Study: COVID Loses 50% Of Ability To Infect After 10 Seconds In Office Air, 90% After 5 Minutes

Coronavirus loses nearly 50 percent of its ability to infect about 10 seconds after becoming airborne in an office environment.

Prof. Jonathan Reid, director of the University of Bristol’s Aerosol Research Centre, unearthed this finding while studying how deadly the virus is in exhaled air.

Reid found that the virus does not spread across an office at the rate experts previously thought. He says the virus is mostly transmitted only to those right next to the person with COVID-19 symptoms.

“People have been focused on poorly ventilated spaces and thinking about airborne transmission over meters or across a room,” said Reid. “When you move further away, not only is the aerosol diluted down, there’s also less infectious virus because the virus has lost infectivity (as a result of time)."

While citing these findings, the Guardian adds that COVID loses 90 percent of its ability to infect within five minutes in the air. Take a look:

Reid's team of Bristol experts claim American scientists conducted misleading experiments. See, American scientists had based their assumptions on how long the virus survives in tiny airborne droplets on studies that sprayed the virus into sealed vessels. However, the Bristol experts say those experiments do not accurately replicate what happens when we cough or breathe, thus the differing results.

Reid's concludes as follows:

“It means that if I’m meeting friends for lunch in a pub today, the primary is likely to be me transmitting it to my friends, or my friends transmitting it to me, rather than it being transmitted from someone on the other side of the room."