Would it not be absolutely awesome to read a scholarly article on that topic? I would love that! If you find some, please share with me!
In the meantime, let us cast our minds back to back in the Days of Yore, before we quit going to hospitals and checking into them for days or weeks at a time for things like having a baby or an appendectomy or pneumonia or whatever. Now, of course, we go to an outpatient doctor’s office, unless we are Super Modern, in which case maybe we use an app like roman or whatever the hell that thing is with the ads with the reddit guy who married the tennis star in them. If we do find ourselves at the hospital, we often never properly speaking check in — there is not an emergency room, there is an emergency department with multiple rooms, each with their own single bed, etc.
Of course, poor people in underserved areas must make do with existing hospitals and systems from the Days of Yore. But for most of us, for a few decades now, the question is about whether you get a semi-private room, or a private room — and even if you get stuck with semi-private, there will be a substantial curtain and probably no one at all in the other half of the room. Wards just do not even happen.
Notice I have not mentioned specialized isolation units.
So we all worry a lot about handwashing (you should wash your hands! Thoroughly. Especially before you eat. Do not touch your face! Stop shaking hands. Etc.). And that is a worthy thing to do! But there are fucking hard limits on the benefits of handwashing if you are in a bed, and a few feet away — less than 6, say — there is someone else. And there is no wall, no curtain, just you in a bed and them in a bed. Also, whenever they have visitors — and if they are not infectious, they will have visitors, because being in a hospital is worrisome for everyone so people come by with treats and flowers and books and charging cords and better food than the hospital serves or at least something more to the liking of the person who is stuck in that bed next to yours.
If you are in a hospital, and you have something contagious, and you are housed in such a large room with lots of people, bedridden, or a visitor of the bedridden, you are a Super Spreader.
Turns out the easiest way to make sure that does not happen is to Not Have Large Rooms With Lots of People In Them. So we do not do that any more.
But people who are not lucky enough to live in a country with the most fucking expensive health care on the planet DO often find themselves in hospitals, in wards. And thus encounter Super Spreaders.
These are cultural factors. These are things that really turn out to matter. Also, did I mention that we barely let anyone into the hospital and then we send them home as quickly as humanly possible? There is a really good reason for that. Diseases transmit really slowly from a person home alone to other people also home alone.
ETA: Really, stay out of the hospital. The 2015 South Korea MERS outbreak involved private or semi-private rooms, more than 6 feet apart, and like, 36 people on the same floor as the traveler caught it. Stay out of hospitals if you possibly can manage it. And think hard about places where a lot of people are sharing a ventilation system.
