It's really so thick on top... Actually for six months, for those who can read well comprehensively. How can the RIVM people be so blind? I understand it from the politicians; In my environment there are also plenty of intelligent people (including doctors, judges, lawyers, coaches, decision-makers, government officials) who still know how to blow their horns. They assume that they are up to date and well informed: they keep up with current affairs and talk shows and read quality newspapers. That's difficult to talk.
In this article, the first page discusses a classic misconception about the size of the (micro) droplets. Classically, floating microdroplets were defined as smaller than 5 nanometers. It was later found that even droplets larger than 50 nanometers remain floating. This has far-reaching consequences for, for example, the amount of virus that can be transported and transmission behaviour. The word "drops" is unclearly defined, virologists use it all the time and that ambiguity is partly responsible for one of the biggest disasters in a hundred years.
I hope Jaap van Dissel will never say that by 'drops' he also meant those microdroplets.
The link to the MedScape is further on. At the bottom of the Medscape page is a 'Next' button. All frequently heard counterarguments against aerosols are dissected there by Prof. Jimenez.
Some examples, point by point:
- Drops vs micro drops. If the particles described by WHO really fell to the ground, pollen allergy would not exist.
- The distance rule that the droplet theory is supposed to prove actually causes dilution of the inhaled aerosols.
- For decades, virologists have refused to accept that measles and tuberculosis went through the air. With exactly the same arguments as they now use to deny aerosol transmission. Tuberculosis was later found to be infected exclusively through the air.
- Virologists say that only viruses with a high infection rate (high R0) are transmitted via aerosols. There is no ground for this. Of course, the most dangerous diseases are the best studied – always resulting in aerosol transmission.
- Variables such as dilution, emission variations per carrier and per infection phase, viral load, individual immune responses provide a variety of images in Covid-19. That makes it more difficult than, for example, with measles, where almost everyone who comes into contact with it gets sick. It is nonsense to require the measles characteristic before aerosols are accepted.
- Under favorable conditions, reproduction values (R0) of 20 to 25 have been reached in Covid-19 infections. That is unthinkable without airborne contamination.
