Crowds must dissipate for airborne risks to fall
PremiumAs research findings confirm that covid spreads mainly through air, our battle against it should be recalibrated by what this implies. Let’s minimize crowds as a strategic imperative
The curb-upon-curb of covid times has begun to rival the date-upon-date exasperation of court cases made famous by a Hindi movie dialogue. But how closely are our safety restrictions and protocols calibrated to the latest we know of this coronavirus? The focus of modern science on vaccines, at which scientists have done a worthy job since the pathogen surfaced in 2019, should not draw attention away from what research is saying of its modus operandi—or ‘expandi’—as a pandemic. The very look of the virus was explosive, evoking visions of a spiky mine-ball afloat on a battle-sea of the 1940s, and so has its spread proven. In just over a year, it has taken over 3 million lives across the world and no one can really say how much more dystopian our lives could end up. Viruses are ‘zombies’, neither quite dead nor alive, and the survival of Sars-CoV-2 has been a quantum-cat level puzzle. Climatic conditions do not seem to affect it, hot or cold, and mutations could yet give it new ways to dodge our vaccine shots. Clearly, it’s imperative to stay up-to-date on how it gets around, and act accordingly.
An analysis published last week in The Lancet, a journal of repute, would have us lay greater emphasis on the containment of the bug’s airborne transmission. That this mode was a major menace had been found soon after the outbreak, but studies have affirmed the view that it spreads primarily through air and can be contagious over rather long distances. Six experts from the UK, US and Canada analysed existing research and offered 10 streams of evidence to identify air-leaps from human host to host as its main method of infection. In asserting this, they cite cases of super-spreader events, such as a choir practice in America’s Skagit County last March that saw a single singer infect 53 others, which could not be explained just by contact of infected surfaces or the microspray of droplets either exhaled or expelled by way of a sneeze or cough. In fact, they conclude, contagion by individuals who show no symptoms of illness could account for up to three-fourths of it globally. Being outdoors is thus less risky than being indoors, where better air ventilation is a big help, and proper masking and distancing are both must-dos in either of those two settings. This advice is common sense, easily conveyed to our multitudes, and must be adopted across the country.
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2 min read . 01:24 PM ISTWhat has escaped adequate notice, eerily, is what airborne infectivity actually means for risk levels as a function of the count of people in proximity. Unlike the chance of catching the virus via other modes, which is capped by a few metres’ radius of exposure, the danger of an air-leap rises exponentially as a crowd begins to swell. Given this probability curve, our maze of covid clamps across the country looks anything but optimal in our effort flatten the trend of daily infections, which topped a seven-day rolling average of 200,000 over the weekend. All mass gatherings must be called off. But even curfews can send people scrambling for food or transport, proving counter-productive. Several state actions had this effect during last year’s lockdown and we haven’t done much better this year. Choke-points in the supply of what people (rather than officials) see as ‘essentials’ have also generated swarms again. Top-down orders rarely go by reliably efficient forecasts of how the multitudes will behave, as market theorists may attest. But still, let’s aim to minimize crowds as a top priority.
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