‘COVID-19 spreads by respiratory droplets, not through air’
BEIJING: The virus that causes the COVID-19 disease is primarily transmitted through “respiratory droplets and close contacts”, and does not seem to stay long in the air, a recent WHO publication said.
Respiratory infections can be transmitted through droplets of different sizes, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
Droplet transmission occurs when you have close contact (within one metre) with a person who has respiratory symptoms such as coughing or sneezing, which may spread these potentially infectious droplets, typically 5-10 microns in size, to your body.
Transmission may also occur by touching surfaces or objects in the immediate environment around the infected person, staterun China Daily quoted the WHO publication as saying.
Airborne transmission is different from droplet transmission, as it refers to the presence of microbes within droplet nuclei, which are generally considered to be the smaller particles of less than 5 microns in diameter, and which can remain in the air for long periods of time and be transmitted to others over distances greater than one metre, it said.
In the context of COVID-19, the airborne transmission may be possible in specific circumstances in which procedures or support treatments that generate aerosols are performed, such as intubation within a patient’s windpipe, disconnecting a patient from a ventilator, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
According to the publication,
no cases of transmission by air were reported in an analysis of 75,465 patients with the Coronavirus in China.
Meanwhile, the number of confirmed Coronavirus deaths accelerated past 50,000 on Friday as the
United States, Spain and Britain grappled with their highest tolls yet and the world economy took a massive hit.
The human scale of the pandemic has never been more stark — experts warning that more than one million cases of COVID-19 disease confirmed globally are probably only a small proportion of total infections as testing is still not widely available.
The United States accounts for around a quarter of confirmed cases but Europe is far from being out of danger — Spain reported more than 900 deaths in 24 hours on Friday, for the second day running.
While Italy still leads the world in fatalities, France, Belgium and Britain have also been hard hit. The UK government is rushing to build field hospitals after a one-day toll of 569.