COVID Archives - Andrew Maynard

With coronavirus vaccines coming online, I thought it about time I put a vaccine video up on the Risk Bites channel on YouTube — after all, this is exactly the type of complex yet important risk and risk communication that the channel was established to address.

I’m expecting plenty of push-back on the video from the anti-vax community, but hopefully there’ll be a greater push-forward from pro-vax, pro-science and pro-public health viewers!

I took a but of a risk here (pun intended) in addressing vaccine hesitancy. But from experience, and drawing on what’s known about effective risk/health communication, this type of approach can be helpful if you’re more interested in reaching people who are seriously interested in useful information, rather than simply preaching to the choir.

This isn’t the first vaccine video to appear on Risk Bites — in the past we’ve addressed HPV vaccines, flu shots, and MMR. But it is especially relevant to the current state of things in the world.

Hopefully this gets some traction — it’s important!

How long do aerosols stay airborne?

Just how long do SAR CoV-2 containing aerosols stay airborne once released into the air?

It’s an increasingly important question as the relevance of airborne transmission of novel coronavirus becomes apparent. Yet despite the science of aerosol dynamics being very well established, it’s surprising just how hard it is to find clear and understandable information on the settling rate of airborne particles.

This became very apparent to me when searching for a simple plot of settling velocity versus particle size that indicates just how slow or fast exhaled COVID-containing aerosols might stick around. I may be missing something but, apart from a bunch of old and quite technical plots and diagrams, there was pretty much nothing.

So I dug into my old aerosol files and created some!