Study looking into whether choirs are super spreaders of COVID
U of Alberta researchers exploring if singing spreads coronavirus particles
Researchers from the University of Alberta have teamed up to discover whether choir singing deserves its bad rap as a dangerous pastime in the era of COVID-19.
Ever since stories broke early in the pandemic about outbreaks and deaths in the United States and Europe traced to choir practices and performances, health officials have been worried.
In May, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, described singing as a “high risk activity,” and in June, Alberta Health Services (AHS) officials noted “singing as part of live performance can cause respiratory droplets to expel at greater distances, which can infect nearby people but also contaminate surfaces and objects.”
But Laurier Fagnan, a music professor at the Faculte Saint-jean, said fears are not based on the science of singing, but on scary, high-profile incidents.
“No studies have been done to show that singing is any worse than speaking, and certainly not than coughing or sneezing,” said Fagnan, who is also president-elect of Choral Canada, representing 28,000 choirs with 3.5 million singers nationwide. “There have been a lot of assumptions made and amplified, and policy-makers have been looking at it and saying that singing is the worst thing you can do without any empirical data that singing is to blame.”
Fagnan has teamed with researchers in mechanical engineering and medicine. Their goal is to assess whether singing in groups is a super-spreader activity.
Fagnan says other activities at choir practices, such as hugging or eating together, could be responsible for the reported COVID-19 infections.
In Seattle in March, 53 of 61 members of a choir came down with COVID-19 after a practice, leading to two deaths. Also in March, in Amsterdam, 102 of 130 choristers at a concert fell ill, leading to one death of a singer, and three other deaths.
The team, which has applied to a variety of funding agencies, is made up of Fagnan, Carlos Lange and David Nobes of the mechanical engineering department, along with Dr. Nelson Lee, an infectious disease specialist, and Dr. Andrea Opgenorth, an endocrinologist. Choir leaders Michael Zaugg of Pro Coro Canada and Brendan Lord of Choir Alberta are also working with the group.
The first stage of the research is to review all available literature related to airborne transmission of droplets or aerosols, including those related to coughing and sneezing, and then create a computer model to simulate transmission by singing.
Later, live singers who do not have the virus may be brought into a mechanical engineering lab where Nobes, a specialist in experimental fluid mechanics, is able to use lasers and cameras to track the movement of droplets through space over time.
Fagnan said people are frightened of singing because they think “it’s louder and more sustained and so therefore there must be more breath flow and particle flow, but we don’t necessarily know that to be true.”
In fact, trained singers may actually send less breath into space because training helps people turn breath into acoustic energy. It’s also possible that more particles would be expelled.
Lee, who has experience studying the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, sat on an AHS scientific committee that recently reviewed the literature on singing and COVID -19 transmission.
The May 22 review states that published medical literature “suggests” singing could be an “aerosol generating respiratory activity” that may generate more respiratory particles than normal talking, but adds there is a “gap in the scientific knowledge” and that evidence the virus is transmitted through singing “is largely limited to media reports.”
“Nothing has been proven at all when it comes to singing,” said Lee in an interview, noting that other factors may be responsible for the transmission of COVID -19 within choirs, including ventilation, or insufficient physical distancing in an indoor space.
“But that is exactly why we need to conduct the study to look at various factors to see if there is any possible way to allow a safe practice of singing.”
The first stage of the study could be completed within six months, but experiments involving real singers would require multiple levels of approval and take more time.
Fagnan said he worries that in the absence of hard evidence to support the safety of singing, choral groups might be benched by policy-makers for quite some time.
“There are so many benefits to choirs, with mental health, social well-being and a feeling of belonging and contributing,” he said. “I’m not saying I want choir singers to start up if it isn’t safe, but we need to find out what the truth is about this.”