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Earlier this year, two diners at a South Korean restaurant were infected with novel coronavirus in a matter of minutes from a third patron who sat at least 15 feet away from them. The third patron was asymptomatic at the time. After dissecting that scene from June, South Korean researchers released a study last month in the Journal of Korean Medical Science that suggests the virus, under certain airflow conditions, travels farther than six feet and can infect others in as little as five minutes. …
The study confirms, says Milton [Donald Milton, professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health], that infected people “can shed virus into the air, and it can travel long distances, and the more air movement you got, the more you might have” the kind of scenario laid out in the South Korean restaurant study.
With more the 20 years of experience in his field, Milton doesn’t think it’ll be another 100 years before the United States experiences a pandemic similar to the one we’re living through now. As such, he would like to see governments and entrepreneurs invest in technology to make buildings and public spaces safer in the future.
Every building is different; without a simulation tool like Pandaa it’s hard to find all the “dead-end spaces” where covid can hide. You don’t want your diners to be safe at their tables but exposed when they step away to take a phone call.
And from a larger point of view, this study points out the general guidelines are just that - general. We need to be taking the great data and data analysis approaches we have obtained from precision marketing - and which are moving into precision medicine - into precision epidemiology.