How much covid do you expel every time you yell, sing or cough?

While specific vaccines against the omicron variant are arriving, the scientists are working at full speed to learn as much as possible about the covid in order to confront and reverse their effects. There are studies that reveal when the virus is no longer contagious. Other reports claim that loss of smell or taste after coronavirus infection is associated with memory problems. New research indicates that people infected with the different subvariants of the coronavirus are more likely to have memory problems. omicronas well as the initial alpha and delta strains, yielded higher amounts of virus than people infected with other lineages (centaurus, gamma, delta or epsilon, among others).

This is the conclusion of the study ‘Evolution of covid shedding by aerosols upon exhalation’, published in the scientific website. MedRxiv and reported in the journal ‘Nature‘. The study concludes that a ‘superpropagator’ with omicron yields 1,000 times more Viral RNA than those suffered by alpha and delta strains, thus corroborating what had already been determined by other reports and the contagion data of countries: this variant and its sub-languages are the most contagious of all.

The virus continues to spread despite being vaccinated.

As if that weren’t bad enough, people who contract the virus after the vaccinationeven after a booster dosecontinue to spread the virus throughout the air, through particles of aerosols. “This research shows that the three variants that won the infection race (omicron, alpha and beta) leave the body more efficiently when people talk or shout than the other strains of coronavirus”, says John Volckens, a public health engineer at Colorado State. University of Fort Collins.

Study co-author, Kristen Colemanwho researches infectious diseases emerging infectious diseases at the University of Maryland at College Park, says this means that people should “put pressure on governments to invest in improving the quality from indoor air” improving “systems ventilation y filtration“.

Tests on a specific apparatus

For the study, Coleman and colleagues recruited. 93 people between mid-2020 and early 2022 who were infected with covid. Participants’ infections were caused by strains including the alpha variant, which emerged in late 2020, and the later, delta and omicron variants. All participants with the latter two strains had been fully vaccinated before contracting the virus.

Infected individuals faced a apparatus cone-shaped apparatus, and they sang and shouted in between inevitable coughs and sneezes. They did so for 30 minutes, while an attached machine collected the particles they exhaled. The device, called Gesundheit-IIseparated fine aerosol droplets measuring five micrometers or less in diameter, which can remain airborne and filter through fabric and surgical masks.