Two years of #COVID: The battle to accept airborne transmission | Coronavirus pandemic | Al Jazeera
▻https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-covid-the-battle-to-accept-airborne-transmission
For Catherine Noakes, a scientist who studies how pathogens move in the built environment, the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic were punctuated with a foreboding sense of frustration.
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Noakes recalls how she and her colleagues were even accused of running ventilation companies. “It’s complete rubbish, none of us runs a ventilation company,” she says, bemused.
But the repudiation from sections of the medical community wasn’t entirely surprising.
“Disease transmission has traditionally been the preserve of the medical profession and it felt like there was a dismissal of people from other fields, particularly engineers,” says Noakes.
There has been this resistance from people in medical fields, agrees Prather, who says, “They’ve sort of dismissed our opinions.”
One of the reasons for that has been the call from certain scientists in the medical field for randomised controlled trials (RCTs), considered a gold standard to measure an intervention’s effect, to back airborne transmission measures.
That makes sense when you’re measuring the effect (if any) of a vaccine or drug — because there are so many factors at play — but to apply it to airborne transmission measures doesn’t make sense because it is possible to directly measure their impact, Prather said.
“It makes sense that if something filters out 99 percent of aerosols, it will reduce the risk of transmission,” adds Gurdasani.
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There are also socioeconomic implications of health authorities endorsing airborne transmission, particularly in countries that may not have good mechanical ventilation systems or enough respirators, says Marr: “That is basically what the WHO told us when we were in a meeting with them in early April [2020]. I think they were very hesitant to call the disease airborne because it would basically tell these lower-resource settings … there’s no hope for you.”
“That’s where the WHO have struggled … because they have to give advice that applies to the whole world,” says Noakes.
Lidia Morawska, director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and a co-author of the open letter, added that even in richer countries, recognition of airborne transmission would require major investment from governments to, for instance, retrofit schools to improve ventilation.
“Admitting that the virus is airborne, and something has to be done with ventilation, government has to provide guidelines and means for doing this,” Morawska says.