Why corona can spread, even if we follow the rules!
Keeping 1.5 meters away only works if the air is moist enough.
Why are there more corona infections after summer? The government leads us to believe it is only because we are not complying enough, but Edsard Ravelli researched a more important factor; humidity and UV light. 1.5 meters only works if the air is humid enough. Humidity causes virus particles within 1.5 meters to fall down and not float and still cause infection in indoor spaces.
1. What does Ravelli's research involve?
2. How does coronavirus infection work?
3. What else can we do to reduce corona infections?
1) What does the Ravelli investigation entail?
Edsard Ravelli, by his own admission, has demonstrated a causal relationship between humidity and the number of coronavirus infections (e.g., there would be more infections at low humidity). He wrote about his findings to Mark Rutte, Hugo de Jonge and HRH Willem Alexander, among others. Professor Jeffrey Shaman wrote a paper back in 2009 about airborne viruses spreading through the air and his conclusion was, the lower the humidity, the greater the chance of respiratory infections, or respiratory infections.
Ravelli replicated this conclusion with Dutch figures
He collected data from:
1. RIVM with the number of positives tested, number of hospitalizations and mortality rates by municipality;
2. KNMI for data from 37 monitoring stations across the Netherlands over the past 20 years and access to current weather data from those stations. Here, humidity, wind direction and solar radiation (UV light) proved to be very important in predicting the spread of influenza viruses. (e.g., influenza and SARS)
3. CBS for data related to population movement behavior
4. NIVEL, a public knowledge organization supervised by RIVM, for data on influenza per municipality per week over the past five years.
He had two universities analyze this data to see if there was a causal relationship and a causal relationship between the data, without them knowing what kind of data it was.
All analyses showed that a causal relationship could be established between air humidity and virus infections spread by droplets in the air.
By modelling this, he managed to predict the number of coronas infections (based on hospital admissions and mortality) with 95% accuracy, according to Ravelli.
2 How does infection by a coronavirus work?
First of all, what is the difference between a virus and a bacterium?
Zodra het virus door het slijmvlies heen is, kan het zich als een usb stick, met zijn spikes, aan de cellen hechten. Je kunt deze spike, van eiwit zien als een soort tuinslangetje dat zich aan de cellen hecht. Vanaf dat moment kan het virus de cellen een opdracht gaan geven. Bijvoorbeeld om te gaan delen. Vanaf de besmetting van de cellen met het virus gaan die cellen weer andere cellen opdrachten geven. Dit noem je repliceren. En zo verspreidt het virus zich in je lichaam en raken en raken steeds meer cellen besmet.
What is the difference between influenza and corona.
Both influenza (which causes flu) and SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19 ) are envelope viruses. That is, they have a kind of spacesuit on and inside that is the RNA and DNA. In coronavirus there is RNA and in a flu virus there is DNA.
A flu virus has an incubation period of 1 to 3 days. Within three days, you get symptoms.
The coronavirus has an incubation period of 5 to 6 days, this is because it is a new virus and our body does not recognize it yet. Because of this, it takes longer for the body to show a reaction. This is why people stay around longer like a flu virus without knowing about it; however, 2 to 3 days before you have symptoms you are already contagious.
Most are sick for 2 to 3 weeks, after which it can still go wrong and you end up in the hospital. In the worst cases, people die, and this is on average 5 weeks after the first symptoms of illness.
So there are 3 transmission routes:
- Direct contact: that's why you shouldn't shake hands;
- Through big drops: that's why we have to keep 1,5 meters distance;
- Via small droplets (aerosols): this is why we need to humidify and ventilate the air.
Humidity is needed for 1.5 meters to be safe.
Air can contain only a limited amount of moisture, with the amount of moisture depending on temperature.
We usually only notice that moisture (water vapor) is contained when it cools and the windows fog up. Colder air can contain less water vapor than warmer air.
Our lungs, throat and nose are moist, and the virus droplets that are there if one is infected contain a relatively large amount of water. This makes it relatively large and heavy and therefore falls to the ground within 1.5 meters. Therefore, we must keep the 1.5 meters distance to avoid infection.
At the moment when the air is very dry, a large virus droplet, which may contain as many as 100,000 water droplets, can burst. Then it becomes very light and starts to float.
When the moisture outside is as humid as your breath, the water has nowhere to go and then the big drop falls to the ground. When it is dry then the water drop breaks up and gets into the air, where it can spread. Ventilation is then not even always enough anymore. So it is more important to keep the humidity high so there are no or fewer infected small virus particles in the air.
3 What else can we do to reduce the number of COVID-19 infections?
Because from October onwards the sunlight is insufficient and the humidity is too low to positively influence the spread of the virus, it is important to place humidifiers, preferably with UV lamps, in homes, schools, public buildings, health care institutions (and soon also in the hospitality industry when it is allowed to open again).
Also, the heating is on more and more of which the air becomes dry and it is necessary that you humidify even more. The smaller your space, the less you need to humidify. The larger the room, the larger the humidifier should be.
Opening a window often does not help enough to increase the humidity in the house: the outside air in winter can actually be colder and therefore drier than inside.are and therefore drier than the air inside. Tools are often used to increase humidity in the home. For example, a bowl of water or wet tea towel near the heater. However, these aids do not help enough to achieve the optimal humidity of about 50%.
A safe margin for relative humidity depends on the (room) temperature.
For example, at 21 degrees the relative humidity should be 50%,
At 18 degrees the humidity should be 65%.
The moister the air is, the moister your mucous membrane is: this also makes your firewall work better to stop the virus.
Humidification helps not only for the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes COVID-19, but also for the common flu.
The Covid-19 tests can be found via this link
Measuring infections at your company location:click here