A group of American experts in medicine, public health and industrial health wrote a letter to White House officials, including Anthony Fauci, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), asking them to complete the inhalation. to speak. , or in the air, the nature of COVID-19 transmission and frontline workers provide appropriate respirators and ventilation strategies to reduce the risk of infection.
The group said the United States should follow Germany, Austria and France – countries that have recently required respiratory protection equivalent to N95 filter masks (FFRs) and higher quality filtration systems for all public employees.
“People are reluctant to use the word in the air because of what it evokes,” Robert Schooley, MD, of the University of San Diego, said in a virtual press conference today about the letter.
Schooley signed the letter with other experts in the field, including Donald Milton, MD, DrPH, of the University of Maryland at College Park, and Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH of the University of Minnesota. Osterholm leads the Center for Research and Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), which publishes CIDRAP News.
But despite the narrow image of a virus in the air, it is necessary to accept the reality that COVID-19 can be easily transmitted through the air via small aerosols if the United States wants to control the pandemic, the group said.
“Government officials need to recognize exposure to inhalation as an important way to spread COVID-19 and act immediately to control and limit this exposure,” Milton told the news conference. “The scientific evidence has been clear for months: the spread of aerosols is an important way in which this virus is spreading.”
Milton cited choral rehearsals, exposure to restaurants and even three to five minutes of conversations between masked people as examples of documented air shipment. He also said the transmission of inhalation could partly explain the inequality of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
“Coloreds, many of whom work on the front lines in essential jobs, have suffered the greatest consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic – and continue to do so,” the letter’s authors wrote.
CDC maintains earlier emphasis on drops
But despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 is distributed by small aerosols, the CDC has maintained an early definition of COVID-19 exposure, emphasizing large droplets and contaminated surfaces.
Lisa Brosseau, ScD, CIH, a nationally known expert on respiratory protection and infectious diseases, signed the letter, saying she hopes change in the White House will lead to a better understanding of the science of transmission. But still, she said the CDC is ‘careless’ when it comes to inhalation exposure. Brosseau is a research consultant for CIDRAP.
“There are a lot of gatekeepers,” Brosseau told CIDRAP News. “Maybe it’s partly science and pressure from parties we do not know.” She said hospital groups may be reluctant to accept the inhalation route of transmission.
Hospitals, Brosseau said, “just hate the idea of spending money on personal protective equipment, and they point to bad clinical studies that say a surgical mask is just as effective. The focus on health care is always on the patients, not on workers. “
Biden says all Americans were vaccinated by the end of July
The recommendation for the wider use of respirators comes when President Joe Biden addressed a pandemic during a town hall meeting last night in Milwaukee. Biden said every adult American could be vaccinated by the end of July, and he hopes the country will be “in a very different situation” by Christmas.
The CDC COVID Data Tracker shows that 72,423,125 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were delivered in the United States, and 56,281,827 doses were administered, meaning that approximately 12% of the U.S. population had at least one dose in a two-dose series of one of the Moderna or Pfizer mRNA vaccines.
According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker, 62,398 new COVID-19 cases and 1,756 deaths were reported yesterday. In total, the country recorded 27,805,289 cases, including 489,748 deaths.
Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 tsar, said an average of 1.7 million Americans are vaccinated every day, up from about 800,000 a day on January 20, when Biden took office.
Variants emphasize travel risks
Today, the White House also announced that it will pledge $ 200 million in advance to the CDC to triple the number of positive virus samples that laboratories follow for genomic variants. This will increase the number of sequence samples each week from 7,000 to about 25,000. According to Politico, the CDC is in talks with 13 public health laboratories to follow the order.
The move comes as variants, including the B117 first identified in the UK, are more prevalent in the United States.
The CDC variant detector shows 1,277 B117 cases in 42 states, 19 B1351 cases in 10 states and 3 P1 cases in 2 states.
Today in Weekly report on diseases and deaths, the CDC presented details of the first eight cases of B117 in Minnesota. Although none of the people traveled to the United Kingdom, three of the eight did travel to California recently, while another reported a trip to the Dominican Republic, and two others were recently in West Africa.
The travel history shows the inherent risk of traveling at this stage of the pandemic, the CDC said.
ACIP group devises the stretch dose interval
Finally, a working group for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is considering recommendations to extend the interval between the first and second dose of COVID-19 vaccines, according to Bloomberg.
With the interval, more people can get a first dose of the vaccine.