COVID – Frequently Asked Questions

Fortunately, the answer “Yes.”

While it is true that elevators are a challenging environment to manage risk in — small volume, lots of people, can’t fully physically distance — we have to remember that our overall exposure and risk is a function of three things: intensity, frequency and duration.

The good news here is that the frequency of elevator use is low, and the duration is short. So that means we just have to focus on reducing the intensity of exposure.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend keeping everyone 6 feet apart, but they must have never ridden in an elevator. Are they really saying one rider at a time?

Rather, to reduce intensity of exposure, all of us have to practice good elevator etiquette. There are just nine things we have to do:

1. Wear a mask.
2. Maximize spacing by loading in a checkerboard pattern
3. Face forward.
4. Announce your desired floor.
5. Have the person near buttons select for all, using knuckles.
6. No talking.
7. Try not to sneeze or cough.
8. If you must, turn toward wall and cough/sneeze into elbow with mask on.
9. When door opens at floor, middle people move to side and front person moves out to createpathways to exit.

If we follow these nine rules of elevator etiquette, we can keep risks to a manageable level. And, finally, we can all feel comfortable during the awkward silence on an elevator!

Extracted from: “Elevator etiquette in 9 easy steps for returning to the workplace” Joseph Allen, USA Today, June 2, 2020

Because subway cars are often crowded and poorly ventilated, they do pose a risk for spreading airborne droplets that can infect riders.

“If someone is infectious and is coughing and sneezing, and you don’t have ventilation, the concentration of that can build up over time,” said Joseph Gardner Allen, an assistant professor of exposure assessment science at Harvard University. “So you want to bring in more air to dilute that.”

The keys to mitigating the risk will be to reduce crowding, increase ventilation, expand disinfection regimens and ensure mask usage among riders.

What can you do to protect yourself on public transit?

While the transit agency bolsters the protections it can provide, public health experts recommend that those who ride public transportation adhere to the guidelines that have been repeated for all daily activities in recent weeks: wear a mask, do not touch your face and wash your hands as soon as possible after leaving the subway or a bus.

In stations, riders should walk to the areas of the platform that are the least crowded, board train cars that appear the most empty and plan extra time for their commute so that they can wait for an empty train if the first one to arrive is packed, experts say.

Riders should try to avoid touching poles by leaning against a wall or placing their feet apart to balance themselves. If you have to touch a subway pole, place a disinfectant wipe between your hand and the pole, advised Dr. Robyn Gershon, a professor of epidemiology at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.

“Once you start handling stuff, you could inadvertently contaminate,” said Dr. Gershon, who discouraged wearing gloves.

“Gloves get easily contaminated, and then you might touch your phone or MetroCard and it gets contaminated,” she said. Though surface transmission is not the main way the virus spreads, if you then touch your eye or touch your phone again without gloves on there is still a chance you might become infected.

Instead, she says riders should carry hand sanitizer and wash their hands as soon as possible once they leave the system.

Two-Out-of-Three Rule

Whether a mask is needed outdoors depends on the circumstances, including local public health rules and whether you and the people you’re with are vaccinated. Brief encounters with an unmasked person passing you on the sidewalk or a hiking trail are very low risk, said Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech and one of the world’s leading experts on viral transmission. Viral particles quickly disperse in outdoor air, and the risk of inhaling aerosolized virus from a jogger or passers-by is negligible, she said. Even if a person coughs or sneezes outside as you walk by, the odds of you getting a large enough dose of virus to become infected remain low, she said.

“I think the guidelines should be based on science and practicality,” said Dr. Marr. “People only have so much bandwidth to think about precautions. I think we should focus on the areas that have highest risk of transmission, and give people a break when the risk is extremely low.”

Dr. Marr uses a simple two-out-of-three rule for deciding when to wear a mask in public spaces or when she doesn’t know everyone’s vaccination status. The rule is consistent with the new C.D.C. guidance on outdoor masking for unvaccinated people, but simpler to follow. In these situations, she makes sure she’s meeting two out of three conditions: outdoors, distanced and masked. “If you’re outdoors, you either need to be distanced or masked,” she said. “If you’re not outdoors, you need to be distanced and masked. This is how I’ve been living for the past year. It all comes down to my two-out-of-three rule.”

Extracted From: “Do We Still Need to Keep Wearing Masks Outdoors?” Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times. Published April 22, 2021

You will get the most protection from a high-quality medical mask like an N95 or a KN95, although you want to be sure you have the real thing. A KF94 is a high-quality medical mask made in Korea, where counterfeits are less likely. If you don’t have a medical mask, you still get strong protection from double masking with a simple surgical mask under a cloth mask. A mask with an exhale valve should never be worn, since it allows plumes of viral particles to escape, and counterfeit masks may have faulty valves that let germs in.

You may want to pick your mask based on the setting. A cloth mask may be adequate for a quick trip into an empty convenience store in an area with high vaccination rates. But a higher-quality mask makes sense during air travel or in a crowded grocery store, especially in communities where vaccination rates are low and case counts are high. Masks with straps or ties around the back of the head seal more tightly than masks with ear loops.

“All the mitigation efforts we used before need to be better to hold off the Delta variant, and this includes masks,” Dr. Huffman said. “I strongly encourage people to upgrade their mask to something with high filter quality and something that fits tightly to their face. The No. 1 factor, in my opinion, is to make sure the mask is sealed well all around the edges — over the nose bridge, by the cheeks and under the chin. So any mask that fits tightly is better than almost any loosefitting mask.”

Extracted from: “Should I Mask? Can I Travel? What About Hugs? How Delta Is Changing Advice for the Vaccinated” Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times. Published August 3, 2021

HEPA, MERV, HVAC: Conversations about air systems can devolve into an alphabet soup of acronyms. Relax and take a deep breath: Even the most stripped-down devices can help bring down the microbial burden in the air.

For a classroom or office, a portable air cleaner suited to the room’s size “is a great low-cost plug-and- play strategy to give you several air changes per hour of clean air,” Dr. Allen said. These are compact devices that can be plugged into any outlet; effective models are available for less than $200.

Some people mistakenly think that the average air filter, portable or part of a larger system, is no match for the microscopic virus. But “the virus is not naked in the air,” Dr. Marr said. “It comes out in respiratory droplets.”

Even if all of the water in a droplet evaporates, salts and proteins traveling with the virus keep the droplet’s size at a half micron or larger. That’s big enough for an air filter to catch.

“We don’t need to worry about filtering out anything as small as a virus,” Dr. Marr said.

A.S.H.R.A.E., a professional society that sets standards for such devices, recommends air filters that qualify as MERV 13 or higher to filter out the coronavirus. Not all ventilation systems can handle a MERV 13 filter, Dr. Marr said, but most can at least handle MERV 11, which can keep out 60 percent of viral droplets.

HEPA filters are also generally considered to be excellent, although some experts said the research on the extent of their effectiveness was limited.

Extracted from: “How to Keep the Coronavirus at Bay Indoors” Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times, Published Sept. 27, 2020