This is how long it takes to get COVID in a room, research shows

You know the basic guidelines put forth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for wearing a face mask, keeping six feet from each other, and avoiding large crowds by rote. Unfortunately, this is not a foolproof solution. While following these simple health guidelines can drastically reduce the risk of infection, the real world is much more complicated than that. Now, new research is shedding light on how many minutes it would take to catch COVID after spending time in a room with someone infected with the virus, whether from close contacts or from strangers standing further away. And not surprisingly, how quickly this happens depends on how well the safety guidelines are followed. Read on to find out what your risk is, and to learn more about how the pandemic is affecting where you live, check out How severe the COVID outbreak is in your condition.

A pair of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a website based on mathematical models of transmission, allowing users to see the risks presented to them by selecting very specific conditions in a given situation, such as height. of the room, whether masks – and what type – are worn, ventilation, humidity and crowd size, Fast company reports.

The tool allows you to see how dangerous virtually any situation can be, whether it’s sitting in a living room with friends, shopping at Walmart, or attending a big concert. . And while the possibilities are endless, it quickly becomes clear which factors can create the most risk. Read on to see how quickly you could get COVID from an infected person at a dinner party, for example, and to learn more about the signs you might already be sick, see If you have this symptom. , there is an 80% chance that you have COVID.

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John bush, PhD, one of the site’s creators and professor of applied mathematics at MIT, said that while basic health rules were helpful, assuming they were 100% effective in all situations was “dangerous” and ” too simplistic ”.

For example, a situation that Fast company watched was a Thanksgiving dinner in a 20ft by 20ft room with 10 attendees, normal humidity, normal speaking volume, and masks removed to allow eating. The tool found that you could only “safely” spend 18 minutes in this situation before the infection became a problem. And for more on the next phase of fighting the pandemic, check out If you’re that age, you could be the last to get the COVID vaccine.

Adjusting small details on the restore scenario also greatly affects the results. If you and all the guests wear coarse cloth masks instead of eating, for example, the safety time increases by two minutes. And by simply opening a window and cranking up the ventilation, you’re safe for another six minutes.

“To protect against airborne transmission, it makes good sense that exposure time, room size, ventilation, and human activity should also be considered,” Martin Z. Bazant, PhD, a co-creator of the tool wrote. “Standing 6 feet apart is safe for a few seconds, but maybe not for a few hours …[And] social distance can be safely reduced if masks are worn. And for more regular COVID updates, sign up for our daily newsletter.

Also in the same dining room scenario reviewed by Fast company, your risk changes drastically with a few other efforts – like replacing cloth masks with surgical masks, that means the time you could safely spend in a room with someone with COVID skyrockets to two full hours. And for more on what makes a mask effective, check out If your mask doesn’t have three, it doesn’t really work.

But what happens when simple mistakes are taken into account? When you factor in people in the room pulling their faces under their noses or wearing a mask that doesn’t fit properly, the safety time again dropped to just 32 minutes. Even these small changes represented major changes in the security of a scenario. And for more on what makes a mask unsafe, see If Your Face Mask Has One, Stop Using It Immediately.

The only problem with the MIT tool is that each of these scenarios assumes that only a no one in the full count is infected. This poses a problem because the skyrocketing numbers from coast to coast make it more likely that several people can spread COVID in a single room, especially if it is a large room.

According to Fast company, changing the settings to mimic a typical 180,000 square foot Walmart, it was found that it would be safe to spend 68 minutes shopping if 1,000 customers were diligently wearing cotton masks and only one person had COVID. But at a time when cities like Chicago have as many as one in 15 infected, going indoors to shop would be a much riskier scenario. And for more ways to determine your chances of getting sick, this is the easiest way to find out if you’ve been exposed to COVID.