COVID

Can social distancing work or there are better ways to lower COVID-19 spread?

Coronavirus can travel further than 10 meters in the air when infected people breathe out the droplets, cough, sneeze, or even just talk.

The virus droplet are very small and so they can spread further than the recent social distancing measurements.

Although this looks frightening, the virus has to overcome many obstacles in order to infect a person.

Viruses are known to travel by aerosol but in fact plenty of them are damaged in the air, therefore only a small percentage of viruses in exhaled breath remain infectious (Milton et al., 2013).

An experimental study by Doremalen et al. (2020) found that once the SARS-CoV-2 virus has left the body it remains active for 3 hours, while another study suggests 16 hours (Fears et al., 2020).

These studies were done in the lab and are not true reflections of human exhaled conditions and it is still the case that the virus declines in a short period of time.

The other factor is that the chance of inhaling airborne virus droplets is higher in crowded places or close contact less than 2 meters from an infected person.

A new petition signed by 239 scientists points out that the virus aerosols can travel further than the current social distancing rules, suggesting measures should be taken in preventing the airborne transmission of Covid-19.