MIT study: No safer from COVID indoors at 6 feet or 60 feet
Image: Devex
The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as it is at 6 feet — even when wearing a mask, according to a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers who challenge social distancing guidelines adopted across the world.
MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, and John W.M. Bush, who teaches applied mathematics, developed a method of calculating exposure risk to Covid-19 in an indoor setting that factors in a variety of issues that could affect transmission, including the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and even respiratory activity such as breathing, eating, speaking or singing.
Bazant and Bush question long-held Covid-19 guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization in a peer-reviewed study published earlier this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.
“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” Bazant said in an interview. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.“
The important variable the CDC and the WHO have overlooked is the amount of time spent indoors, Bazant said. The longer someone is inside with an infected person, the greater the chance of transmission, he said.
Opening windows or installing new fans to keep the air moving could also be just as effective or more effective than spending large amounts of money on a new filtration system, he said.
Bazant also says that guidelines enforcing indoor occupancy caps are flawed. He said 20 people gathered inside for 1 minute is probably fine, but not over the course of several hours, he said.
“What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be. Often times the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good,” Bazant said. “I think if you run the numbers, even right now for many types of spaces you’d find that there is not a need for occupancy restrictions.“
Six-feet social distancing rules that inadvertently result in closed businesses and schools are “just not reasonable,” according to Bazant.
“This emphasis on distancing has been really misplaced from the very beginning. The CDC or WHO have never really provided justification for it, they’ve just said this is what you must do and the only justification I’m aware of, is based on studies of coughs and sneezes, where they look at the largest particles that might sediment onto the floor and even then it’s very approximate, you can certainly have longer or shorter range, large droplets,” Bazant said.
“The distancing isn’t helping you that much and it’s also giving you a false sense of security because you’re as safe at 6 feet as you are at 60 feet if you’re indoors. Everyone in that space is at roughly the same risk, actually,” he noted.
Pathogen-laced droplets travel through the air indoors when people talk, breathe or eat. It is now known that airborne transmission plays a huge role in the spread of Covid-19, compared with the earlier months of the pandemic where hand-washing was considered the leading recommendation to avoid transmission.
Those droplets from one’s warm exhalation mix with body heat and air currents in the area to rise and travel throughout the entire room, no matter how socially distanced a person is. People seem to be more exposed to that “background” air than they are by droplets from a distance, according to the study.
For example, if someone infected with Covid-19 is wearing a mask and singing loudly in an enclosed room, a person who is sitting at the other side of the room is not more protected than someone who is sitting just six feet away from the infected person. This is why time spent in the enclosed area is more important than how far you are from the infected person.
Masks work in general to prevent transmission by blocking larger droplets, therefore larger droplets aren’t making up the majority of Covid infections because most people are wearing masks. The majority of people who are transmitting Covid aren’t coughing and sneezing.
Masks also work to prevent indoor transmission by blocking direct plumes of air, best visualized by imagining someone exhaling smoke. Constant exposure to direct plumes of infectious air would result in a higher risk of transmission, though exposure to direct plumes of exhaled air doesn’t usually last long.
Even with masks on, as with smoking, those who are in the vicinity are heavily affected by the secondhand smoke that makes its way around the enclosed area and lingers. The same logic applies to infectious airborne droplets, according to the study. When indoors and masked, factors besides distance can be more important to consider to avoid transmission.
As for social distancing outdoors, Bazant says it makes almost no sense and that doing so with masks on is “kind of crazy.“
“If you look at the air flow outside, the infected air would be swept away and very unlikely to cause transmission. There are very few recorded instances of outdoor transmission.” he said. “Crowded spaces outdoor could be an issue, but if people are keeping a reasonable distance of like 3 feet outside, I feel pretty comfortable with that even without masks frankly.“
Bazant says this could possibly explain why there haven’t been spikes in transmission in states like Texas or Florida that have reopened businesses without capacity limits.
As for variant strains that are 60% more transmissible, increasing ventilation by 60%, reducing the amount of time spent inside or limiting the number of people indoors could offset that risk.
