A researcher at one of the top universities in the United States is disputing federally mandated social distancing guidelines after she found the virus may be able to travel farther than originally thought.
Associate professor Lydia Bourouiba, who has researched coughs and sneezes for years at the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, found coughs or sneezes from infected people can emit gaseous clouds containing the coronavirus that can travel up to 27 feet away from their source.
“There’s an urgency in revising the guidelines currently being given by the WHO and the CDC on the needs for protective equipment, particularly for the front line healthcare workers,” Bourouiba told USA Today on Tuesday.
Bourouiba also cautioned against the belief that certain masks can contain the spread of the virus, saying “currently used surgical and N95 masks are not tested for these potential characteristics of respiratory emissions.”
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But Dr. Paul Pottinger, an infectious disease professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said the infection rate would be much higher if Bourouiba’s findings were true.
“If you think about it, if this really traveled very efficiently by air, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Pottinger said. “Everybody would know it’s true because everybody would be infected. If it was a 27-foot radius that was a high risk to somebody, this would be a totally different conversation. It’s not.”
On Monday, the World Health Organization refuted claims from other researchers who argued the coronavirus is an airborne disease. A recent study from the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories claimed the virus can remain airborne “for hours,” and a different finding published in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that singing may have spread the disease throughout a church in Washington state.
The coronavirus has infected more than 800,000 people globally, and over 170,000 have recovered since the flu-like illness was identified in Wuhan, China, late last year.
