Study: Corona remains in the elevator for half an hour after the injured person leaves
A new study revealed that corona virus particles produced by coughing can rotate inside an elevator for up to half an hour if the doors are closed.
Experts from the University of Amsterdam simulated a series of coughs inside the hospital elevator, to determine how long the droplets lasted under different conditions.
When the elevator doors are closed, the infected droplet can persist for up to half an hour, but when the doors are opened, the drops disappear within four minutes.
Under normal work cycles, with the doors open and closed regularly, infected droplets resulting from coughing or speaking out loud can last for about ten minutes.
The team says wearing a mask while in the elevator eases some of the problem with proper ventilation at all times, not just when the elevator is moving.
The team explained that aerosols, which contain small respiratory particles, are increasingly being seen as a potentially important method of transmitting the Corona virus.
To recreate the size and shape of the aerosol produced by a cough, team leader Daniel Boone and his colleagues devised a spray nozzle.
Then they sprayed the simulated drops into an elevator, and used lasers to illuminate the particles - so they could be counted and tracked over time.
The tests were conducted in the elevator cabins during normal operation, which means that the door is open about 10-20% of the time.
The team discovered that during such a normal process, it takes 12-18 minutes before the number of aerosol particles decreases, according to Boone.
And when the elevator doors are permanently open, this period decreases from 2 to 4 minutes.
The team explained that sputum infected with corona - a mixture of saliva and mucus - from patients in the hospital with mild diseases, can carry between ten thousand and one billion copies of the virus per milliliter.
Speaking out loud may produce up to a few hundreds of thousands of drops per minute, while a single cough can actually produce a few million drops.
And if you breathe in the air inside an elevator after an infected person speaks or coughs - you are ingesting up to thousands of Covid-19 particles per minute.
And in a very confined space, such as an elevator, these droplets can easily infect other people who come later - especially if they remain in the air.
The new study found that during normal work cycles, sputum can remain for up to ten minutes after an infected person coughs.
The researchers recommend leaving elevator doors open for a longer time whenever possible, and avoiding talking and coughing in elevators, while wearing an appropriate face mask.
They also noted the importance of improving ventilation and increasing the capacity of mechanical ventilation.
Dr. Cees Van Rijn, the co-author of the study, said that it was found that the ventilation inside the elevators does not move automatically after a minute or two.
Previous studies have shown that something as simple as talking while infected can lead to the virus spreading in an enclosed space.
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