My original claim is that you don't get sick from going to the store (and since you all take everything 100% literally, I don't mean it's literally impossible to get sick from going to the store, just very very very rare). Secondly, you have not been able to claim how much actual active viral particles are in a sneeze because none of the studies that you or Silvanus have linked has provided that data point, thus meaning you don't know how much infectious dose is actually in a sneeze.
Let's recap: The point you have been trying to argue was that a sneeze containing "many times over an infectious dose", is "a ridiculous statement".
That right there was what I've been pushing back against: You made a direct claim about the viral load contained in a sneeze. I explained to you that it's a simple well-corroborated fact that a given sneeze in an infected individual does in fact contain many times the infectious dose.
Moreover, as part of that, I explained to you: "That’s why simple measures like covering coughs and sneezes and keeping distance from sick individuals reduce transmission: they reduce the number of viable particles that reach another host, lowering the probability of infection."
You know...that same thing you're now trying to invoke yourself, only you're going well beyond the scope and saying that it renders that number 'pointless'? It's not 'pointless', it's part and parcel of why the damn disease doesn't go extinct. Since any given particle has a very low chance of infecting a new host, the virus compensates with extreme numbers.
To put it directly: viruses can't control the circumstances under which a sneeze spreads their particles. Most droplets won't reach another person, and most viral particles that do will never successfully start an infection. If respiratory viruses only produced the minimum number of particles needed for infection, the disease would quickly die out because too few transmission events would succeed.
So respiratory disease compensate with numbers, releasing many times more viral particles than the infectious dose as what amounts to statistical insurance. Because the virus cannot control where droplets travel or whether they reach a susceptible host, producing large numbers greatly increases the chance that at least some particles will successfully infect someone else. Without that redundancy, transmission would mostly require extremely rare "perfect" conditions, like a sneeze directly into another person's nose.
In this respect, it's similar to how mushrooms reproduce. A single mushroom releases millions to billions of spores. That huge number is necessary because the release is uncontrolled and most spores land somewhere unsuitable for growth. Almost all of the spores fail, but producing enormous quantities increases the probability that at least a few will land in the right environment and develop into new mushrooms.
Again: this is basic epidemiology. And you clearly aren't even trying to understand it, just rejecting it out of hand because it was introduced to you in the form of a correction to one of your statements.
Upper respiratory diseases are airborne and their particles will float around in the air, just being with someone in the same room with them breathing and talking normally will get you sick. That's when you get sick is when the people you spend prolonged periods of time with (friends/family/coworkers) are sick. If you're worried about strangers getting you sick, it will be like restaurants and bars to worry about, not grocery and department stores.
There's basically no evidence that masking did anything because a face mask isn't going to stop you from getting sick from family/friends/coworkers that are sick because the virus is airborne and masks don't help against airborne transmission. If you're watching a movie with your kid and one of you is sick, it's not going to matter if you have masks on or not, you'll get sick either way. Distancing to 6 feet in places where you don't get sick already (like grocery stores) doesn't really do anything, hence why the measure was stupid. Whereas watching that movie with your kid and you're six feet away will still get you sick. The places that are 90+% likely to get sick, those measures don't do anything. Whereas those measures could possibly work in say a restaurant setting, but you can't be 6 feet away from people you're dining with and people didn't wear masks in the restaurant (outside of walking to their table, which did nothing). The whole wearing a mask to sit down in a restaurant but not at the table is literally the microcosm of how pointless most covid guidelines/recommendations were.
Yes, people do indeed cover sneezes or distance themselves a bit!
You know, like what health agencies recommended, with face masks and distancing! Measures that you yourself argued were totally useless and didn't do anything!
Now you want to refer to covering and distancing as reasons for why a sneeze is less likely to infect someone?!
BEFORE covid, people already covered sneezes/coughs. This was not some new thing that people just started doing.
