An expert says that assessing the ‘garlic breath distance’ can give people a good indication of whether they are too close to someone for coronavirus transmission to take place.
Dr Julian Tang, a consultant virologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary, said that if you can smell your friend’s lunch from their breath then you could be inhaling any virus that comes with that.
Appearing on Sky News, he urged governments and health officials to focus their efforts on airborne transmission.
Dr Tang claimed that the current emphasis on washing hands is wrong and said that more should be done to promote good ventilation in indoor settings, reports Hull Live.
“The message ‘hands, face, space’, we think should be really ‘space, space, hands’,” he said.
“The way this virus transmits is really through conversational distance, within one metre.
“When you’re talking to a friend or sharing the same air as you’re listening to your friend talking, we call it the garlic-breath distance.
“So if you can smell your friend’s lunch you’re inhaling some of that air as well as any virus that’s inhaled with it.
“And this is why we say that masking is fine, social distancing is fine, but the indoor airborne environment needs to be improved and that can be done with ventilation.”
Dr Tang, an honorary associate professor in the Department of Respiratory Sciences, told Sky News: “If you think about it, if you burn your toast in the kitchen, if you open the windows and doors, the back door, it clears very quickly.
“So you keep the windows open even halfway most of the time, then you can improve that ventilation rate in the indoor area and that reduces the overall airborne concentration that you can actually then reduce the risk of transmission from.
“So I think this is a really kind of addition to what people are doing, the social distancing, the masking.
“But if you’re indoors having a drink or eating, you can’t mask, you can’t maintain social distance, so the ventilation becomes much more important.”
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