When Donald Trump suggested people besides himself wear cloth masks in public last week, it reignited a festering debate about whether the 2019 novel coronavirus is airborne. For months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took the same position that the World Health Organization (WHO
When Donald Trump suggested people besides himself wear cloth masks in public last week, it reignited a festering debate about whether the 2019 novel coronavirus is airborne.
Story continuesThe University of Nebraska researchers who found traces of the virus around the rooms of COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms are in the final stages of a study to determine if “live” virus can be found in the air. But given how transmissible the virus is, according to Brosseau, it seems likely. “I’m skeptical that this is all contact or droplet transmission and no inhalation of small particles unto the lower respiratory system,” she said.
But “the paradigm of droplet and airborne transmission just isn’t accurate,” Brosseau argued. It gives people the impression that transmission is binary—the virus is either transmitted through droplets or through the air. Realistically, it’s more of a spectrum, where on one end you have highly contagious viruses that can survive in the air for a significant period of time, and less contagious viruses that don’t survive well in the air on the other end.
So what does this mean for the use of cloth masks? “If an infected person wearing a cloth mask coughs, there’s some possibility the mask could block the lateral projection of large particles,” Brosseau said. “But it’s not going to do much of anything for those smaller particles.” For that reason, she disagrees with the CDC’s new guidance. “I don’t think it should be a blanket recommendation,” she said.
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