Rules of COVID-19 at One Year, a New Playbook

A year of studying what works and what does not work in dealing with COVID-19 has changed the playbook on how scientists advise us to move forward. We’ve learned that we don’t have to wash our groceries when bringing them into the home, and that wiping down surfaces and putting up plexiglass barriers are not as important to preventing COVID-19 as the tried-and-true rules of wearing a mask, social distancing, and washing our hands often. Even taking temperatures is not a reliable way to ferret out infected people, according to the new rules.

According to The Wall Street Journal, more public health experts recommend the use of rapid testing to detect cases quickly since many think more than 50% of COVID-19 infectious may be asymptomatic. With the number of cases now 100 million globally with more than 25 million in the U.S., the pandemic is causing more concern among health officials. The current wave of variant viruses wreaking havoc around the world means that stay-at-home orders, business closures, and travel restrictions are important protective steps to mitigate the spread.

While vaccines are available, their distribution has been tediously slow. So, we must revise the rule book to concentrate on scientifically proven ways to contain the pandemic.

“We have to deal with the ‘right now,’ We’ve zeroed in on this set of controls that we know work,” said Joseph G. Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings program and an associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

One of the most surprising and insightful things we have learned about the virus is that most infections are spread by people without symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A second revelation was that the disease can be transmitted by tiny particles in the air known as aerosols that can travel and linger in the air. A study published in March in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that aerosolized coronavirus particles can live up to three hours in the air, meaning that they could infect people hours after being expelled. Dr. Linsey Marr, an expert in the spread of aerosols at Virginia Tech says that this study shows how important good ventilation is to reduce the risk of viral transmission.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we encountered plexiglass dividers everywhere both in indoor and outdoor settings to protect us against COVID-19. However, researchers said that the barriers only stop larger respiratory droplets. Professor Howard Stone, who specializes in the mechanics of fluid transmission at the Princeton University, told Good Morning America that “plexiglass dividers do compartmentalize air, and reduce the risk to some degree.”

However, Dr. William Ristenpart, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, says the dividers work like face shields, blocking large droplets of virus and are less effective in impeding aerosols that hang in the air.

An engineering team from the University of Central Florida calculated the effectiveness of plexiglass barriers in indoor restaurants with standard ventilation systems. They found that the breath from an infected person dining in an area flanked by the barriers rose and interacted with the ventilation system. Our breath is generally hotter than indoor air, so as the warm air rises, it can spread over and around the barrier and infect others.

While plexiglass dividers have their benefits, they are not zero risk said experts, according to GMA, and are not a substitute for masks and social distancing.

Experts say that we went overboard cleaning and sanitizing surfaces at the beginning of the pandemic, but as researchers learned more about how the virus spreads, the CDC said that routine cleaning of frequently touched surfaces should suffice, according to the Journal.

Forehead temperature checks have been waning since a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found only 13% of infected people develop fevers. Scientists also learned that even brief encounters with infectious people can spread the virus if there is poor ventilation and crowding.

Doubling masks is one of the latest rules to help prevent the disease. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recommended wearing two masks instead of one. “If you have a physical covering with one layer, it just makes common sense that two will likely be more effective,” he said Monday, according to the New York Post.

Frequent testing has emerged as one of the most effective tools in identifying the virus and catching it in communities to help control the spread of COVID-19.

“Unless we’re doing really broad, frequent screening of the people at large, we’re completely missing the vast majority” of infections, said Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “We have to change how we’re doing this.”