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Is the coronavirus airborne? Experts can’t agree (DIY prevention)

#1
C C Offline
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w

EXCERPT: . . . But experts that work on airborne respiratory illnesses and aerosols say that gathering unequivocal evidence for airborne transmission could take years and cost lives. We shouldn’t “let perfect be the enemy of convincing”, says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

“In the mind of scientists working on this, there’s absolutely no doubt that the virus spreads in the air,” says aerosol scientist Lidia Morawska at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “This is a no-brainer.”

When public health officials say there isn't sufficient evidence to say that COVID-19 is airborne, they specifically mean transported in virus-laden aerosols smaller than 5 micrometres in diameter. Compared with droplets, which are heftier and thought to travel only short distances after someone coughs or sneezes before falling to the floor or onto other surfaces, aerosols can linger in the air for longer and travel further.

Most transmission occurs at close range, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. But the distinction between droplets and aerosols is unhelpful because “the particles that come out with virus can be a wide range of sizes. Very, very large ones right down to aerosols”, he says. And if SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting in aerosols, it is possible that virus particles can build up over time in enclosed spaces or be transmitted over greater distances.

Aerosols are also more likely to be produced by talking and breathing, which might even constitute a bigger risk than sneezing and coughing, says virologist Julian Tang at the University of Leicester, UK. “When someone’s coughing, they turn away, and when they’re sneezing, they turn away,” he says. That’s not the case when we talk and breathe.

A study of people with influenza found that 39% of people exhaled infectious aerosols. As long as we are sharing an airspace with someone else, breathing in the air that they exhale, airborne transmission is possible, says Tang.

[...] Whatever the infectious dose, length of exposure is probably an important factor too, says Tang. Each breath might not produce much virus, he says, but “if you’re standing beside [someone who’s infected], sharing the same airspace with them for 45 minutes, you’re going to inhale enough virus to cause infection”.

But capturing those small concentrations of aerosols that, given the right combination of airflow, humidity and temperature, might build to an infectious dose over time, is “extremely difficult”, says Morawska. “We could say that we need more data, but then we should acknowledge the difficulty of collecting the data,” she says... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Just breathing or talking may be enough to spread COVID-19 after all
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#2
confused2 Offline
From ^^
Quote:.. sharing the same airspace with them for 45 minutes, you’re going to inhale enough virus to cause infection”.
I have long been puzzled by the idea that you have to (say) inhale 'enough' viruses. Is one landing in the right (wrong) place not enough to do what viruses do? Cannot just one become 8 and 8 become 64? In fairness the chances of one virus in a room ending up in your lung/eye or whatever are very small. Are the odds any different from (say) a million virus particles increasing your chances of being infected (by any one particle) by a million?
Epidemiology is the study of large numbers of a population. My suspicion is that you are statistically unlikely to be infected by one virus particle but if that one particle gets you you are just as infected as someone exposed to a million. The situation is slightly different for health workers who may be in very high concentrations of virus and fall victim to a simultaneous attack from (say) eyes, nose, throat and lungs all at the same time.
I don't know. The 'received wisdom' is that I am wrong (not for the first time).
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#3
stryder Offline
(Apr 5, 2020 01:32 AM)confused2 Wrote: From ^^
Quote:.. sharing the same airspace with them for 45 minutes, you’re going to inhale enough virus to cause infection”.
I have long been puzzled by the idea that you have to (say) inhale 'enough' viruses. Is one landing in the right (wrong) place not enough to do what viruses do? Cannot just one become 8 and 8 become 64?  In fairness the chances of one virus in a room ending up in your lung/eye or whatever are very small. Are the odds any different from (say) a million virus particles increasing your chances of being infected (by any one particle) by a million? 
Epidemiology is the study of large numbers of a population. My suspicion is that you are statistically unlikely to be infected by one virus particle but if that one particle gets you you are just as infected as someone exposed to a million. The situation is slightly different for health workers who may be in very high concentrations of virus and fall victim to a simultaneous attack from (say) eyes, nose, throat and lungs all at the same time. 
I don't know. The 'received wisdom' is that I am wrong (not for the first time).

When the body for the most part detects a "problem cell", it will attempt to send antibodies to neutralise it. If a particular problem cell is in a small concentration, then it's like the body will overwhelm it and defend itself from such things as an infection. The problem is of course when the body is overwhelmed, at which point it's about how quickly your body can produce antibodies and how effective they are at neutralising.

An anecdotal point is that for a number of years I've been pretty recluse, I keep away from people and during that time I didn't have many illnesses like flu. However when I was over in the US and staying with family, I ended up with the flu. The main reason for it was that we'd get stuck in a car together and somebody would have picked up the bug from somewhere, it would be sucked through the air-conditioning and circulated around the car. The longer we were in the car and the more often we were in the car, the more likely that such viruses could continue to propagate and suppress the immune system to the point of spreading the bug. (I guess it's another one of the reasons why not to be tightly packed in a car with family over long trips)

From what I observed from one of the videos on it. Due to only one barb being exposed at a time in SARS when trying to find the ACE2, it creates a problem that should an antibody attach, it might only block that one barb. I assume (As in it would need to be scientifically confirmed) it really needs to be overwhelmed by antibodies so all barbs are neutralised. This means you could have someone become asymptomatic, but not lose having the virus or stop it from spreading.
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