
239 Experts with 1 Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne - 9nGQluzmnq3M
https://nyti.ms/3f1z0eW
======
nabla9
At the beginning there was 4 different routes were considered: fecal-oral
route, touch-hand-face, droplets in the air, airborne viruses. Fecal-oral
route seems to either nonexistent or incredibly small. Airborne (aerosol) risk
has been considered very small.

Two main routes are touch-hand-face and droplets in the air. It seems that
droplets are the main route (60-70% of infections) rest come from touching
things. Social distancing. 2m indoors and hand washing seems to work.

If there is aerosol transmission it seems to be much smaller percentage than
two other transmission mechanisms.

Claiming that aerosol vs droplet transmission is artificial distinction is
incorrect. Droplets fall down relatively fast and don't linger in the air 10s
of minutes like aerosol. Aerosol transmission is more dependent on moisture in
the air, they linger longer in dry air. We should see strong seasonal and
climate forcing in transmission rates.

Simulations of indoor airflow that show the difference between aerosol and
droplet transmissions:

(caution: just inhaling viruses is not enough to cause infection, you need to
inhale a dose that is large enough to cause infection)

[https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/modelling-confirms-isolating-
th...](https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/modelling-confirms-isolating-the-ill-and-
prioritising-remote-work-are-key-strategies-in)

VTT simulation with only droplets with and without mask:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWuD4jdjLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YWuD4jdjLc)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-apLuN7sZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-apLuN7sZc)

~~~
Gibbon1
I don't know how you square discounting aerosol transmission with super
spreading events where one person infects dozens of people in less than an
hour.

Sounds like cover your ass nitpicking to me.

~~~
nabla9
Infecting dozens in a hour sounds like droplet transmission. Especially when
the events usually happened when people were signing etc. People shed droplets
when they exhale and speak. Singing is much worse.

Aerosol transmission could infect several hundreds if it was significant
transmission route.

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soared
The title while technically correct stokes fear more than anything else. The
article goes into depth on how “airborne” is not terribly different than what
we know now about aerosols hanging in the air. Most people will read the title
and react at too large of a scale, while the only real insight should be that
in crowded indoor places with poor ventilation (offices, restaurants), you may
be able to get infected even when socially distancing.

That is much more reasonable and solvable. Airborne is a overused Hollywood
term that makes most people think it floats on the wind and infects you
anywhere, anytime.

~~~
nwah1
Some microbes really do float in the wind like that. But apparently viruses
tend to get destroyed by sunlight or desiccated fairly easily. Bacteria are
more complex, and become world travellers.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/living-
bacteri...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/living-bacteria-are-
riding-earths-air-currents-180957734/)

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mhkool
Prof Dr Cicero Coimbra showed in an interview a graph that makes you think:
with 18 ng/ml vitamin D levels 100% of patients with covid-19 die and with 34
ng/ml 100% survive with a line in between: so the less vitamin D, the higher
the risk to die. He has a protocol to give a single high dose of vitamin D and
all patients survive. The interview is in Portuguese and the graph has English
labels:
[https://youtu.be/l_nKoLY60lY?t=911](https://youtu.be/l_nKoLY60lY?t=911)

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skywhopper
This article feels like it’s months old or from an alternate universe. We
“may” need masks indoors? I’m very confused what is being communicated here.
It sounds like a bunch of experts fussing over the finer points of established
theory without considering real data about _this particular virus_. Presumably
because they don’t have enough data, but then the focus ought to be on
collecting more, not arguing over theory.

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sunstone
What if masks give better protection against aerosol than droplets. So far it
seems mask wearing has been unreasonably effective, eg Tokyo and Taiwan.

~~~
tridentlead
Other way around, droplets are bigger and more effectively filtered usually.

