Scientists studying Covid-19 ‘super-distributors’ – those who transmit SARS-CoV-2 at about four times the average – have discovered additional features that give patients this grim ‘superpower’.
Researchers at Tulane University, Harvard, MIT, and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a perfect storm of obesity, age, and worse Covid-19 infection that can combine humans and cause them to exhale far more virus-laden respiratory droplets than normal.
Their findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were based on a review of data from both an observational study among 194 healthy humans and an experimental study of primates infected with Covid-19.
Older subjects with a higher body mass index and a more severe Covid-19 infection were found to exhale up to four times as many respiratory drops as others.
In surprising figures that reinforce the Pareto principle again (for many outcomes, about 80 percent come from the effects of only 20 percent of the causes), the researchers found that only 18 percent of the participants 80 percent of the exhaled particles in the human study. group. In other words, one fifth of the infected individuals are responsible for four fifths of all transmissions.
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Within the non-human group, researchers saw a decrease in the diameter of the droplet to just one micron as the disease progressed, allowing more particles to be expelled, floating longer in the air and moving further, which in turn increased the possibility of transfer to others dramatically increases. the environment. The increase in aerosol droplets exhaled was also seen in asymptomatic cases.
“We have seen a similar increase in drops during the acute stage of infection with other infectious diseases such as tuberculosis,” said Chad Roy, Ph.D., co-author of the study, and director of aerobiology infectious diseases at Tulane National Primate Research . Centre.
“It seems likely that viral and bacterial infections in the airways can weaken airway mucus, which promotes the movement of infectious particles to this environment.”
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