Aaron Hartman, MD explains how respiratory particles spread when we breathe, cough, and sneeze, traveling up to 26 feet. Aerosols can linger for hours. He recommends masks, ventilation, and HEPA filters to reduce transmission.
Questions this video answers
About 3–6 feet.
Up to 19 feet.
About 26 feet.
Approximately 5–10 microns.
Less than 5 microns.
Chapters
All right, great to be with everybody here again. Today, we're going to talk about to mask or not to mask? That is the question. The gist is we need to wear masks. For some reason, this is still considered controversial in our country. I'm still going out and not seeing people wearing masks. There's still different physician organizations saying maybe we don't have to worry about it. Hopefully, after you hear this, you'll realize when you go out in public, we should all be wearing a mask. At this stage, I think that is pretty incontrovertible. And this is all about that. At the very bottom, there'll be the link that will have the article that this information comes from. So if you want to get more information, it'll be available below. I think one thing that's really interesting, in the COVID 19 survival guide that I put out this past week, one of my key points was wearing masks on that. I've been talking about it a little bit and this. And we're going to talk about that a little bit today. So the basic gist of what this article talks about is that when we breathe, there's three major points. The first of all is when we breathe, just me talking right now. If you were here in front of me, I would be spreading small air particles of saliva, which is kind of gross to think about, about three to six feet out. So we would need to be back quite a bit if I didn't want my basically salivary particles landing on you. When we cough, we spread particles up to 19ft. 19ft. So basically, if you're in the room with someone and they cough, if you sneeze, when you aerosolize particles, okay, that's even smaller. They're spread about 26ft. So if someone sneezes, you know, the rooms in my house are not that. Are not. Don't have 26ft. That's pretty big. That's a huge room. If you're in the room with someone and they sneeze, then you're gonna get exposed to particles. The point is, is that social distancing is not 100% effective. I can be 6ft away from you, but if you sneeze and I'm in the room, I'm likely gonna be exposed to the particles in the air. This is where masks become important because they not only block your part, they not only protect me from breathing in particles in the air and particulates and aerosols, aerosolized particles, but they keep you from spreading your stuff. And that might be the benefit with these things, not so much me not breathing your stuff in, but you're not spreading the stuff out. So facial coverings, anything that covers your mouth is going to slow the velocity of these particles. We've seen them recommending in New York City just to cover your mouth with something, anything, you know, a bandana. Why? Well, just something of your mouth will slow the air velocity and diminish particurization. When you sneeze, you're having a faster velocity air than when you cough. And when I talk, it's even slower. So that's the difference between the 6ft versus the 19ft versus the 26ft. And if you cover your mouth with something, you're gonna. You're gonna diminish that. So you can make these. That's. There's actually a lot of people are making these, which is fine. Actually, when my patients were taking HEPA filters for vacuum cleaners and then making masks and using these little metal bendy things, those. Actually, the mask is actually really good quality. But the ideal mask is an N95 mask that's going to reduce about 99.9% of both the particle spread and the exposure. So when we talk about droplets, these droplets being spread, they're usually about 5 to 10 microns in size. And this is an arbitrary cutoff. Now, to put that in perspective, a red blood cell is about 8 microns in size. So these are pretty small things. When you make these droplets and aerosolized particles less than 5 microns. Whenever you sneeze or cough, you have both of these. Sneezing will have more aerosolized stuff, coughing will have more particles, but there's going to be both of those. And maybe this is the reason why this disease is spreading so quickly is because of just the physics of particles and how these things are spread. So a question some people have asked that's been answered is how long do droplets stay in the air? When you have a droplet, when you cough and you make those, those things that spread that 19ft, those will stay in the air for a few minutes and they'll drop out. When you sneeze and produce the small aerosols, those can actually stay in the air for hours. And that's where it gets kind of tricky, where air systems, air convection systems, H VAC systems, There was some debate initially whether some of the disease on some of the cruise ships was being spread through the air ducts. And basically people were kind of like, you know, that's not really the case. Well, from some of this new information with the way these aerosolized particles. Maybe that is the case. Particularly if a place is poorly ventilated. That could be the case. Point is, is that, you know, the only way to really protect yourself is not just social distancing. It's going to be a mask. If you're in the grocery store or anywhere else. And these small residue or droplets can stay in these little nuclei suspended in the air for up to three hours. So literally, you could be walking down an aisle somewhere and someone sneezed 20, 30 minutes before you, and now you're walking through this dusting, so to speak, of their aerosolized droplets. What does that mean? It means if you go out, wear a facial covering of some sort, get a N95 mask. I know it's controversial, but, you know, when I go out, I wear mine. When my son went out with me to get some pickup takeout the other day, he had his on as well. We just have them around the house because, well, one, I'm a physician, I have them at the office. But two, because I use them for any kind of work around the house, crawl space, etc. So what does this mean? We want good ventilation. You want to make sure you're moving air in the rooms. You want HEPA filters. Now HEPA filters, something else I mentioned in the the COVID 19 Survival Guide. I actually have HEPA filters in my office and all my exam rooms. In my home, I have HEPA filters and all my, all the kids bedrooms as well as in our main living space. HEPA filter. A standard HEPA filter will move a particle down to 0.3 microns. Okay, so that's going to move most of the aerosolized particles. If you get. That's the minimum classification for HEPA filters. So any true HEPA filter, you can go to Costco online, buy a typical HEPA filter and get down to this 0.3 microns. Now, there are high quality HEPA filters, ultra HEPA filters. Those are the kind of ones that I have in our bedrooms, in our house. They're more expensive in my office at work. Those can filter down to 0.003 microns. So what does this mean? Basically, viruses, bacteria, VOCs, mold, all these. The large majority of things will attach to particles in the air. If you remove particles, you can remove 99.999% of the stuff in the air. You don't want to get exposed to especially viral particles attached, viral virons attached to particles. So a good decent HEPA filter will do this for you. There are A bunch of different manufacturers that do this. Austin Air is a decent one. That's what I actually have at home have Air Oasis at work. That's a specialized HEPA filter air ionizer as well as UV light, but the same thing. You can just get a good HEPA filter at Costco. That's going to get 99.9% of what you want done. If you want 99.999% then you're going to have to. That's the difference between $120 filter and a $500 filter, basically. So we mentioned that before. So these are some information about dust particles, air particles. Hopefully this was helpful. The gist of this is if you don't want to get exposed to this, need a mask, facial covering, surgical mask is acceptable. The optimal is N95. Hopefully whenever this our social distancing is relaxed a little bit. Hopefully we'll have enough of these N95 masks available that everybody can have them when we start reintroducing ourselves to society and culture. Anyway, I hope this information was helpful. As new updates come out, we'll continue to update you all, continuing to check the literature as well as look at and see what people are concerned about. We'll be doing a live question and answer session later on. If you follow us on social media, you'll be notified of that when it goes out. I'm not quite sure when this this will be going going out. If you if this was helpful, please follow us on Facebook, Instagram like us, give us a five star rating. That just makes this information easier for other people to find and otherwise also as well. COVID 19 guide is now out there. It's on the website richmondfunctionalmedicine.com you can download that. We're making more resources available as we have time to do them. I'm still working full time. My wife who's helping with all this is educating our children as well as trying to do this. So we're doing the best we can. But hopefully this stuff is helpful and useful and I hope you all have a great day. Take care.
