Did MIT Study Really Challenge 6-Foot Social Distancing For Covid-19 Coronavirus? Here’s What It Said
Some people on social media are trying to put the six feet social distancing recommendation essentially six feet under. They are claiming that a study from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is showing that keeping six feet apart won’t really do much to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus indoors. For example, Peter Navarro, PhD, an economist who served as an advisor to then U.S. President and current Mar-A-Lago resident Donald Trump, used the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) to take another shot (the mudslinging type and not the vaccination type) at Anthony Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID): pg slot
Before you listen to these claims and start walking right up to others in a room and saying, “how you doin,” stop. And hold on, in the words of Wilson Phillips. Take a closer look at what this PNAS study really showed.
For the study, Martin Z. Bazant, PhD, a Professor of Chemical Engineering, and John W. M. Bush, PhD, Professor of Applied Mathematics, who are both at MIT, put together sets of equations that tried to represent the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus in what they called a “well-mixed” room. In this case, a well-mixed room doesn’t mean a room with a good DJ but rather one where any floating particles would end up spreading fairly evenly in the airspace.
The study also focused on just one way of transmitting the virus: via the small virus-carrying respiratory droplets that may come out of a infected person’s nose and mouth, become easily aerosolized since they are quite light, and then float in the air far away from their source like pixie dust. These are otherwise known as droplet nuclei. So Bazant and Bush didn’t look at larger respiratory droplets that may carry the virus as well. And they didn’t factor in direct physical contact as in the “touching you, touching me” type of contact that may transmit the virus. More on this later.
Based on their equations, the researchers concluded that staying six feet apart alone would not prevent the virus from spreading person-to-person because the virus-laden small respiratory droplets would already be everywhere in the air. Again, that’s because they are assuming that the air in the room would be well-mixed. In turn, the small, light aerosolized virus-carrying respiratory droplets wouldn’t quite behave like fart particles might. In other words, the small droplets wouldn’t just stay more concentrated near the source but instead quickly fan out so that they are equally distributed throughout the airspace of the room.
