(upbeat music)
- Okay, today I'm gonna talk a little bit about COVID-19
and what we know about how it's being transmitted
and how we've ended up in a global pandemic
with this particular virus.
And so this is a perfect topic for public confusion,
because there's been a lot of confusion about how
this virus is making its way around our world.
So early on in the pandemic,
and I think most people will probably remember,
we were told that transmission mainly occurs
through these really large droplets size bigger
than five microns to some people that won't matter,
but big droplets that we traditionally think about coming
from people who cough and sneeze,
and the good thing about these droplets,
if that's where they are,
is that they settle to the ground within one to two meters.
So within three to six feet, they'll fall the ground,
and then we have to worry about touching them,
touching them or them landing on us in some place
that would lead us to be infected.
So we are told by the WHO and CDC,
the key thing we needed to do was to disinfect surfaces,
and we had to stay at least one to two meters apart
to reduce this transmission.
We were also told that masks are not effective,
and at the very least we should save them for healthcare
and frontline workers.
And one of the main things we were told was
that if you have a fever or you're coughing or sneezing,
you should stay home.
And that was enough supposedly
to limit our sort of the transmission of this virus.
WHO just to give you an example, this is March 28,
this is a tweet that they put out,
which is basically flat out stated this virus is not
in the air.
And so this was all over just disinfect surfaces,
pay attention to coughs and sneezes,
and this is where we started.
So as a scientist who communicates to the public,
I can understand the confusion and I've spent the last well,
six months in my life trying to undo this
and get it to a better place
where we can actually protect ourselves appropriately,
and so that's what I will be telling you about today.
So this field of respiratory transmission
is like over a hundred years old.
There's medical books written about textbooks
in the medical field, all about droplets,
nothing hardly at all about airborne transmission.
In fact, we were told we weren't even supposed
to mention the word airborne transmission.
And so the focus at the time going into this was
that people cough and sneeze when they're sick
and these big droplets,
they travel like little mini cannonballs
and they immediately fall to the surface,
so it was all about surfaces.
Aerosol scientists who study aerosols the tiny stuff,
come in and say, no, in this particular virus,
it's not about the coughers and the sneezers.
It's about people just speaking or singing
or talking loudly, and when you do that,
you produce thousands of aerosols.
And so thinking about the behavior
of a big droplet versus an aerosol,
you can compare little mini cannonballs to aerosols
that are like cigarette smoke that fill the room
and I've shown a picture of this.
We've all been in a smoky room, those are aerosols.
And that is more in line with how this particular virus
is being spread.
And so one of the big sort of disconnects between
what people thought was happening with medical field
that was happening and what's really happening,
has to do just with this distinction and terminology
of what we define as an aerosol versus a droplet.
And so around the time when we kind of came into this story,
we basically realized that these aerosols
are being transmitted by people
that are largely asymptomatic,
and by that it means they have no symptoms.
Most people don't even know they're sick.
So 10 to 20% of the people who are walking around,
they're not coughing and sneezing,
they have no idea they're sick are leading to 80 to 90%
of the infections.
That is how this virus has made its way around the world
and we've ended up in this global pandemic.
And so we came along as aerosol scientists
we said you know you've missed the aerosols,
they're invisible,
but we've been measuring them actually for decades.
Here they are, when you talk you produce aerosols,
they contain the virus,
and that is probably most likely what is leading
to the spread of this disease.
So I stitched it all together, I study aerosols,
I wanna direct a major NSF center on aerosols,
I put it all together and said, okay,
if this is how it's getting around,
if it's getting around through airborne transmission,
then the key thing is that everybody has to wear masks.
And basically the goal there is,
it protects you as the wearer, but more importantly,
if you don't know you're sick,
it blocks what you're sort of spewing out.
And so this figure has made it's been translated into,
I don't know how many languages it's used everywhere
to sort of show the public, communicate
to the public we're not just telling you wear masks,
we're explaining to you why it is important,
and this has had a huge, very positive impact.
Going forward, I've done,
it's approaching now 500 interviews on aerosols
and what it means to be in the air.
I've talked on CNN, CBS about how are we getting infected
by this particular virus.
And I've even went so far as to brief multiple times,
Dr. Fauci on it's in the air, it is in the air,
it is not on surfaces,
and if we don't tell the public the truth
of what is really happening,
then we can't protect the public appropriately.
