IMPROVING a building’s indoor ventilation to help tackle coronavirus transmission will cost money but help maintain a degree of safety over time, an expert has said.
Dr Julian Tang, consultant virologist at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and honorary associate professor in the Department of Respiratory Sciences, is the author of a new study in the British Medical Journal that urges governments and health leaders to “focus their efforts on airborne transmission”.
Speaking to Sky News this morning, he explained the findings.
“Improving the ventilation is not an overnight thing and a lot of places you can’t open the windows or keep the doors open easily because of security issues," he said.
“But if the concept is there, if the kind of will is there, to improve ventilation over time, those improvements will come in gradually.”
READ MORE: Scotland Covid deaths officially pass 10,000 as three more people die
He added: “Improving infrastructure and buildings is a very difficult thing and it costs money.”
Dr Tang was asked if a previous focus on hand washing and sanitising was “wrong”.
He told viewers: “I think the emphasis is wrong. So the message ‘hands, face, space’, we think should be really ‘space, space, hands’.
“The way this virus transmits is really through conversational distance, within one metre.
“When you’re talking to a friend or sharing the same air as you’re listening to your friend talking, we call it the garlic-breath distance.
“So if you can smell your friend’s lunch you’re inhaling some of that air as well as any virus that’s inhaled with it.
“And this is why we say that masking is fine, social distancing is fine, but the indoor airborne environment needs to be improved and that can be done with ventilation.”
Scotland yesterday recorded three coronavirus deaths and 278 positive tests.
It brings the death toll under this measure – of people who first tested positive for the virus within the previous 28 days – to 7636.
Scottish Government figures show 222,660 people have tested positive since the start of the outbreak, up from 222,382 the previous day.
The daily test positivity rate was 1.3%, down from 1.6%.
In Scotland there are 119 people in hospital confirmed to have the virus, down from 133, while 20 patients remain in intensive care.
And 2,694,971 people have been given their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, up 12,265 from yesterday, with 634,422 receiving a second dose.
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