You’re more likely to be COVID than to cough, study finds



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Although our understanding of COVID and its transmission has evolved over the past year, a strong consensus emerged early that aerosols, i.e. contaminated droplets, are the most effective way more common spread of the virus from person to person. So if you’ve been around someone who has coughed in the past 10 months, you’ve likely found yourself backing up quickly for fear of getting infected with COVID-19. But now a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A January 20 found that a behavior we all practice on a daily basis is actually just as likely to spread COVID as coughing, if not more – and that’s just talking.

Read on to find out what this new research found and to learn more about what you can do to prevent the virus, stop doing it immediately to avoid the new strain of COVID, doctors are warning.

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The research team behind the new study – led by lead author Prof. Pedro Magalhães de Oliveira, an expert in fluid mechanics in the University of Cambridge’s engineering department – created a mathematical model to predict how COVID spreads from an infected person in a room, taking into account the size of the space, number of people present, ventilation and whether or not people were wearing masks.

The hypothesis could be that actions that shed a lot of droplets – like sneezing, coughing or screaming – are the riskiest in terms of COVID transmission, but this new research from Cambridge University and Imperial College of London suggests otherwise. The larger droplets associated with coughing fell to the floor at a shorter distance and at a faster rate, while the smaller droplets produced by speaking carried the virus over 6.5 feet and lingered in a room for a longer period.

“Speech is a very important issue that must be taken into account because it produces much finer particles [than coughing] and these particles, or aerosols, can be suspended for over an hour in amounts sufficient to cause disease, ”said de Oliveira The Guardian. And for more on COVID transmission, check out The Weird New Way You Might Get COVID, Study Finds.

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The study found that when you’re in a poorly ventilated space and you’re not wearing a mask, talking is much more likely to spread the virus than a short cough. In a modeled scenario, the researchers found that after a short cough, the number of infectious particles in the air decreased after 1 to 7 minutes, notes Live Science. But after speaking for 30 seconds, it took 30 minutes for the infectious particle count to drop to similar levels. After an hour, a large number of particles were still in the air, enough to make someone else sick. And for more tips on how to stay virus free, find out how This One Hygiene Habit could protect you from COVID, study finds.

Women talking on the sofa while drinking cups of coffee or tea
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If you’re in a poorly ventilated room with an infected person talking, you have up to a 20% risk of infection, the researchers found. “This analysis illustrates the risk associated with constant speech in closed environments (such as in a conference room) due to a higher mass fraction of liquid resulting in the formation of small droplets during speech”, concluded the scientists. And for more regular news on COVID, sign up for our daily newsletter.

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The Cambridge team says “ventilation… is of the utmost importance to minimize the risk of infection inside”. In a statement, de Oliveira said the study shows “how these small droplets can build up in indoor spaces over the long term, and how this can be mitigated with adequate ventilation.”

The team also used their results to create an online calculator that can help users assess the risk of different indoor situations given the size of a room and the number of people in it. If you spend an hour in a medium-sized store with a capacity of 50 people, for example, improving ventilation or wearing three-ply masks may see your risk of infection drop from 8% to 2%. .

“The idea is not to get absolute risk numbers from the tool, but to use it to see how mitigation strategies impact the risk of infection,” de Oliveira said. The Guardian. And for more on the worst COVID outbreaks right now, check out This is how bad the COVID outbreak is in your condition.

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