infected 25 feet away from an infected person who is shouting or singing, but the thing travels because it is lightweight and can drift in air currents, not because it levitates four inches above its source.
[Long after I wrote the above in July, 2020, I came across a story from a tech site called BGR from November 2020, called, “Crazy study reveals short people have a higher risk of catching the coronavirus.” A bullet below the headline says, “A new study finds that shorter people are at a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus due to the downward trajectory of droplets.” How about that? My joke is someone else’s scare story. At least the authors were right about droplets and the downward trajectory, which directly contradict the more mainstream story of aerosols and an upward trajectory. There’s probably a story somewhere telling us that people of average height face the greatest risk.]
We know that men die at higher rates and are taller on average than women. Perhaps the authors of the study simply looked at a group of people and failed to recognize that gender, not height, caused the disparities in infection rates, although some of the articles said there were very few women in the study, and at least one said that tall women were especially susceptible to infection. We’ll never know what’s going on, as the study itself wasn’t published. All we know from the articles is that the study surveyed 2,000 people and was conducted by a team of “experts” at Oxford University.
Why would a nonsense story about a bogus unpublished study get so much coverage? I heard about it from a friend who has no particular interest in either the coronavirus or height. Clearly it was coming through our phones. Just a day or so of a story dripping from our screens and millions of Americans “know” something new, even if what they know is false.
The media launched a summer push to promote aerosols. They had been telling us from the beginning that outdoor gatherings were just as dangerous as indoor gatherings. Beaches and parks remained closed into the summer. Ballgames, bike races, barbeques, and parades were illegal. But suddenly, in early June 2020, the media needed to carve out an exception for a certain kind of outdoor activity, so they went in search of a new discovery. None of it made sense (outdoor church services remained banned in many places), but aerosols sounded like science, and the media knew no one would ask questions. The outdoors part was irrelevant, as we’d known since April that the outdoors was safe, but by mentioning aerosols and indoors in the same conversation, the media made us think they were linked. The story of sad giants walking to their deaths was just a byproduct of a campaign to make protests and riots safe from the coronavirus.
Still, in a curious coincidence, we behave as if a lower profile is safer. We are required to wear masks when standing or walking, even though walking is nearly always safe because we are moving through the air. (If you walk past a sprinkler, you get a little wet. If you stand next to one for twenty minutes, you get soaked.) We wear masks in elevators, grocery stores, and gas stations. We are required to wear them when entering airplanes and restaurants. We are even required to wear them outdoors in some areas, and a shocking number of people do so voluntarily. All of these public displays involve standing or walking. We wear masks when we are on display.
But we remove them as soon as we sit down. We take them off in restaurants, bars, airplanes, hotel lobbies, offices—any place where we sit, any place where we might drink or eat. Not that we have to: an old Starbucks cup or crumpled napkin can serve as a useful prop if we want to take off the mask. We just feel safer when we sit down. Such is our “science” and our commitment to safety.
[Summer 2021 update: Airlines have become strict on mask requirements recently after a lax 2020. I flew a number of times last year, and no one seemed to care about masks as long as we were seated with a drink or snack in front of us. I assume the new strictness in 2021 comes from Biden's executive orders of January 20th. Recently, a commercial pilot acquaintance told us how happy she was to see a passenger pulled from her plane and likely banned from the airline for life for not wearing a mask. She told us this over a basket of peel-and-eat shrimp in a crowded Denver restaurant in which not a single customer was wearing a mask, herself included. Hundreds of millions of passengers flew last year, snacking all the way, with no outbreaks traced to flights. At the time, restaurants were closed. Now, mask requirements on planes are strictly enforced, yet restaurants are back to normal.]
We don’t pretend to explain it. We satisfy the newscasters and politicians and our nervous neighbors by wearing the mask where we are most visible, and we remove it as soon as we reach our safety seat. We bully and shame those who fail to wear one for the five-second trip to the bathroom, out of civic-mindedness or to advertise our hatred of Trump. We are safe because we are good people. If the virus is on the prowl, let it aim its aerosols at tall people, who probably earn more than we do anyway.
One might wonder whether masks do much of anything. When the CDC reports that 74% of people surveyed say they “always” wear a mask outside of their homes, and most others report that they “often” wear one, there isn’t much more ratcheting up we can do. Various other surveys have all shown similar high rates of mask-wearing. A July 2020 survey conducted by the New York Times found 99% of pedestrians on a street corner in Queens wearing masks, and over 80% in many other locations around New York—outdoors, with a heat index of 86 to 97 degrees, when the risk of spreading was essentially zero. My own observations are that everyone wears a mask in stores and gas stations and any place where we wait in line, even outdoors. When 71% of those who test positive say they always wore a mask, and another 14% say they often wore one (about the same percentages of those who did not test positive), it’s hard to see any correlations between mask-wearing and “safety.” Yet masks, along with lockdowns, have become the whole ballgame for those most invested in the danger narrative. If only everyone wore a mask, we could knock this out in two weeks!
Because the threat is so vanishingly low in most public places, we have the luxury of performing safety in ways that make us feel virtuous even if the actions have nothing to do with public safety. Imagine if World War I soldiers were required to wear helmets and gas masks behind the lines but were encouraged to remove them before an attack. Imagine if the Apollo astronauts were required to wear helmets and spacesuits at press conferences but took them off in space, or if Formula One drivers raced in street clothes but wore fire suits to the Champagne celebration afterward. Such is our policy on masks, which suggests that either we don’t believe they do anything or we have no clue how the virus transmits. But aerosols—those we can all agree on. We read about them in the news.