The bottom line is to say people were really worried,
and you talk about why there's a lack of trust,
people were worried about this sort of message.
If you say, it's airborne, people are gonna say,
oh, they're gonna get scared.
I have never had anybody get scared by my message,
I've always emphasized once we acknowledges in the air,
this is a very fixable problem.
And it also tells the public why they should bother
to do the things we're telling them to do.
There's a huge trust issue behind just telling people
the truth in terms of public health.
So we kept going, there is about, I don't know,
10 of us, I guess, in the world that discontinued
to apply pressure to the CDC, the US version of the WHO
to acknowledge it is in the air.
And so finally in July, we wrote a paper 239
of us signed this open letter to WHO is saying it's time
to say it's in the air.
New York Times said it's in the air, it is in the air.
There is no question
that is how this virus is spreading
through people around the world.
So then we basically decided that it was important
it had been like we needed
to sort of make the point even stronger
we wrote a letter to Nature,
and this just came out not too long ago,
basically with the title airborne transmission
of SARS-CoV-2.
300 words, it's in the air, this is what we have to do,
we have to shift our focus from surfaces to the air,
and this is why.
And so this has received a lot of attention
by public health and again,
we just sort of continue this pressure
on the public health officials
to sort of tell the public like it really is.
And within minutes of our letter coming out,
the CDC came out with new guidelines that acknowledge
that this virus may be adrift in the air.
There's a long story behind this,
they had something out saying it was airborne
they pulled it back, they put it back.
It's just gone back and forth, finally CDC said,
it's likely airborne, and this is why you should care
and gave new guidance,
and this came out so say within minutes of our paper.
So the key point, why are we pressing?
Why have we pushed so hard
to make this airborne transmission aspect important?
And it's because once you acknowledge it's in the air,
you can fix it, and this gets back to if you ignore it,
it's not gonna go away on its own,
that's obviously not happening.
So there's many things we can do,
and there's many things we shouldn't be doing.
So if it's aerosols, this figure just shows one
of the things people have done is
they stuck up plexiglass barriers everywhere,
classrooms, grocery stores this shows
the simulation fluid dynamics,
you can do it at a high level.
It shows actually plexiglass doesn't block you
from aerosols.
The aerosols just flow right around, and in fact,
they can concentrate on the other side
of plexiglass barriers.
The better thing to do instead
of focusing on cleaning surfaces is cleaning the air.
And so through ventilation,
better ventilation through filtration,
you can actually this down here is a inexpensive box filter.
Just a box fan that you can get, you can strap on a MERV 13,
which you can buy at your local hardware store.
40 bucks you can actually filter out aerosols
that potentially have this virus.
The other thing you can recognize is
that outdoors is much safer than indoors.
The number of cases that have been outside is like in China,
they did 7,000 studies and found out
that there's one case outdoors
the rest have all been indoors.
Looking back , this is not new, a hundred years ago,
we had classrooms outside, we opened windows in classrooms
to protect people.
So it is all about once you acknowledge
where it's really coming from the fix is very obvious.
So then thinking about the public
and how they can take this information
and help themselves is you gotta avoid
or at least limit your time
because it's an integrated exposure.
You have to limit the amount of time you spend
in places like restaurants and bars,
places where people are yelling with no masks
and no ventilation, don't go to those places.
That's where most all of the major outbreaks are occurring.
They shields alone, don't work.
They aerosols again, just flow right around.
You can wear a facial with a mask
and there's reasons to do that.
So finally, I'll just say that there's no perfect metric
of how to protect ourselves, but this is a great analogy
that there's sort of the Swiss Cheese approach,
this virus will seep through every sort of different type
of protection intervention,
but there's only sort of after you stack them up,
that is how we get
to full protection against this airborne virus.
And the last thing I'll say is coming back
to this comment about public communication.
When I gave the CBS interview, eight year old listened,
and then drew this for her mom, and I would say,
I get more evidence that there is no fear.
There's just clarity in understanding where it comes from,
this is an eight year old, didn't wear
wanna wear a mask after listening to it.
She drew this picture and said, I don't really like mask,
but I understand we don't wanna share our spitballs.
And so that is the level that I think as a communicator
of science, when an eight year old can translate
what you said,
this is sort of the ultimate positive feedback
that I've gotten.
And so with that, I will stop.
(upbeat music)