A choir decided to go ahead with rehearsal, now dozens have Covid-19
latimes.com
latimes.com
I read an article from a epidemilogist that wrote about a very recent study of an isolation chamber for a covid-19 patient. They detected the virus everywhere on surfaces in the isolation chamber. This is consistent with airborne droplet spreading, since the patient was presumably coughing and droplets were being spread throughout the isolation chamber.
What they DIE NOT find was the virus in the air. If it's truly airborne like measles, it would be detected in the air itself, but that was not true. Thus, it is not airborne.
I don't have the source for this, because I probably read 200 articles a day like everyone else so it's lost in my history. But I actively committed this to memory and reassured me that this was not airborne, but rather airborne droplet.
I had no cough before developing fever and muscle pains, and only a very mild cough afterwards. Are you suggesting that asymptomatic cases are not infectious?
Likewise, according to the article, "nobody there was coughing or sneezing".
It is traveling through the air, you can get it, through the air, if you are near another person.
I have seen this misunderstanding in real life. People who think an outdoor festival is safe because "it isn't airborne"
As well, at least one expert, in South Korea, states that it is possible to become aerosolized and actually airborne in the right conditions (many people, singing, shouting, in a small area). Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAk7aX5hksU&t=1559s
There is no solid science for how far apart people should be, and there are so many complicating factors (what kind of room? how much airflow?) that any such guidance is a rough guideline, at best. Folks who are stringently trying to stay six feet apart from each other while walking down the street in Manhattan, for example, are more than a bit silly.
The GP is a reasonable statement of the current scientific knowledge: it isn’t airborne, and you actually do need fairly intimate contact to get the virus “through the air”. Spending hours together in an unventilated room is probably sufficient, even if you never get closer than 1m; conversely, it probably doesn’t matter much if you pass right next to someone on the street(unless they cough directly in your face).
The reinfection debate has been murky. Is it just a testing artifact, etc? Notably, he did not mention any of these alternate explanations. He stated rather plainly that they have seen cases of reinfection.
HN loves to make "well ackchuyally" posts that are technically correct but meaningless to the layman. It's a result of the "points scoring" format of the site, same as Reddit. It leads to people having to make cumbersome posts that fully specify every single point that might possibly be the subject of any disagreement, and that's antithetical to good, informative, concise content.
Pedanticism is not the same thing as content. In fact, it usually crosses the rules of the site into "not giving the most gracious possible reading of a comment". And yes, you have to strike some balance between being pedantic and being accurate.
To the layman, if you don't already understand the difference between aerosol and airbone transmission, there really isn't one in practice. Being around an infected person can cause you to become infected yourself, without direct physical c. That is the short and long of it. It doesn't shed off their skin, just when they breathe, or talk, or sneeze, or cough, and potentially can linger for hours. There is no meaningful difference in how you would behave if this was airborne vs aerosol.
Everyone thinks their particular "well ackchuyally" is important, but usually... they're not.
But to that point... I'll admit I have been there. At times, if I'm just relaxing, constant corrections can feel pedantic, endless, tiring, and uncharitable.
I see the other side too though. Other times, I really need a place for careful discussion of ideas, where we all try to contribute what we know and learn from each other, as a refuge from all the places dominated by anti-intellectualism.
So I know it can be draining, but I'd hate for peer pressure from a vocal minority to chill useful intelligent contributions in other threads. I don't want anyone to feel like they'll be made fun of for simply trying to contribute to a discussion.
Unimportant "well actually" posts can be downvoted or ignored. There's no equivalent workaround for overcorrection, no way to save the insightful addition someone never posts to avoid the risk of getting made fun of.
It seems we all should be wearing masks in public!
Isn't the main reason for the success of this measure precisely to make any infected people retain droplets (big or small) inside the mask?
I'm not saying it doesn't offer any protection from droplets in the air, but the main motivation was containing droplets.
