These days, hearing someone cough or sneeze in public can cause instant anxiety when they’re around, especially indoors.
But how often do you think of the other main route for COVID-19: the simple act of talking to someone else?
Drops dropped during speech are believed to be the key transmission vector for COVID-19 for asymptomatic and presymptomatic patients, says research scientist Jeremy P. Howard, co-founder of fast.ai, who promotes deep learning through artificial intelligence.
Asymptomatic infections may account for 40-45 percent of all COVID-19 cases, according to a new analysis from the Scripps Research Institute published this month in Annals of Internal Medicine. An additional percentage of cases, still unknown, involve presymptomatic patients.
“Our estimate of 40 to 45 percent asymptomatic means that if you’re unlucky enough to get infected, the probability is almost a coin flip on whether you’re going to have symptoms. So to protect others, we think wearing a mask has makes a lot of sense, “Scripps Research behavioral scientist Daniel Oran told Science News.
COVID-19 causes viral clearance in the upper respiratory tract, where droplets can form.
Every time people speak, they spray a cloud of droplets that vary widely in size. Large droplets quickly fall to the ground, but small ones can become dehydrated and remain as “droplet cores” in the air, behaving like an aerosol, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The researchers measured the droplets generated on a sheet of laser light by a person speaking in a cardboard box. The video clips (see the tweet) showed a dramatic difference between the speech with and without a cloth over the mouth.
Infected youth in bars, clubs, parties, and other internal gatherings may not become seriously ill, but can transmit the virus to parents, grandparents, and other vulnerable people.
Systems biologist Dr. David States noted on Twitter that the deaths of older family members infected by youngsters in the recent surge in cases in Texas, Arizona, Florida, California and other states, primarily the south, will not appear in the statistics. for a month. or more.
At a press conference Monday in Columbus, Ohio, Republican Governor Mike DeWine, who rejected the anti-mask arguments on the right, raised a face that viewers could see.
“If we want to be able to go out and live our lives, this mask is a symbol of freedom,” he said. “It is a symbol of freedom because if you wear these, if we get 75-80 percent of the people in public who wear this mask, we will see these numbers improve.”
Studies back it up. Models presented by scientists from Cambridge and Greenwich Universities in the Proceedings of the Royal Society indicated that the use of 100% face masks seriously decreases the spread of the disease.
Wearing masks could also prop up the struggling economy, according to research.
A new Goldman Sachs study suggests that a national mask mandate would reduce the growth rate of new coronavirus infections and prevent a loss of 5% of GDP caused by additional blocking measures, Forbes reported Monday.
Hong Kong, a metropolitan area and special administrative region of 7.5 million, has had only six confirmed deaths from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.
The key to Hong Kong’s success is near-universal mask compliance (97%) in the morning rush hour, according to University of Hong Kong professor Yuen Kwok-yung, one of the world’s leading coronavirus experts. world. Yuen said that 3% of people who don’t wear masks are mainly Americans and Europeans.
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Mike Moffitt is a reporter for SFGATE. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate
