The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission
By V. Stadnytskyi, C. Bax, A. Bax, P. Anfinrud. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020
982 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Speech droplets generated by asymptomatic carriers of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are increasingly considered to be a likely mode of disease transmission. Highly sensitive laser light scattering observations have revealed that loud speech can emit thousands of oral fluid droplets per second. In a closed, stagnant air environment, they disappear from the window of view with time constants in the range of 8 to 14 min, which corresponds to droplet nuclei of ca. 4 μm diameter, or 12- to 21-μm droplets prior to dehydration. These observations confirm that there is a substantial probability that normal speaking causes airborne virus transmission in confined environments.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine, Speech and Hearing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6e06dd80833cd454ad01475b97a7a92081f5e17
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Citations in the corpus
- Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19 (2020, positive): “Human atomization of virus-bearing particles occurs from coughing/sneezing and even from normal breathing/talking by an infected person (3 – 6).”
- Airborne transmission of respiratory viruses (2021, background): “One study showed that 1 min of speaking may produce at least 1000 aerosols (97).”