"Airborne virus plays a significant role in community transmission, many experts believe. A new study fills in the missing piece: Floating virus can infect cells.
Skeptics of the notion that the coronavirus spreads through the air — including many expert advisers to the World Health Organization — have held out for one missing piece of evidence: proof that floating respiratory droplets called aerosols contain live virus, and not just fragments of genetic material.
Now a team of virologists and aerosol scientists has produced exactly that: confirmation of infectious virus in the air.
A research team at the University of Florida succeeded in isolating live virus from aerosols collected at a distance of seven to 16 feet from patients hospitalized with Covid-19 — farther than the six feet recommended in social distancing guidelines."
Why did it take so long?
"The research was exacting. Aerosols are minute by definition, measuring only up to five micrometers across; evaporation can make them even smaller. Attempts to capture these delicate droplets usually damage the virus they contain.
“It’s very hard to sample biological material from the air and have it be viable,” said Shelly Miller, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies air quality and airborne diseases.
“We have to be clever about sampling biological material so that it is more similar to how you might inhale it.”
In the new study, researchers devised a sampler that uses pure water vapor to enlarge the aerosols enough that they can be collected easily from the air. Rather than leave these aerosols sitting, the equipment immediately transfers them into a liquid rich with salts, sugar and protein, which preserves the pathogen.
The researchers had previously used this method to sample air from hospital rooms. But in those attempts, other floating respiratory viruses grew faster, making it difficult to isolate the coronavirus.
This time, the team collected air samples from a room in a ward dedicated to Covid-19 patients at the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital. Neither patient in the room was subject to medical procedures known to generate aerosols, which the W.H.O. and others have contended are the primary source of airborne virus in a hospital setting.
The team used two samplers, one about seven feet from the patients and the other about 16 feet from them. The scientists were able to collect virus at both distances and then to show that the virus they had plucked from the air could infect cells in a lab dish.
The genome sequence of the isolated virus was identical to that from a swab of a newly admitted symptomatic patient in the room.
The room had six air changes per hour and was fitted with efficient filters, ultraviolet irradiation and other safety measures to inactivate the virus before the air was reintroduced into the room.
Several experts noted that the distance at which the team found virus is much farther than the six feet recommended for physical distancing.
“We know that indoors, those distance rules don’t matter anymore,” Dr. Schofield said. It takes about five minutes for small aerosols to traverse the room even in still air, she added.
The six-foot minimum is “misleading, because people think they are protected indoors and they’re really not,” she said.
That recommendation was based on the notion that “large ballistic cannonball-type droplets” were the only vehicles for the virus, Dr. Marr said. The more distance people can maintain, the better, she added."
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