There is consistent, strong evidence to prove that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, is predominantly transmitted through the air, according to a new assessment published in the medical journal The Lancet.
Therefore, public health measures that fail to treat the virus as predominantly airborne leave people unprotected and allow the virus to spread, according to six experts from the UK, USA and Canada, including Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent,” Jimenez said.
“It is urgent that the World Health Organization and other public health agencies adapt their description of transmission to the scientific evidence so that the focus of mitigation is put on reducing airborne transmission.”
The team, led by researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK, reviewed published research and identified 10 lines of evidence to support the predominance of the airborne route.
Pandemic has recorded some super-spreading events that involved long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms such as in quarantine hotels. room sizes, ventilation, and other variables in choir concerts, cruise ships, slaughterhouses, care homes, and correctional facilities, among other settings, have both long-range and short-range patterns of airborne transmission. This is due to the dominance of aerosol transmission of SARS-CoV-2, scientists explained.
long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms but never in each other’s presence was also documented that could be attributed to health safety protocol adherence such as the use of masks.
