Airborne

Whether a virus is airborne or not misses the point.

It’s a good bet that nearly every virus is airborne to some degree.

The virus is only quarter of a micron. It seems logical that it could hang onto a vapor droplet and fly, robin, fly.

Viruses that are airborne or aerosolized are dispersed rapidly throughout the volume of air in the room.

Heavier droplets will fall; extremely light droplets will stay in the air for some time.

In either case the infectious dose hitting your respiratory tree is going to be inadequate.

Infectious dose is important in infectivity just as the number of men you have attacking a fort is important.

If you have a few men attacking a fort over a more prolonged period of time, you are going to lose that battle.

If you have a lot of men attacking the fort over a shorter period of time you have a better chance of winning that battle.

The same process goes on in a viral infection.

If I have greater infectious dose attacking a specific focal point in the respiratory tree, I have a greater chance of entering the body.

This can best be accomplished if the virus is transmitted into the human body via food. This will occur if a person doesn’t wash their hands after touching a credit card loaded with viruses and then touches food that they then consume.

Bill who has COVID-19 is a checker at McDonald’s. He is wearing Nazi Party approved gloves and mask. He coughs through his mask onto his gloved hand. Then he accepts a credit card from Jane who has purchased a two cheeseburger meal (with fries and a Diet Coke). Bill’s COVID-19 virus is now all over the credit card. Jane accepts the meal and the credit card and goes home to eat her two cheeseburger meal. Because she has accepted the credit card, the viruses are now on her hands. When she gets home, she forgets to wash your hands first. She then picks up a cheeseburger and eats it. The viruses that were on her hands are transmitted to the cheeseburger bun which then travel unhappily into her oropharynx. The viruses may now enter the epithelium in the back of her throat.

This is the principal way infections are spread.

What Dr. Fauci is telling you is not so. Dr. Fauci doesn’t understand this because he doesn’t see patients for a living. Neither do the academics.

The academics believe that people get respiratory infections through inhaling the virus.

While that is possible, it is unlikely. It is unlikely because the infectious dose is not high enough.

The infectious dose is not high enough because a virus coughed into the air is dispersed out into an enormous volume – thus diluting it.

In a small room 10’ x 15’ x 10’ or 300 cubic feet, there are over 8000 L of air.

You poisoning the air is akin to Lex Luthor poisoning the city water supply. I don’t care if Lex Luthor empties an entire dump truck of cyanide, he’s not going to poison the city water supply. And it’s unlikely that you will poison the air around you by coughing even if all of the virus were aerosolized.

Even in a confined space such as in an aircraft it is unlikely that a nebulized aerosolized virus will contaminate everyone.

There is no reason to believe that the COVID-19 virus or any other virus will behave differently than the influenza virus with regard to causing aerosolization.

You would have to postulate and prove prove that somehow the COVID-19 virus produced a particular inflammatory response that would produce proteins, lipids and sugars in a combination that would predispose it to being aerosolized more than any other virus.

Or you would have to prove that the COVID-19 virus has a particular configuration that loans itself to producing smaller respiratory droplets.

I can find no evidence of this.

Given that, why haven’t we seen massive airborne transmission of influenza on aircraft over the past 75 years? Wouldn’t we have observed and personally experienced this already? Yes, we would have; and we have not. We have not because it does not occur.

Since it does not occur, we can either postulate that what I say is so, that respiratory viruses are not transmitted by inhaling viruses, or we must postulate that there’s something about the influenza virus that does not loan itself to respiratory transmission.

Of course, we could embrace the theory of Edgar Hope-Simpson that the influenza virus infection is largely a product of low vitamin D, but I don’t think anybody’s willing to go down that road.

Since people are unwilling to give up the infectious mode of influenza transfer, we must then postulate that the influenza virus is producing respiratory droplets that are different than COVID-19 viruses (because we are operating under the assumption that the COVID-19 virus can be spread within an aircraft wherein the air is confined and recycled). Do you follow?

I can find no evidence to support the notion that the COVID-19 virus is somehow different in that it can cause aerosolization of the respiratory droplets and thus a greater chance of infection via inhalation.

But even if it did, the infectious dose would be low given the dilution of the virus in a huge volume of air.

Now, it is true that viral infections can spread on a jet, but this has been shown to occur if one is sitting close to the infected person which suggests that the mode of transfer is most likely by fomite or hand contact.

Given that, there is no justification for the face mask. Nor is there any justification for stating that the confined space of an aircraft in itself leads to a greater incidence of infection.

On the other hand there is better support and more solid reasoning behind washing one’s hands.

Sincerely,

Archer Crosley, MD

Copyright 2020 Archer Crosley All Rights Reserved