Scientists investigating Covid-19’s ‘super spreaders’ – those that transmit SARS-CoV-2 at a rate almost four times higher than the average – have discovered additional features that provide patients with this terrible ‘superpower’.
Researchers at Tulane University, Harvard, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have identified a perfect storm of obesity, age and a more serious Covid-19 infection that can combine and cause people to breathe far more virus-laden respiratory droplets than normal.
Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were based on a review of data from an observational study of 194 healthy people and an experimental study of primates infected with Covid-19.
Older study subjects with higher body mass index and more severe Covid-19 infection exhaled up to four times the number of respiratory droplets than others.
In surprising numbers that again reinforce the Pareto principle (for many results, about 80 percent of the consequences come from just 20 percent of the causes), the researchers found that only 18 percent of the participants produced 80 percent of the particles exhaled in the human study group. In other words, one fifth of infected individuals is responsible for four fifths of all transmissions.
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Within the non-human group, the researchers witnessed a drop in droplet diameter to just one micron as the disease progressed, allowing more particles to be expelled, floated in the air for longer and to travel further, again dramatically increasing the possibility of transmission to other people in the neighborhood. The increase in exhaled aerosol droplets has also been witnessed in asymptomatic cases.
“We saw a similar increase in droplets during the stage of acute infection with other infectious diseases like tuberculosis,” said Chad Roy, Ph.D., corresponding study author and director of infectious disease aerobiology at the Tulane National Primate Research Center.
“It seems likely that viral and bacterial infections of the airways can weaken mucus in the airways, which promotes the movement of infectious particles into this environment.”
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