FRIDAY, February 26, 2021 (HealthDay News) – Just a conversation in a hair salon can spread the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to a new study.
The same is likely to be true of many health care facilities, as the same research has shown.
Most of the research on exhaled air and the spread of the virus has focused on coughing or sneezing, which allows tiny droplets of breath to spread over long distances.
For this study, published online February 23 in the journal Physics of Fluids, Japanese researchers assessed the movement of exhaled air used by hair salon workers during conversation. They simulated a number of typical scenarios, such as: B. Workers standing over customers and bending over them, or shampooing a recumbent customer.
“A significant amount of similar personal contacts would occur not only in cosmetology, but also in long-term and medical care,” said study author Keiko Ishii from the mechanical engineering department at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo.
“We analyzed the characteristics of expiratory diffusion with and without a mask when a person was standing, sitting, face-down, or face-up,” Ishii said in a press release in a journal.
The researchers found that the exhaled air of an unmasked hair salon who speaks tends to move downward due to gravity, meaning that a customer underneath the speaking worker could be at risk of infection.
When a speaking worker wears a mask while standing or sitting, the aerosol cloud tends to attach to the speaker’s body, which is warmer than the surrounding air, and flows up along the body.
When a worker leans forward, the aerosol cloud likely breaks away from that person’s body and drifts onto the customer below, according to the study.
Experiments with face shields have shown that they can prevent aerosols that leak around the speaking worker’s mask from swimming down to the customer.
“The face shield helped increase exhaled breath,” Ishii said. “Therefore, it is more effective to wear both a mask and face shield when providing services to customers.”
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is more concerned with COVID-19 prevention.
SOURCE: Physics of Liquids, press release, February 23, 2021
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