Delta Variant — why you need a N-95 Respirator, not just any mask.
1,000 times the viral load?
PART 1: Aerosol Transmission
Christopher Eddy, M.P.H., REHS, CP-FS
Eriko Sase, Ph.D.
7.30.2021
Our Figure 1 diagram, designed in March 2021, early in the pandemic, still holds. It seemed that with each passing month a new element of the transmission diagram was pushed closer to a point of validation.[1]
[1] https://www.neha.org/sites/default/files/flipping_book/jeh-may-2020/28/index.html
In our paper, “An all-hazards approach to COVID-19: clarifying pathogen transmission pathways toward the public health response,” we state the following:
“We clarified known transmission pathways of SARS-CoV-2 and epidemiological commonality from a literature review, and organized descriptors into three categories (zoonotic, person-to-person, and environmental) with discussion of infection dynamics. Our nomenclature system unifies veterinary, environmental public health, and medical terminology by following a One Health concept with a simplified categorization of transmission pathways to enable effective prevention strategies in a straightforward public health message based upon an all-hazards theory that focuses on risk and severity. We analyzed prevention, facilitate behavior modification, and shorten incident mitigation in the absence of full human, animal, and environmental transmission dynamics of COVID-19.”
“Increasing cases demonstrate that the experts have neither fully assessed the virus risk yet, nor is there consensus on the methods to prevent its spread. WHO guidelines have no clear definition of a pandemic and its pandemic alert seven-phase descriptions are influenza specific (WHO, 2009). Current bio-surveillance is inadequate — creating vulnerabilities to future epidemics by novel pathogens — and public health messaging about zoonotic disease reservoirs and modes of transmission is lacking (Eddy, Sase, & Schuster, 2010; Eddy, Stull, & Balster, 2013).”
