What does "omicron transmissibility" mean?

[LAS14]

Back in the day, maybe well into Delta, we had pretty hard guidance. Stay 6 feet away. Don't stay in an unventilated space. Don't stay close to another person more than 15 minutes.

Did the distances or times change for Omicron? Does it penetrate masks more easily?

What does "more transmissible" mean?

tia
las

[targetpractice]

1. I had Omicron last week...

... Believe I caught it in an Uber while I was wearing a KN95 mask... I'm fully vaxxed and boosted.

I think it means stay away from people, period... Unless you've had this variant.

[Pobeka]

2. Well, for one thing 6 feet was an archaic, and wrong metric

That is because the particle size of the virus is so small it floats much farther than 6 feet. But, the farther particle travel the more disperse they are, so there can be a little mitigation due to distance. Really will depend entirely upon the air flow circumstances you find yourself in.

For myself, if outside, I make it a rule to not walk even 10 feet behind someone moving ahead of me at the same pace in still air, because I will be breathing some of the air they exhaled for the duration of time I follow them.

To your original question, more transmissible is a combination of two things:

1) The minimum viral load required to start and infection (1000, or 10,000 viral particles). So you can see if you only needed 1000 particles to cause an infection vs 10,000, you'd be 10 times more likely to get an infection for the for the 1000 threshold case, *everything else equal*.

2) A given variant like omicron, may be *really good* at hanging out in the nose/mouth, and thus increasing the amount of viral particles exhaled on every breath.

Put those two things together, and you can see the factors involved in delivering the "minimum viral load" necessary to cause an infection.

I am no expert on the size, but I'd guess all these variants penetrate masks about the same, since they are all pretty much the same size.