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By Steven Reinberg<\/b>
HealthDay Reporter<\/i><\/p>\n
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 28, 2020<\/p>\n
The tiny droplets that linger in the air after people talk, cough<\/a> or sneeze aren’t very efficient at spreading the new coronavirus, new research suggests.<\/p>\n Using laser technology, researchers measured the path of droplets released when people spoke or coughed.<\/p>\n If someone enters a room a few minutes after a person with mild COVID-19<\/a> symptoms has coughed in that area, the odds of infection are “rather low,” the Dutch researchers noted. It is even lower if that person was only talking.<\/p>\n That doesn’t mean these droplets are risk-free — just that they contain less virus than the larger droplets produced when someone speaks, coughs<\/a> or sneezes directly on us, according to researcher Daniel Bonn, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam’s Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute.<\/p>\n “Based on the current insights, we actually see that aerosol-wise, it’s relatively safe to go into well-ventilated modern buildings, such as airports, train stations, modern offices, etc.,” Bonn said in a news release from the American Institute of Physics.<\/p>\n “Modern ventilation makes the aerosol infection risk not very large. The amount of virus in the small droplets is relatively small, meaning that it becomes dangerous if you’re in a badly ventilated room for a relatively long time with an infected person or after an infected person has coughed there,” he added.<\/p>\n These findings support the effectiveness of wearing masks, social distancing and other measures that target the spread of larger droplets, the researcher said.<\/p>\n “They are so large that they fall onto the ground roughly within a meter from your mouth,” Bonn said. “If you want to minimize the risk of infection, you need to not only keep the 6 feet<\/a>, or 1.5 meters, but also make sure the room you are in is well ventilated. And wash your hands.”<\/p>\n The study was published online Oct. 27 in the journal Physics of Fluids<\/i>.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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