Bazant also said that a big question that is coming will be when masks can be removed, and that the study’s guidelines can help quantify the risks involved. He also noted that measuring carbon dioxide in a room can also help quantify how much infected air is present and hence risk of transmission.
“We need scientific information conveyed to the public in a way that is not just fearmongering but is actually based in analysis,” Bazant said. After three rounds of heavy peer review, he said it’s the most review he’s ever been through, and that now that it’s published he hopes it will influence policy.
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Shane
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But what is covid if we now have evidence it does not exist.?
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Saeed Qureshi
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Exactly, Shane.
Why people talk about COVID when no one has provided scientific evidence of its existence? Please “scientists” and “experts” work on something which is real or shown to exist.
http://www.drug-dissolution-testing.com/?p=3824
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Dev
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Dr Stephan Lanka
https://odysee.com/@DeansDanes:1/cpe-english:f
CPE – Control Experiment – 21 April 2021 – English version
Virology refuted.
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Wisenox
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Good video, thanks. The scientists performed a control experiment using uninfected organisms on virology standard medium. Then, showed the same results as those claimed to be caused by viruses. Thus, showing that the medium caused cellular death and not infectious virions. Good stuff.
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Squidly
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“It is now known that airborne transmission plays a huge role in the spread of Covid-19”
That is FALSE! … we KNOW, and have known for a few decades that RNA viruses such as SARS (and all its variants) are contracted more than 90% through CONTACT, not through airborne transmission. This MIT article is bunk…
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Wisenox
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Makes you wonder why viruses don’t follow trade or prevalent winds. We should, if airborne transmission is real, have areas of constant illness or lack thereof. Viruses magically know when to leap off surfaces or mutate out of animals to endanger everyone. Then, the unicorns fly into the air in order to infect the next host, but are wholly unaffected by wind patterns. These super-leprechauns are cunning though. They never wipe out the animal they mutate from.
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Wisenox
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If anyone isn’t familiar with the NWO quote by Sir Alexander King, it reads:
“it was necessary to locate ‘a common enemy against whom we can unite’. But in fighting this enemy – ‘global warming, water shortages, famine and the like’ – the authors warned that we must not ‘mistake symptoms for causes’. ‘All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.’”
This notion of fabricating the reason to attack humanity was the result of an MIT study funded by Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre. MIT also happens to develop just about every police state software in use. The distancing study is no different. They attack distancing, but subtlety give credit to the ideas that covid exists and is dangerous. Its pre-suasion garbage spewing from another corrupted indoctrination center. MIT supports the elite’s dystopia in full. IMO, they have proven to be enemies of the people, and are full participants in the oppression inflicted around the world. Covid has no proof, it doesn’t exist, and distancing has absolutely zero effect on fantasies.
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Mark Tapley
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There have always been those in society that do not want to compete in a free market but instead desire to make society work for them. In order to accomplish this objective it is necessary to get control of the government. The elite parasites will then expand the role of the government into every area activity so that instead of having a limited government of specifically delegated and enumerated powers, the elites have total control, including the fiat banking cartel, media, education, military, medicine, domestic and foreign policy and most of the corporations. There has to also be a two party dichotomy of fake puppet politicians to stage division and opposition while the primary agenda of bringing more control to bear on the goyim goes on as intended.
This program has essentially been in effect in the U.S. since about 1913 beginning with Wilson and all of the puppet actor presidents since are controlled by the same network. This is not a new situation but has now reached a new level of malevolence because now the elite (commonly termed Zionists because of their origin) are now close to achieving global hegemony. Their guiding philosophy is best espoused by the German Philosopher George Frederick Hegel who believed in total government he defined as “God walking on earth.” His main disciple was Chicago Professor Leo Strauss who taught several of the Neo cons that were involved in the contrived 911, WMD’s and the “War On Terror”for the Yinnon Plan for Greater Israel. The phony “climate change” was instigated by their Club of Rome in the late 60’s. The long planned fake virus is an extension of several previous medical scams including AIDS, swine flu and anthrax in order to keep a manufactured invisible “crisis” before the goyim at all times. However war has always been the primary tool for control and conditioning and used as the Hegelian dialectic thesis antithesis to move societies on toward Neo feudalism.
