Immediate need to revisit COVID strategy
New Delhi: Strong evidence has come to fore that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, behind the COVID-19 pandemic, is predominantly transmitted through the air, according to a new assessment published in The Lancet journal on Friday (April 16). The report said that public health measures that fail to treat the virus as predominantly airborne leave people unprotected and allow the virus to spread.
“The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent,” Jose-Luis Jimenez, from the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, is quoted as saying by a PTI report.
“It is urgent that the World Health Organization and other public health agencies adapt their description of transmission to the scientific evidence so that the focus of mitigation is put on reducing airborne transmission,” Jimenez added.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK, reviewed published research and identified 10 lines of evidence to support the predominance of the airborne route. The researchers from the UK, the US and Canada highlighted the super-spreader events such as last year's Skagit Choir outbreak in the US, in which 53 people became infected from a single infected case.
