As everyone knows, the new measures recommend a safety distance of one meter between people. Recently, a recent study conducted in China indicates that the coronavirus is able to travel further than this official safe distance and stay in the air for about 30 minutes. Relayed by Chinese daily newspapers, the study was unpublished on March 10 by the publisher Practical Preventive Medicine without any explanation. What did this study tell us?
If the authorities advise keeping a distance of one or two meters from other individuals, this distance would not be sufficient. It is about a study published in the journal Practical Preventive Medicine , revealed by the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post this March 9, 2020. According to epidemiologists from the Provincial Center for Diseases Control and Prevention (China), the coronavirus can travel up to 4.5 m and stay in the air for about 30 minutes . This is indeed a much greater distance than the safe distance recommended by governments to limit contagion.
Scientists investigated a local case of an outbreak dating from January 22, 2020, in the middle of Chinese New Year. An individual boards a long-distance coach and sits at the back, in the second-to-last row. At the time, the man was already feeling ill, but the incident happened before China entered the stage of a national crisis. However, the person concerned was not wearing a mask, like most of the 48 other passengers.
The researchers analyzed images from the coach's surveillance cameras. However, all the windows of the vehicle were closed. Above all, the fact is that the man did not interact with the other passengers during the four hour journey. No less than 9 people were initially infected, including 3 who were close to the man. Nevertheless, the other 6 infected were at a distance of 2 to 4.5 meters! Of these people, one was later found to be asymptomatic. Then other passengers boarded the coach. In total, the man contaminated 13 people during the trip.
“It can be stated that in a closed environment with air conditioning, the transmission distance of the new coronavirus exceeds the generally recognized safe distance”, warned Hu Shixiong, lead author of the study.
The study recalls the importance of hand hygiene but also of wearing a mask in public places. This is because the virus can linger in the air, attached to tiny droplets of bodily fluids , in addition to surviving several days on different surfaces. Finally, you should know that the South China Morning Post made a correction to his article. Indeed, recently, the journal Practical Preventive Medicine withdrew the study without any explanation. The daily says it has contacted the magazine to obtain information and is therefore waiting.
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