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Wisenox
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I like how you mention “zion” referring to their origin. I’m not sure if people realize how long their sleaze has been around.
My interpretation of the symbology is that Zion means true god, and Zionists are those faithful to him. In the trinitarian system, he would be the “father”. He is the sky/heavens.
The Temple of Solomon is the business center, with their religion’s trinity being sun-earth-sky, or sol-om-on. In the ancient Sumerian pantheon, this is Anu, EnLil, and Enki.
The Earth is the clay, or rule of law, the sun is the iron, or power over life and death, and the sky is the kingdom. On the US Dollar, the sky is the eagle, the clay is the sheaf of grain in the eagle’s right claw, and the iron is the fasces. Outwardly (the people’s version), the characters are represented as the sun being the eagle, Inanna being the sheaf of grain, and Utu (Šamaš) being the fasces. Behind the scenes, the sky-earth-sun trinity is referred to as “true” christianity.
The US eagle faces the right claw and that’s why US presidents say “rule of law” so much.
This is also the kingdom of David, with Judea being the clay, and Israel being the iron.
When people, like Lin Wood, say “true Christian”, like when he refers to Pence, he is referring to zion. All of the symbology is the same, giving it dual meanings and allowing them to hide in plain sight.
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Alan
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Isn’t the time spent indoors the factor that makes flu seasonal winter infection in the UK? Some also say sunlight kills the virus which is why there is more of it about in winter. There’s plenty of sunlight in New Delhi, so what is happening there?
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Roger Higgs
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Overcrowding? Regular flu, re-named covid? I wish I had time to investigate this question.
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Mark Tapley
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They must not have anything to do at MIT. Since viruses have not been shown to exist and the imaginary covid has never been purified, isolated nor verified what are they testing? During the so called “1918 Flu” which was really the result of several Rockefeller “vaccine” blood poisons and the massive dosages of the new drug aspirin, every thing possible was done to transmit the “flu” from one person to another and it did not work any more than it did for the medical con man Pasteur.
Now the idiots are even lining up for the super toxic GMO chemo injections that of course offer no immunity or prevent transmission (since there is no virus) as even admitted by the criminal drug companies and their partners at the Rockefeller founded CDC.
All of the economic destruction from the illegal mandates that the people should have refused will create another windfall for the Vultures at Black Rock as in the bailout for billionaires in 08. The fake virus along with the staged rioting has provided good cover for trillions of stimulus money for the banking cartel’s buddies on Wall St. while conditioning the goyim to obey the Zionist mandates. What else could be expected from the elite criminals at the top when the sheep are so easily fleeced?
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Mark Tapley
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Hello Wisenox:
As you bring out, the term Zion originates in the Old Testament reference to the physical Jerusalem, and is used in the New Testament as a representation of the spiritual kingdom. It is part of the high level Masonic symbolism and there are many wolves in sheeps clothing as Apostle Paul warned.
Rabbi Moses Hess was probably aware of all of this when he used the term as a symbol for Jewish Nationalism. The greatest fear of the talmudic Jew leaders was that their followers (90% Khazar) would assimilate in with the rest of society. That would ruin the Rothschilds plan of capturing the strategic bridgehead of Palestine for a “Jewish Homeland.” The Jews through the Masonic lodges were the driving force behind the first attempt at communism in the French Revolution and also prominent in the European revolts of 1848. Hess disciple Marx (Moses Mordecai Levy) was the paid operative for the early industrialists, financed by his wealthy Uncle the founder of Philips Corp.
The Jews allied (and often married into) with the Anglo Zionists which are represented today by our aPAC, ADL political puppets, banking cartel, WEB, CDC, WHO, CFR, Trilateralists, Bilderbergers, all major media networks, “entertainment” industry, and major corporations to complete the agenda established long ago in order to as Douglas Reed the foremost journalist of WW2 stated “to destroy all the nations and replace them with a global tyranny.
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