Simply speaking could transmit coronavirus, new study suggests

A new research suggests that coronavirus can spread in airborne particles, drifting around rooms to infect people.

The research of the University of Nebraska suggests that what many scientists have feared that it may be true that the virus can travel in fine aerosols that leave the mouth and nose when people are just speaking or breathing normally.

Researchers there samples of air from coronavirus patients’ rooms and found that virus in those samples could replicate in petri dishes, according to a preprint that was posted to MedRxiv.org, but has not yet been peer-reviewed for publication.

Its implications are daunting. If breathing and speaking can spread the virus in fine mists (known as aerosols), it can likely linger in the air and travel much further than the six-foot distance people are currently advised to keep apart.

The University of Nebraska cared for 13 of the coronavirus-infected passengers of the infamous Diamond Princess cruise ship, which became a stranded floating COVID-19 outbreak in March as the virus spread to more than 700 people aboard and the boat was turned away by six countries after its departure from Hong Kong.

Led by Dr Josh Santarpia, an associate professor of pathology and microbiology researchers at University of Nebraska seized upon an opportunity to study how coronavirus might spread from some of their patients.

To do so, they collected samples of air from about a foot above the patients’ beds as they breathed normally, spoke and, in some cases, coughed.

Altogether, the team managed to collect 18 air samples from five patient rooms.

Air – in hospitals, our homes, grocery stores, shopping malls and even outside – is not just composed of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but scores of other particles, gasses and water vapor.

The air is also teaming with billions viruses, blowing around in the breeze, but most of these can’t infect humans and don’t pose any threat.

If the University of Nebraska study holds up to peer review, it will be further evidence that the danger of coronavirus can lurk anywhere an infected person has been, and for longer than previously thought.