UCHealth: Six steps to slowing airborne aerosol coronavirus, a must-read!

06 Sep UCHealth: Six steps to slowing airborne aerosol coronavirus, a must-read!

We curated this excellent article by Ted Neff from UCHealth Today. The subject: Six steps to slowing airborne aerosol coronavirus transmission. A must-read. Along with listening to this “To Your Health” post by Dr. Alan Safdi on the same subject.

It took months for scientists to recognize airborne transmission as a major mode of COVID-19 transmission. Now that knowledge can help tame the coronavirus pandemic.

Aerosols – invisibly fine particles that float in the air around us for minutes or hours – appear to be a major player in the transmission of the coronavirus. That’s a big change from the early days of the pandemic, when larger droplets from coughing or sneezing and the contamination of surfaces were thought to be the main ways COVID-19 spread.

With this new understanding comes the question: how do you slow the spread of disease if hordes of invisible floating particles are a serious source of infection? The good news is that the old standbys of washing hands, social distancing, and, when you can’t socially distance outside the home, wearing a mask are still critical mainstays. But the rise of aerosols as a transmission vector requires new additions to those pandemic-fighting tools. They involve deliberate steps to clear the air.

What’s floating in the air – and how it does or doesn’t float in different situations – has been a source of COVID-19 uncertainty. Pandemics are the domain of epidemiologists and infectious-disease experts. Aerosol science is rooted in physics, chemistry, and engineering. It took time for those versed in aerosol science to impress upon the medical community that the long-understood nature of aerosols, combined with the scant evidence of COVID-19 transmission through droplets, demanded a rethinking of how the coronavirus spreads. The watershed moment came with the publication of a July 6 challenge to the World Health Organization signed by 239 scientists from around the planet, “It is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of COVID-19.”

Hard science around airborne coronavirus transmission…

Continue reading here.