I've been saying this for a long time, and I think it's pretty straight forward. People don't spread COVID by coming in contact with the same people every day, it's when a new potentially infected person gets added to the mix that transmission becomes much more likely. The most obvious case in the frum world is weddings, we see people going to shul, work, and stores every day with little transmission. As soon as you add weddings to the mix it starts spreading like crazy.
The same will apply to students, when they're hanging out on the streets they come in contact with new people every day making transmission much more likely.
This post got me thinking. Let's take for a given that weddings are indeed driving spread, even now. Why is that so? The fact that there is much we don't understand about how the world works and this virus in particular doesn't mean it doesn't follow some form of predictable logic, and we can try to understand it.
Obviously, if Covid is more prevalent in x frum community, say 5% of the population will have Covid, weddings in Lakewood have a certain amount of people from X community, say 1000, so 50 covid carriers are seeding Lakewood. (People who attend weddings are probably skewed, so prevalence will be even higher the 5%).
Additionally, if there is a relatively insular neighborhood or area in Lakewood where Covid is less prevalent than the rest of Lakewood, perhaps most day to day contacts in shuls, schools, and stores are more likely to be within the community where Covid is less prevalent, whereas weddings will expose the community to people from the communities where it is more prevalent.
However, to me it seems that currently Covid is more prevalent in Lakewood than the other frum communities where people are coming to weddings from (perhaps Miami & Israel are the exception?), and Covid appears to be prevalent enough in Lakewood that it's hard to believe any specific community has it dramatically less than others.
I think there are two possible explanations.
1. There is much more direct contact in weddings. Spread can happen in the air and from people standing next to each other, but the vast majority of spread is probably by direct conversation exchanges or prolonged direct contact. By and large, the average person who goes to shul or a store doesn't speak directly to more than a handful of people at most, but at a wedding, you are likely interacting closely with at least 10 people, sometimes 50 or more.
2. Perhaps the circadian clock plays a role? Is is possible people simply shed more virus at night, or recipients are more susceptible to infection when exposed to this pathogen at night?
Anybody able to help me understand?