Sport in the time of pandemics - what is the risk
For context, Australia, where I live, currently sits at ~130 confirmed cases, which makes me feel relatively safe for now, but naturally this will get worse with time as other countries' examples suggest. I will be working from home, avoiding public transport and limiting shopping to the minimum. I live in suburban Sydney, so one of the major population centers.
How safe is it to continue solo outdoors training with the current and predicted COVID-19 situation? Specifically, I mean cycling without a group (i.e. maintaining a good degree of separation from any other humans at any given time). I imagine it has to be considerably safer than e.g. grocery shopping. Can the virus remain airborne outdoors for long periods of time?
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The long and short of it is that the novel coronavirus can be experimentally aerosolized where it can persist in the air for several hours but a number of studies have failed to detect virus in samples taken from the air of the rooms of patients with active disease. But virus has been detected in aerosols near bathrooms surfaces indicates that it is spread over a long distance with mechanical assistance (flushing?). SARS was also spread by one patient with diarhoea with malfunctioning sewer systems aerolized the virus across multiple floors of a building.
Both the Covid-19 and the SARS viruses had an aerosol half-life of 2.7 hours, meaning half the particles drop out of the air after that amount of time, and half of what remains drop out after another 2.7 hours. After a day, roughly nine half-lives, 0.002 (0.2 of 1%) of the original particles remain. As a result, the scientists said, “aerosol … transmission of [the new coronavirus] is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours.”
The usual spread may be via contaminated surfaces (probably on the cruise ships) and respiratory transmission less so since the rate of symptomatic infection among a patient’s household members was 10.5%
Since you're outside based on the above, the viral load would be miniscule.
www.statnews.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-can-become-aerosol-doesnt-mean-doomed/ www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf (not peer reviewed yet )
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