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BSS-48
COVID-19-WHO
WHO to review evidence of corona virus’s airborne transmission
DHAKA, July 8, 2020 (BSS) – World Health Organisation (WHO) has said emerging evidence forced it to review possibilities of airborne transmission of coronavirus to update its advice aid growing expert speculation that the deadly virus could survive for a longer period compared to what is being assumed.
“We have been talking about the possibility of airborne transmission and aerosol transmission as one of the modes of transmission of COVID-19,” WHO official Maria Van Kerkhove told a news briefing in Geneva late yesterday.
Dr Benedetta Allegranzi, who leads the WHO’s committee on infection prevention and control, supplemented Kerkhove saying the possibility of airborne transmission, especially in “crowded, closed, poorly ventilated settings, cannot be ruled out”.
She said the UN health agency now recommended “appropriate and optimal ventilation” of indoor environments, as well as physical distancing for protection against coronavirus as there was emerging evidence that the coronavirus could be transmitted by air.
The WHO comments came as 239 experts signed an open letter asking the global health agency to review its guidance while several of the signatories have collaborated with the WHO and served on its committees.
For months, the WHO said COVID-19 spreads mainly via direct contact with large respiratory droplets, like those expelled in a sick person’s cough or sneeze, while it overnight acknowledged that the airborne transmission of the virus might be a threat in indoor spaces a well.
The WHO, however, previously said some procedures can aerosolize the virus, but stopped short of calling it a threat to the general public.
But one of the signatories to the letter Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, preferred to compare the transmission process with cigarette smokes which concentrate mostly around the person smoking but it also disperses and drifts throughout the room.
“Viral aerosol functions much the same way,” Time magazine’s latest issue quoted her as saying.
Experts who signed the letter welcomed the WHO’s announcement.
“We are very glad that WHO has finally acknowledged the accumulating evidence, and will add aerosol transmission indoors to the likely modes of transmission” for the coronavirus,” the New York Times said quoting Colorado University’s chemistry professor Jose-Luis as saying.
Jimenez, who was one of the signatories to the letter added that the WHO’s revision plan would “allow the world to better protect themselves and fight the pandemic”.
“This is definitely not an attack on the WHO. It’s a scientific debate, but we felt we needed to go public because they were refusing to hear the evidence after many conversations with them,” the BBC later quoted him as saying.
BSS/AR/SH/2022 hrs