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Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, has a specific way of looking at COVID-19 transmission — it’s like secondhand smoke.
What’s going on:
- Feigl-Ding — one of the first experts to suggest that COVID-19 could lead to a global pandemic — told Yahoo! Life that the transmission of COVID-19 is a lot like passing secondhand smoke between one smoker and another person.
- “A virus transmission is kind of like secondhand smoke — it’s secondhand breathing from someone else. There is no such thing as a smoke-free part of a restaurant. Given what we know about secondhand smoke, the smoke will go everywhere, therefore it hurts the waitresses and bartenders and people who work there who don’t want to smoke but they’re kind of stuck with the occupational hazard of it.”
- Feigl-Ding said there’s enough evidence to suggest that masks can help stop the spread of the coronavirus. He said the U.S. should increase effort to mandate masks to help stop the spread.
- He said, “People are protesting mask mandates, but we need them because people are not wearing them. I think we have to think through the policies — should the mask enforcement be like a civilian speeding ticket?”
Airborne transmission in the news
- Experts and scientists argued in a new letter to the World Health Organization that the novel coronavirus can be an airborne virus, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- The letter — which came from 239 scientists from 32 different countries, according to The New York Times — called on the WHO “to give more weight to the role of the airborne spread of COVID-19,” according to CNBC.
- CNBC said: “It appears to contradict previous evidence that the virus is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the nose or mouth. These are expelled when a person with the infection coughs, sneezes or speaks.”