In this case, Choir practice it's literally a spit fest - you're singing loudly in a tightly packed large group of people. It's like the perfect scenario for spread.
Even if they are in rows, you get them on your head, neck, shoulders, hands, pants, sheets of paper you're holding, even shoes.
Also, if it is indeed suspended in air, then wouldn't the minimum requirement be N95 masks?
The one thing that people don't seem to think about is even if it's only effective at keeping droplets from infected people from spreading, how are all of the asymptomatic supposed to know they should wear a mask?
The obvious solution is that everyone should wear a mask. I think people keep discouraging mask use due to the shortage, but if people are misinforming the public due to a shortage that's still not cool
Communication wise isn't straight forward, but in this case I think the masses should know it bluntly. "You could be a source of spread, so use a mask in public."
Because on one side I understand that "use masks" might give a sense of false security, and stresses supply chains... but there are other ways of doing it - promote community production, even if it is rudimentary. Some countries are using prisons. I mean, there are ways around it.
I haven't seen ant misinformation discouraging mask use.
I have seen people point out: (1) it is most critical that healthcare workers have masks, (2) masks are not particularly effective for protecting the wearer, but they are very helpful for protecting others from the wearer.
#2 is enough to discourage use from the selfish who are unconcerned with social consequences, #1 tends to discourage those who are concerned with social consequences, given the supply shortage.
I'm not from America. I'm from Europe. So you're basically saying we need tens of billion of masks worldwide... that simply won't happen.
I understand that would be the optimal solution in your opinion. But some countries are showing good results with a not so optimal solution, which is surgical masks and home made masks.
As odd as this my sound, but at the moment you might have a larger bottle neck in N95 production than you have on ventilators (taking into account the disposable nature of N95 masks and the sheer volume required for usage, I'm not trying to compare ventilators to N95 in terms of complexity or their production lines).
Of all of this, I think an effective treatment seems to be the fastest solution (though there's none available yet), where you'd deploy treatment only to those in intensive care and ICU.
Someone infected with measles shedding the virus can send it far and wide...
COVID-19 needs a carrier, a bit of water/mucus to survive in. The radius of distribution is smaller (6 feet) but these drops can linger in the air depending on ambient conditions.
EVERYONE needs to put on a mask, not to avoid catching it, but to avoid spreading it... The fact that our national policy doesn't reflect this is negligent, and in the end it will have caused unneeded deaths.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-pr...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/would-everyone-weari...
There is an article out there that outlines this for other airborne diseases but I can't find it... Hot and dry is going to be the outright winner here...
The article says that 45 people out of a group of 60, in a large room with chairs spaces at least a foot apart and twice as many chairs as people, all became infected without any physical contact.
The 6' radius limit is nonsense for this disease.
Epidemiologists do not study individual cases; they study statistics. For that, social distancing helps in the sense that it decreases the speed at which this spreads.
AFAIK, this virus needs water to survive. If so, it depends on how long droplets will survive in the air. Larger ones will fall down sooner, smaller ones will evaporate sooner (all depending on humidity and temperature)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143281/ says ”droplets >5 μm in diameter that fall rapidly to the ground under gravity, and therefore are transmitted only over a limited distance (e.g. ≤1 m)” and ”large droplets comprise most of the total volume of expelled respiratory droplet”
So, keeping a small distance decreases the probability of infection, but doesn’t prevent it.
Edit: figure C.2 in that article shows the “Wells evaporation-falling curve of droplets”, which shows that, at room temperature, a diameter of around 120 μm is the worst, time-wise. Smaller droplets evaporate sooner, larger ones fall down earlier (all assuming zero convection, I assume, something that isn’t realistic)
We are being given many many natural experiments. Posts like the parent here, claiming to refute and invalidate actual experience will have to eventually acknowledge reality.
Otherwise it's "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes" retreat to authority.
People need to understand that there is a good possibility that this virus can stay in the air, even if it is only for 5 or 10 minutes. If using the word airborne isn't correct use of scientific jargon, it at least is correct use of common English.
