MIT Professors Create Formula For Estimating Risk Of Indoor COVID Exposure
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- As states and cities begin to open up and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxes some of its recommendations, there's a lot of confusion about how to best protect yourself from COVID.
Do you wipe down surfaces, wear a mask indoors or out, and what about social distancing?
CBS2's Dr. Max Gomez says we may be missing the biggest danger.
There seems to be fairly consistent agreement about what to do outdoors. As long as you're not in a crowd or up close to someone, it's pretty safe to go without a mask. But indoors? That's where it get's confusing.
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Now a pair of MIT professors have published a detailed formula for estimating the risk of COVID exposure indoors. It necessarily makes assumptions to insert into their equation; still, the results run somewhat counter to much conventional wisdom.
First and foremost, six feet of social distancing is much less important or protective than other factors that impact the primary mode of infection: airborne transmission.
The most important factors are: the size of the indoor space; the number of people in the space; the kinds of activities -- singing and shouting is much riskier than quiet talk or eating; the amount of ventilation is essential, and of course, mask wearing.
Study co-author Dr. John Bush told Gomez on Thursday: "Efficient mask use provides an extremely effective means of limiting indoor transmission of COVID-19... Masks mitigate both short-range transmission from respiratory flows and long-range airborne transmission."
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Somewhat surprising was the finding that air filtration was not nearly as important as ventilation systems that have a high air exchange or lots of open windows.
While this type of analysis can only provide a rough estimate of risk and there aren't many activities that are zero risk, this does give us an idea of what factors we should concentrate on to prevent indoor COVID transmission -- minimize sharing time indoors, maximize ventilation and wear a mask.
