Baronvonrort wrote on Jan 5
th, 2023 at 10:44pm:
When did Nick say covid wasn't airborne got a link?
Deputy Chief Medical Officer interview on Sky News Live First Edition on 6 May 2020 Quote:LAURA JAYES:
Do we have a better handle on how this has been transmitted through our community? Is it that this is airborne? Is it and that it's hand-to-hand contact? Or is the disease surviving on surfaces? Or is it a combination of all three?
NICK COATSWORTH:
COVID-19 is definitely not an airborne pathogen. When you have airborne pathogens, like measles for example, the basic reproductive number that we've all come to know so well is much higher than what it is for COVID-19 – so, so definitely not an airborne. It's got- this is a droplet pathogen which means it settles on surfaces. Once it is coughed up or expectorated it tends to- it drops to the ground very quickly. And that's why hand hygiene and physical distance are our most important measures, and will be our most important measures particularly when we start opening businesses that they that they enable processes that allow us to keep our distance from each other until we have a vaccine or effective treatment.
LAURA JAYES:
Okay. So I just want to rule that out. That it's not airborne, so there is no concerns about it going through air conditioning in planes for example.
NICK COATSWORTH:
That's, that's correct, Laura. And I'll give you a good example – we use the measles example again. If you- you can get measles if you're standing next to someone from a very short period of time, but you can't get COVID with- in that sort of scenario. COVID, we know by the contact definition, requires contact of greater than 15 minutes just to give you a high likelihood of transmission. So no concerns there from the general public for airborne transmission of COVID.
Yes, that was from two and a half years ago during the early stages of the pandemic but as far as I know he's never retracted that statement and admitted Covid is and always has been airborne.
And, he's copped a lot of well deserved criticism for it ever since.
Also:
Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborneEarly in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. 6 April 2022 Quote:As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had seemed as though it might never arrive. On 23 December, the World Health Organization (WHO) uttered the one word it had previously seemed incapable of applying to the virus SARS-CoV-2: ‘airborne’.
On its website, a page titled ‘Coronavirus disease (COVID-19): How is it transmitted?’ was quietly edited to state that a person can be infected “when infectious particles that pass through the air are inhaled at short range”, a process otherwise known as “short-range aerosol or short-range airborne transmission”. The website says that transmission can occur through “long-range airborne transmission” in poorly ventilated or crowded indoor settings “because aerosols can remain suspended in the air or travel farther than conversational distance”.
“It was a relief to see them finally use the word ‘airborne’, and to say clearly that airborne transmission and aerosol transmission are synonyms,” says aerosol chemist Jose-Luis Jimenez at the University of Colorado Boulder.
I have no medical training whatsoever but even I knew Covid must have been airborne right from the start of the pandemic because there was absolutely no other way the virus could have spread and infected so many so quickly if it wasn't.