It doesn’t necessarily reflect what actually happens when someone breathes or coughs.
(you're splitting hairs, and the implied medical advice will actually kill people who follow it - much MUCH MUCH safer to simply say "airborne" to the general public, who need a simpler model than this)
It's still a not universally agreed to term or concept, but likely will be, especially after this ordeal.
The difference between 'droplet' transmission such as flu and the 'airborn route' is just the size of the droplets. Infections flu droplets need to be so big they don't linger in the air very long. They tend to be projected ballistically and mainly end up on surfaces and spread by contact, while the smaller droplets such as the ones that seem to spread Covid-19 linger in the air and can be conducted via air flows such as ventilation systems.
Measles, which you cite as truly airborn, is also spread by small droplets and would almost certainly be captured by the 0.3 micron filters described in the study you seem to be referring to [2] that were used to scrub the air samples, the same fineness as N95 masks recommended for protection agains Measles.
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_disease
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762692
The case at issue here strongly suggests aerosol, not droplet, transmission; that's the whole point. Aerosol transmission is smaller particles that remain suspended longer than what is classes as droplet transmission, and droplet precautions aren't adequate for it. It's a bit fuzzy whether it is necessarily actually classed as airborne transmission but of defined precaution classes it requires airborne rather than droplet precautions.
Yes, the COVID-19 is mostly being treated as only having droplet transmission (and therefor requiring droplet and not airborne precautions), which is potentially a major error if it can be transmitted on aerosols.
I am a doctor by no stretch of the imagination, but I was a voice major in college and sang in choirs for 4 years. When you sing, you breathe in deeply, from the diaphragm, and hold the air low in your lungs. Properly, your abdomen will expand more than your chest. Moreover, you hold the air in. Singing is not like breathing out at the doctor's office. You take a deep breath and then let that air out in a controlled manner over the course of a musical phrase.
That kind of breathing is exactly—and instinctively—what you would not want to do if you were in some kind of miasma of pathogens. Imagine walking through a sick ward at a hospital, or even a cave full of bats. You would be trying not to breath, taking only shallow breaths.
Again, I very well may not know what I'm talking about, with respect to disease transmission, but I think the forceful and deliberate inhalations are more significant than the exhalations.
Even droplet based spread (which is not airborne) can transfer over distances on to surfaces. This is why there is advisory for a 6+ ft physical distance.
That does not mean it is an airborne disease, as it seems the virus needs to survive in droplets.
It is no surprise to me that a choir singing could easily spread droplets on to surfaces and inadvertently touch their faces during that time.
Even a heavy breath that expels air and droplets from the lung can cause spread. That doesn't mean its airborne.
As with all things with infectious diseases (like asymptomatic spread) it's less useful to ask whether it's possible to spread in a certain way, and better to ask whether that way is a large driver of new infections. For hospital workers, maybe; for the general public, probably not.
>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.
Aerosols don't need to hit a surface to end up in someone else's lungs.
Anyone who has sung on staged, or acted, for that matter, knows that there will be spit. And it will fly far. Farther than this group separated. Furious because: You kinda should have known, choir leader.
It's much easier to point the finger at millennials on spring break (pro tip: millennials haven't gone on spring break for 10 years now), but this is one of those things where boomers are refusing to stop behavior that is enabling super-spreading.
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3074131/coro...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_... is pretty thorough on the topic I'd say.
I think it's pretty funny that the incorrect usage is in computer circles. I have seen many engineer coworkers use the wrong -ii suffix (e.g. virii, statii) in order to sound "fancy" :eyeroll:
Here's a not unrelated question: 1 computer mouse, several computer ...?
1 virus
2 virus+
3 virus+
...
Then the engineer+ can also distinguish between multiple virus+ and no virus*.
Stability of SARS-CoV-2 in different environmental conditions
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.15.20036673v...
Humidity has a tie to temperature and for this virus that seems to be the bigger "factor"