Coronavirus is known to spread through respiratory droplets, and now a new study has revealed just how far these droplets can travel after a single sneeze.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have filmed slow motion footage of a sneeze, revealing how droplets can travel up to 27 feet (8.2 metres) through the air.
In the study, the team filmed a healthy person sneezing, slowing the footage down from 25 seconds to 1.5 minutes.
This slow motion footage showed that respiratory droplets can travel at impressive seeds of up to 100 feet/second.
This creates a ‘turbulent’ cloud of droplets, that can reach between 23 feet and 27 feet away.
Worryingly, this is significantly further than the current UK social distancing limits, indicating that Brits could still be at risk of catching the virus while out and about.
In their study, published in JAMA Insights, the researchers, led by Professor Lydia Bourouiba, wrote: “Although such social distancing strategies are critical in the current time of pandemic, it may seem surprising that the current understanding of the routes of host-to-host transmission in respiratory infectious diseases are predicated on a model of disease transmission developed in the 1930s that, by modern standards, seems overly simplified.
“Implementing public health recommendations based on these older models may limit the effectiveness of the proposed interventions.
“These distances are based on estimates of range that have not considered the possible presence of a high-momentum cloud carrying the droplets long distances.”
Based on the findings, the researchers are urging health care workers to be particularly careful around coronavirus patients.
They added: “Given the turbulent puff cloud dynamic model, recommendations for separations of three feet to six feet (one metre to two metres) may underestimate the distance, timescale, and persistence over which the cloud and its pathogenic payload travel, thus generating an underappreciated potential exposure range for a healthcare worker
“For these and other reasons, wearing of appropriate personal protection equipment is vitally important for health care workers caring for patients who may be infected, even if they are farther than six feet away from a patient.”
