India on Friday reported 3,545 Covid cases and 27 fatalities. The cumulative caseload is 43,094,938 (19,688 active cases) and 524,002 fatalitiesWorldwide: Over 516.17 million cases and over 6.24 million fatalities.Vaccination in India: Over 1.89 billion doses. Worldwide: Over 11.32 billion doses.TODAY’S TAKEYou are 1,000 times more likely to catch Covid from air than surfacesIf you have made sanitisers and surface disinfectants your best friends during the pandemic, yet forget to wear your mask properly when you step out, here’s some bad news for you.Researchers from the University of Michigan (U-M) in the US have discovered that people are 1,000 times more likely to get COVID-19 from the airborne viral particles they breathe than from the surfaces they touch.This is a significant finding because early studies suggested that asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and symptomatic carriers may shed virus particles, which can remain viable and infectious for up to 7 days on surfaces but just hours in aerosol. So the focus tended to be on surface-based transmission.The study, published in the ‘Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology’, looked at public spaces around the university campus, including classrooms, rehearsal rooms, cafeterias, buses and gyms. They even checked out ventilation and air ducts. Overall, between August 2020 and April 2021, the researchers collected 256 air samples and 517 surface samples.The team found that positivity rates were 1.6% for air samples and 1.4% for surface samples, and that probability for infection was about 1 per 100 exposures to SARS-CoV-2 aerosols through inhalation and as high as 1 in 100,000 from contaminated surfaces in simulated scenarios.“On the bus, 15 out of 100,000 mask-less passengers might be infected through inhalation if they take a 5–15 min bus ride when the air on the bus is contaminated by SARS-CoV-2,” reads the study.“The low overall positivity rate indicated that the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 at monitored locations was low,” adds the study. This, incidentally, is also one of the limitations of the study flagged by the team. Since the study was conducted on campus, “extrapolation of the findings to the general population should be done with caution”.TELL ME ONE THINGAs mask use dips, asthma makes a comebackDuring the last two years of the pandemic, when wearing a mask and avoiding crowds had become the norm, asthma patients were benefited, having fewer attacks, even as their comorbidity exposed them to higher complications in the event of contracting Covid-19. With the impact of Covid-19 ebbing , doctors are seeing more cases of asthma and with extreme weather conditions likely to prevail in the days to come, they fear an increase in numbers.“Wearing masks has helped asthma patients. We did not see a rise in patients in the last two years, but we may see now due to the climatic conditions. Any kind of extreme weather conditions are not good for people having asthma,” head of department of T B and pulmonary medicine, Goa Medical College (GMC), Dr Uday Kakodkar, says.Pulmonologist Dr Haradatta Karande says that, in the past two months, they have seen a lot of paediatric cases. “During the pandemic we hardly saw any cases of asthma, but, in the past two months, a lot of paediatric cases have been reported, now that outdoor activities and schools have restarted,” he says.“Wearing of masks and restriction on movement, indirectly helped people with asthma. However, now, besides adults, we also have a lot of paediatric cases, which had reduced to zero in the past two years. Weather being recalcitrant, also more cases are being reported,” says Karande. More details here.Follow news that matters to you in real-time.
Join 3 crore news enthusiasts.Written by: Rakesh Rai, Sushmita Choudhury, Tejeesh Nippun Singh
Research: Rajesh Sharma
