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A woman standing 2 meters from a coughing man without a mask is exposed to 10,000 times more exhalation drops than if she had had a mask.
It shows a laboratory experiment conducted at the Edinburgh University School of Engineering, which appears in the latest issue of the Royal Society Open Science journal.
Read also: Dagsavisen summarizes the news for 2020, of course in Teams (+)
Definitely
– There is no longer any doubt that masks can reduce the spread of potentially infectious droplets, says lead author Ignazio Maria Viola to AFP.
Large exhalation droplets are believed to be the most important transmission method for COVID-19, he notes.
– If you wear a mask, you reduce the transmission of the virus to one tenth. For the big drops we analyzed, we are talking about a reduction of 99.9 percent, says María Viola.
When we breathe, we send out drops of different sizes. The Edinburgh experiment observed droplets with a diameter of 170 microns, about four times the thickness of a hair. Smaller droplets stay in the air longer. The smallest ones, the so-called aerosols, are usually carried by air currents. These are generally less than 20-30 microns and therefore have a fraction of the volume of the drops that Maria Viola examined.
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Life can be saved
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle has estimated that 55,000 lives could be saved in the United States over the next four months if a blanket requirement for a sanitary napkin is introduced.
The institute nailed it when they estimated in July that the United States would experience at least 224,000 crown-related deaths by November 1, and now they estimate that the death toll will rise to 561,000 in April next year. (NTB)
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