A new analysis suggests that keeping 6 feet of distance from your friends might not be enough space to stay safe from the novel coronavirus.
What’s going on:
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford say the current guidelines of staying 6 feet away from others when you’re indoors and outdoors might not be enough space.
Ventilation, crowd size, exposure time length and whether face coverings are worn should be considered, too, NBC News reports.
The new report — published in the BMJ — says that “physical distancing should be seen as only one part of a wider public health approach to containing the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“It’s not just 6 feet and then everything else can be ignored or just mask and everything else can be ignored or just ventilation and everything else can be ignored.” — Lydia Bourouiba, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT and co-author of the report.
There’s already other research on this
Back in April, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said the current model for measuring social distancing was developed in the 1920s. She said the current guidelines may be too short, according to Deseret.com.
- “However, these distances are based on estimates of range that have not considered the possible presence of a high-momentum cloud carrying the droplets long distances,” Bourouiba writes in research published in JAMA Insights.
The novel coronavirus may spread more than 6 feet indoors with bad ventilation as well, which I wrote about for Deseret.com.
“We’re talking about a virus that is present in very small droplets, tiny ones that we call aerosols that can travel much farther through the air and remain in the air for minutes to hours at a time.” — Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech, told CBS News