A group of American experts in medicine, public health and industrial health, wrote a letter to White House officials, including Anthony Fauci, MD, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), asking them to fully address the inhalation, or airborne, of the COVID-19 transmission and provide frontline workers with appropriate respirators and ventilation strategies to reduce the risk of infection.
The group said the United States should follow Germany, Austria and France – countries that recently demanded equivalent respiratory protection to respirators with N95 filter masks (FFRs) and high-quality filtration systems for all public officials.
“People are reluctant to use the word airborne because of what it evokes,” said Robert Schooley, MD, of the University of San Diego, at a virtual news conference on the letter.
Schooley signed the letter, along with other experts in the field, including Donald Milton, MD, DrPH, from the University of Maryland at College Park, and Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH from the University of Minnesota. Osterholm runs the Infectious Disease Research and Policy Center (CIDRAP), which publishes CIDRAP News.
But despite the frightening image of an airborne virus, accepting the reality that COVID-19 can be easily transmitted through the air using small aerosols is necessary if the United States is to control the pandemic, the group said.
“Government officials must fully recognize inhalation exposure as the primary form of spread of COVID-19 and take immediate steps to control and limit that exposure,” said Milton during the news conference. “For months, the scientific evidence was clear: aerosol transmissions are the main form of spread of this virus.”
Milton cited choral practices, restaurant exhibitions and even 3 to 5 minute conversations between masked people as examples of documented airborne transmission. He also said that inhalation transmission may partly explain the injustice of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.
“People of color, many of whom work on the front lines in essential jobs, have suffered – and continue to suffer – the greatest impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,” wrote the letter’s authors.
CDC maintains the previous emphasis on drops
But despite overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 spreads through small aerosols, the CDC maintained an initial definition of exposure to COVID-19, which emphasizes large drops and contaminated surfaces.
Lisa Brosseau, ScD, CIH, a nationally known specialist in respiratory protection and infectious diseases, signed the letter and said she hoped the change at the White House would lead to a better understanding of the science of transmission. Still, she said the CDC is “uncompromising” when it comes to reporting exposure to inhalation. Brosseau is a research consultant for CIDRAP.
“There are a lot of guardians,” Brosseau told CIDRAP News. “Maybe it’s partly science and some pressure from parties we don’t know.” She said groups of hospitals may be reluctant to accept the route of transmission by inhalation.
Hospitals, Brosseau said, “simply hate the idea of spending money on personal protective equipment and point to poorly done clinical studies that say a surgical mask is so effective. The focus on health is always on patients, not workers.”
Biden says all Americans will be vaccinated by the end of July
The recommendation for wider use of respirators came when President Joe Biden addressed the pandemic during a town hall meeting last night in Milwaukee. Biden said that every adult American could be vaccinated by the end of July and expects the country to be “in a very different situation” by Christmas.
The CDC COVID Data Tracker shows 72,423,125 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered in the United States and 56,281,827 doses were administered, meaning that about 12% of the US population received at least one dose in a series of two doses of either the Modern or Pfizer mRNA vaccines.
The United States reported 62,398 new COVID-19 cases yesterday and 1,756 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracker. In total, the country recorded 27,805,289 cases, including 489,748 deaths.
Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 czar, said that an average of 1.7 million Americans were being vaccinated each day, against approximately 800,000 a day on January 20, when Biden took office.
Variants highlight travel risks
Today, the White House also announced that it would promise a $ 200 million “initial payment” to the CDC to triple the number of positive virus samples that laboratories have sequenced for genomic variants. This would increase the number of sequenced samples from 7,000 to about 25,000 each week. The Politico reported that the CDC is in negotiations with 13 public health laboratories to conduct the sequencing.
The shift occurs as variants, including B117 first identified in the United Kingdom, become more prevalent in the United States.
The CDC variant tracker shows 1,277 B117 cases in 42 states, 19 B1351 cases in 10 states and 3 P1 cases in 2 states.
Today in Weekly morbidity and mortality report, the CDC offered details of the first eight cases of B117 in Minnesota. Although none of the people traveled to the UK, three of the eight reported a recent trip to California, while another reported a trip to the Dominican Republic and two others had recently been to West Africa.
Travel history shows the inherent risk of traveling in this phase of the pandemic, said the CDC.
ACIP Group ponders stretching dose range
Finally, today, a working group of the CDC’s Immunization Practices Advisory Committee (ACIP) is evaluating recommendations to extend the interval between the first and second doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, according to Bloomberg.
The interval would allow more people to receive the first dose of the vaccine.