“We’re getting surprises all the way along,” Dr. Conly said. “This paper I find interesting, but it has a long was to go to be able to get into a line of credibility, in my mind.”
Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, was equally skeptical. He said that, outside of hospital settings, “large droplets in my mind account for the vast majority of cases. Aerosols transmission — if you really run with that, it creates lots of dissonance. Are there situations where it could occur? Yeah maybe, but it’s a tiny amount.”
Dr. Tang and other scientists strongly disagree. “If I’m talking to an infectious person for 15 or 20 minutes and inhaling some of their air,” Dr. Tang said, “isn’t that a much simpler way to explain transmission than touching an infected surface and touching your eyes? When you’re talking about an outbreak, like at a restaurant, that latter seems like a torturous way to explain transmission.”
The Coronavirus Outbreak ›
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 27, 2020
-
Should I refinance my mortgage?
- It could be a good idea, because mortgage rates have never been lower. Refinancing requests have pushed mortgage applications to some of the highest levels since 2008, so be prepared to get in line. But defaults are also up, so if you’re thinking about buying a home, be aware that some lenders have tightened their standards.
-
What is school going to look like in September?
- It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.
-
Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
-
What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
-
Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
In the new analysis, a team led by Parham Azimi, an indoor-air researcher at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, studied the outbreak on the Diamond Princess, where physical spaces and infections were well documented. It ran more than 20,000 simulations of how the virus might have spread throughout the ship. Each simulation made a variety of assumptions, about factors like patterns of social interaction — how much time people spent in their cabins, on deck or in the cafeteria, on average — and the amount of time the virus can live on surfaces. Each also factored in varying contributions of smaller, floating droplets, broadly defined as 10 microns or smaller; and larger droplets, which fall more quickly and infect surfaces or other people, by landing on their eyes, mouth or nose, say.
About 130 of those simulations reproduced, to some extent, what actually happened on the Diamond Princess as the outbreak progressed. By analyzing these most “realistic” scenarios, the research team calculated the most likely contributions of each route of transmission. The researchers concluded that the smaller droplets predominated, and accounted for about 60 percent of new infections over all, both at close range, within a few yards of an infectious person, and at greater distances.
“Many people have argued that airborne transmission is happening, but no one had numbers for it,” Dr. Azimi said. “What is the contribution from these small droplets — is it 5 percent, or 90 percent? In this paper, we provide the first real estimates for what that number could be, at least in the case of this cruise ship.”
The logic behind such transmission is straightforward, experts said. When a person is speaking, he or she emits a cloud of droplets, the vast majority of which are small enough to remain suspended in the air for a few minutes or longer. Through inhalation, that cloud of small droplets is more likely to reach a mucus membrane than larger ones soaring ballistically.