 You know, you talked a lot about how it's spread through air droplets and so I work in the film industry and now we have an entire department that is called the COVID Compliance Department and, you know, their job on set is essentially to enforce a six foot separation policy, masks, face shields, but they also go around and they clean highly used surfaces. And it seems like an easy thing to do, makes sense, everyone's touching it, clean it, sanitize it, whatever, but it seems like it should be more of a focus on getting air scrubbers into filming stages and worry more about the ventilation as opposed to high traffic surface areas. You know, do you know, are you familiar with the efficacy of cleaning such areas versus getting a properly ventilated area? So this is still an area of scientific debate, although I would say that most scientists have come around to the opinion that the dominant mode of transmission is airborne. Public health agencies such as the World Health Organization and the CDC have been very slow to accept that conclusion or to endorse that officially and they've maintained from the beginning, even before the pandemic, that the standard strategy for dealing with disease is wash your hands, disinfect services, and stay apart from sick people. So essentially that advice hasn't really changed except there's that specific six foot version of it in the United States, which is not followed elsewhere, but nevertheless that has been generally the public health guidance. Now I think personally, and I think many, many scientists agree that the airborne transmission is in fact dominant. So the kind of transmission you're talking about in a pedi-mology is called fomite transmission. That's where there's an infectious residue, let's say from breathing or coughing which ends up on a surface. You touch that surface and then you touch some part of your body that basically gets it into your body. You touch your eyes, you touch your mouth, you touch your nose, and then you transmit. So first of all, the direct evidence for fomite transmission is not that strong and to my knowledge is not a single definitive recorded case of fomite transmission. There are many, many definitive recorded cases of airborne transmission and in fact there are many cases of COVID spreading that can only be explained by airborne transmission. Furthermore, respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 often are spread by an airborne route and this has been established in the past. So for example tuberculosis was treated for decades in exactly the same way. Wash surfaces, you know, think worry about coughs, and finally it was it was shown that that's the only way of transmitting essentially is airborne because the pathogen, which in that case is a bacteria, would be contained in those aerosol droplets I mentioned that needs to get deep into your lungs into the smallest pathways, the alveoli, and they are so small that only the smallest droplets can actually get there. So you might ask yourself, you know, let's just say there's an infectious residue sitting on a fork or on a surface and you touch it. How is it exactly going to get into your lungs? You know, because the virus is not really present in your blood or other bodily fluids, aside from the respiratory tract. So even if you were to touch your eye or sometimes you might ask, you know, again, it's the physics of transmission, physically, not biologically, but physically, how is that virus going to get into your lungs or into your respiratory tract? So it's it's it's my opinion that the phomite transmission is not a significant mode of transmission for COVID-19. And in any case, you know, it can't hurt to be overprotective. So, you know, if you're going to be cleaning surfaces, I don't want to tell you not to do that, but you're absolutely right that if you believe, as I do, that airborne transmission is dominant, then you really should be worrying about the air, which means you should be worrying about primarily the exchange of the air. So ventilation is the number one factor, again, comparing the outside being the ideal, but inside still being, you know, a situation where you can control ventilation quite significantly. And also looking at other factors such as air filtration, wearing masks is critical and, you know, other some other mitigation strategies are available as well. But I think that's really the important thing that we kind of need to recognize is the importance of airborne transmission. I'm not the only person saying this actually by far. In fact, there are much greater experts than I am who spent their lives working on, you know, this area of public health who have been saying this. So, for example, Lydia Morofska at Queensland University of Technology, Donald Milton here in the United States, and Lindsay Marr, many others have been saying that airborne transmission is dominant for COVID-19 since the very beginning. And in fact, over the summer, they got together 239 concerned scientists to sign an open letter essentially to the World Health Organization stating, you know, this is the dominant motor transmission. The CDC did not accept or even mention airborne transmission until September when they posted some initial guidance, which they then took down, and then it came back in October, and they acknowledged that airborne transmission can occur, but did not acknowledge that it could be a dominant motor transmission. But they did at least acknowledge it can occur. World Health also around the time of that letter in the summer did acknowledge afterwards that airborne transmission could occur. So that's where we are right now, is that airborne transmission officially, according to the public health agencies, is a possibility. And so whether you think it's dominant or not, I think it's dominant, so do many, many other scientists. It's important to have a way to protect against it. So the agencies have not yet provided any specific quantitative guys to protect against it, which is really what I've been trying to provide, again, to go beyond six feet as it were. Because, you know, again, if you're talking about airborne transmission, the six feet, any distancing measure is really not the right way to go about protecting yourself. You know, a nice analogy I could give that I think kind of summarizes all of this is smoking. We all know the effects of smoking. If you think of the particles that arise when someone is smoking a cigarette as these infectious aerosols are breathing out, we all know that there is the risk of direct transmission. I could exhale my cigarette directly in your face. In fact, we're also aware of that, that most smokers don't do that. They tend to look away and blow somewhere slightly away from someone else's face. You know, so we're aware that that is kind of giving an increased transmission of smoke particles. That's pretty obvious, right? On the other hand, we also know that when you're in the room with even one smoker, is that pretty quickly, very quickly, you can smell it and even see it everywhere in the room. And it doesn't matter if there's a face shield. Imagine someone's smoking the face shield. The smoke's just gonna go right around it. Like it's totally useless. It'll block the momentum of that sort of puff, you know, which is useful. But other than that though, the particles get out, they're in the air, and you know, the smoke particles just like the aerosol droplets, they don't settle. They're in the air. And we also know that, you know, if there were, let's say at the supermarket, there's this kind of barrier, oftentimes, old plexiglass between you and the other person. Again, if I'm gonna cough directly on the cashier, that is probably a very good protection, just like a face shield would be. But again, if we're asymptomatic, nobody's coughing, we're just breathing, and we're all wearing masks on top of that, it's not possible to have that sort of projectile of respiration going towards somebody else. Instead, there's this kind of leakage of particles and droplets much like smoke. And what we should be worrying about essentially is like the secondhand smoke. So if you wanna think about it, this is, you know, the theory that I've put forward in the guidelines is sent here a way to protect yourself from a secondhand smoke in the room. In fact, the equations for smoking would be exactly the same. I would just have to change, you know, kind of the number of particles per breath or something like that. But the basic principles of ventilation, filtration, everything else would apply just as much in that case. Hey everyone, thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. And one final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies to feature on the show. 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