redshaw
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- Jul 17, 2015
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Part of the problem in just advising sick people to wear one, they might be past the contagious stage and spreaders shedding the virus will be asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic.I think the advice came from a good place, which was to discourage non frontline people from panic buying and hoarding.
Also interesting is within a German study they tested an highly infected household and couldn't find any surfaces with the virus, perhaps too late to find it. Most of the infections is spread at home in China. I'm willing to take on a lot of spread is through surfaces and touching your face as per the video I posted by the NY doctor but knowing how much can be expelled and linger in rooms just by talking laughing let alone coughing, people talking for long periods at home vs a dried droplet on a surface sitting there for various lengths of time and being brought to the mouth/nose/eyes.
I'm not looking for protection, I'm looking at reducing the expelled droplets in shops and homes in the air or on surfaces and helping the hospitals not be overwhelmed, it's a two way street, we see in Italy how immensely difficult it can be for staff to keep up with procedures and they go out the window and get infected themselves.
Various face coverings can help lessen the spread, can be washed and reused. Keeping ventilation at home and less talking in close proximity.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak
"Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.
“It seemed like a normal rehearsal, except that choirs are huggy places,” Burdick recalled. “We were making music and trying to keep a certain distance between each other.”
After 2½ hours, the singers parted ways at 9 p.m.
Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.
The outbreak has stunned county health officials, who have concluded that the virus was almost certainly transmitted through the air from one or more people without symptoms.
“That’s all we can think of right now,” said Polly Dubbel, a county communicable disease and environmental health manager.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, eight people who were at the rehearsal said that nobody there was coughing or sneezing or appeared ill.
Experts said the choir outbreak is consistent with a growing body of evidence that the virus can be transmitted through aerosols — particles smaller than 5 micrometers that can float in the air for minutes or longer.
The World Health Organization has downplayed the possibility of transmission in aerosols, stressing that the virus is spread through much larger “respiratory droplets,” which are emitted when an infected person coughs or sneezes and quickly fall to a surface.
But a study published March 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when the virus was suspended in a mist under laboratory conditions it remained “viable and infectious” for three hours — though researchers have said that time period would probably be no more than a half-hour in real-world conditions.
One of the authors of that study, Jamie Lloyd-Smith, a UCLA infectious disease researcher, said it’s possible that the forceful breathing action of singing dispersed viral particles in the church room that were widely inhaled.
“One could imagine that really trying to project your voice would also project more droplets and aerosols,” he said.
With three-quarters of the choir members testing positive for the virus or showing symptoms of infection, the outbreak would be considered a “super-spreading event,” he said.
Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech and an expert on airborne transmission of viruses, said some people happen to be especially good at exhaling fine material, producing 1,000 times more than others.
Marr said that the choir outbreak should be seen as a powerful warning to the public.
“This may help people realize that, hey, we really need to be careful,” she said."
Obviously don't have mass gatherings like this but I can see how it can be suspended in the air through pressure waves by talking a lot in close proximity.
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