Tiny scientific screws help Covid kill

[ad_1]

Epidemiologists have long observed that most respiratory bed bugs require close contact to spread. However, in this small space, many things may happen. The sick person may cough droplets on your face, give off the small mist you inhale or shake hands, and then rub your nose with them. Any of these mechanisms can spread viruses. Marr said: “Technically speaking, it is difficult to separate them and see who caused the infection.” For long-distance infections, only the smallest particles can be blamed. However, looking at it up close, particles of all sizes are at work. However, for decades, droplets have been regarded as the main culprit.

Mar decided to collect some of his own data. She has installed air samplers in daycares and airplanes. She often says in textbooks that it should be found in flu viruses that shouldn’t be found-hidden in the air, most commonly small enough to stay in the air for hours Of particles. And it’s enough to make people sick.

In 2011, this should be big news. Instead, major medical journals rejected her manuscript. Even if she conducts new experiments, it provides evidence for the idea that influenza infects people through aerosols, but there is only one niche distributor, Royal Society Interface Journal, Accept her job consistently. In the isolated world of academia, aerosols have always been the domain of engineers and physicists, while pathogens are purely medical issues. Mar is one of the rare people trying to bridge the gap. She said: “I am definitely a marginal person.”

Considering that this might help her overcome this resistance, she will try to find out where the defective 5-micron pattern comes from from time to time. But she is always stuck. Medical textbooks simply speak of it as a fact, without citation, as if it were pulled out of the air. In the end, she was tired of trying, her research and life continued to advance, and the mystery of 5 microns gradually faded from the background. It wasn’t until December 2019 that a newspaper from Yuguo Li’s laboratory passed through her desk.

Mr. Li is an indoor air researcher at the University of Hong Kong. He named himself during the first SARS outbreak in 2003. His investigation of an outbreak in the Tao Garden apartment building provided the strongest evidence that the coronavirus may be airborne. But in the decades that followed, he also tried to convince the public health community that their risk calculations had disappeared. In the end, he decided to perform mathematical calculations. Li’s elegant simulation shows that when a person coughs or sneezes, there are few heavy water droplets and the target objects (open mouth, nostrils, eyes) are too small to cause many infections. Therefore, Li’s team concluded that the public health agency has gone backwards, and most colds, flu and other respiratory diseases must be spread through aerosols.

They believe that their findings expose the fallacy of the 5-micron boundary. They went further, tracing the numbers back to decades-old documents issued by the CDC for the hospital. Mal couldn’t help feeling a burst of excitement. A diary asked her to review Li’s paper. When drafting a reply, she did not hide her feelings. She wrote on January 22, 2020: “This work is extremely important for challenging the existing dogma of how to spread infectious diseases through droplets and aerosols.”

Even when she was taking notes, Li Shufu’s work was far from theory. A few hours later, Chinese government officials cut off any travel in and out of Wuhan in a desperate attempt to curb the hitherto unnamed respiratory disease and burned down the 11 million metropolis. As the pandemic closes country by country, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tell people to wash their hands, scrub surfaces and maintain social distancing. They did not say about the dangers of masks or being indoors.

[ad_2]

Source link