
When it comes to Covid-19, it is not easily spread by asymptomatic people. Still, if you don’t want to catch it, you need to take precautions not to get it. Don’t blame Trump, or anyone else except the person who actually transmitted to you, if you do. Even then it might not be the transmitter’s fault in the legal or insurance sense because like the tango, it takes two to get Covid.
Discerning cause and effect in any area of life is a difficult proposition. Doing so for the transmission trajectory of a widespread virus, within a radically heterogeneous population over large land masses where millions of variables are at work, is harder still. One might even say: impossible. It surely is not enough to throw together a paper that is 95% statistical mumbo-jumbo, and with a firm conclusion that impacts on an earth-shaking election that is only three days away. Scientific integrity requires much more than coming to a politically correct conclusion with a made-for-media conclusion.