Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one, twenty
Speaker 1: six since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story,
Speaker 1: standing six ft apart in public has become COVID gospel.
Speaker 1: But where did that number come from? And how far
Speaker 1: is really far enough? But first, here's what happened in
Speaker 1: virus news today. US hospitals have been ordered to stop
Speaker 1: sending COVID nineteen related data to the Centers for Disease
Speaker 1: Control and Prevention. Instead, they will now send numbers they
Speaker 1: tally of y U beds, ventilators, and more to a
Speaker 1: centralized health and Human services database that will not be
Speaker 1: available to the public. The government says the change will
Speaker 1: improve tracking, but experts fear this will politicize the data
Speaker 1: and obscure what's really happening with the disease. Walmart is
Speaker 1: going to require customers to wear masks in all of
Speaker 1: its US stores to protect against the coronavirus starting July.
Speaker 1: Walmart's decision follows similar moves by Costco, Starbucks, and Best Buy.
Speaker 1: Also today, the National Retail Federation, the country's main industry
Speaker 1: trade group, called on retailers to set nationwide mask policies.
Speaker 1: The n r F said in a statement that shopping
Speaker 1: in stores is a privilege, not a right. Finally, Tokyo
Speaker 1: raised its alert level for coronavirus to the highest on
Speaker 1: a four point scale. The city reported one and sixty
Speaker 1: five coronavirus cases on Wednesday. It has struggled to get
Speaker 1: a handle on growing infections as it reopens its economy.
Speaker 1: Tokyo Governor Euriko Koike urged residents to avoid stores that
Speaker 1: don't need safety guidelines, but has not called on businesses
Speaker 1: to close their doors. And now for today's main story,
Speaker 1: While wearing a mask or refusing to wear one has
Speaker 1: become politicized, there's one COVID safety measure we seem to
Speaker 1: be comparatively united about. Everyone knows they should stand six
Speaker 1: feet away from other people in public, mask or no mask.
Speaker 1: But where did this guidance come from? As Kristin V.
Speaker 1: Brown reports, that one simple number is already changing our
Speaker 1: b behavior and will soon change the places where we live,
Speaker 1: work and play. When I go to the grocery store,
Speaker 1: there are these little vinyl stickers on the floor six
Speaker 1: ft apart tell me where to wait in line. When
Speaker 1: I run in the park by my house. There are
Speaker 1: signs there too, demonstrating the distance that fellow exercisers should
Speaker 1: keep from one another. In the last few months, like
Speaker 1: many people, I have gotten really good eyeballing a distance
Speaker 1: of six ft in the midst of a surging pandemic.
Speaker 1: Six ft has become a number that we all live by.
Speaker 1: But where does that number come from exactly? It turns
Speaker 1: out the actual distance for safe social distancing is kind
Speaker 1: of hard to pin down. I talked with Gabriel isaacman
Speaker 1: ven Worts, a scientist at Veraging Attack who studies the
Speaker 1: way that particles change in atmosphere. But there isn't some
Speaker 1: number that says, well, beyond this, there's no risk, and
Speaker 1: in front of that, you know, closer than this there
Speaker 1: is a risk, or beyond this all of the things
Speaker 1: that are infectious have been gone, are gone, they fall
Speaker 1: into the ground, and closer than that than there is
Speaker 1: still infectious risk. Right, So that number is going to
Speaker 1: depend on sort of what is the activity, and what
Speaker 1: is the environment and what is the airflow? Right? Are
Speaker 1: you upwind of someone or downwind of someone? Are you
Speaker 1: inside the room? Are you outside? Is the air still?
Speaker 1: You know? What's the air ventilation? Rate in the room.
Speaker 1: And so I think a lot of the issue around
Speaker 1: around that uncertainty kind of stems from this issue that
Speaker 1: it is fundamentally a question of circumstances. There is little
Speaker 1: doubt that strategies like wearing a mask and social distancing
Speaker 1: play a major role in stopping the spread of COVID nineteen.
Speaker 1: The question is how far apart you have to be
Speaker 1: in order to adequately avoid risk. The CDC recommends at
Speaker 1: least six ft from other people as a way to
Speaker 1: avoid the potentially infectious droplets a person launches into the
Speaker 1: air when they cough, sneeze, or talk. The World Health Organization,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, recommends just three ft. But Gabriel says,
Speaker 1: the issue is that there isn't just one magic number.
Speaker 1: When we talk or sneeze or do anything, we're not
Speaker 1: releasing like some big particles and some small particles, and
Speaker 1: then that's it that we can talk about them separately. Right.
Speaker 1: We tend to release kind of these mixtures of particle
Speaker 1: sizes um and once they're in the air they can
Speaker 1: change more, so they can you know, our breath is
Speaker 1: very humid, so you can get out into the air.
Speaker 1: That's what the fog is that we're seeing when we
Speaker 1: breathe out in the winter, and so I think the
Speaker 1: difficulty is that it's all sort of this continuum, and
Speaker 1: so you know, the question is how much do we
Speaker 1: need to breathe in and how infectious is it? Really?
Speaker 1: The three foot rule actually dates back to the turn
Speaker 1: of the last century. It talked with Kavin Handle, a
Speaker 1: medical historian at Virginia Tech, who was working to figure
Speaker 1: out the origins of these numbers. Interestingly, she says, we
Speaker 1: don't really know where the rule comes from. At one point,
Speaker 1: diseases were regarded primarily as airborne, and at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century, scientists moved towards the idea that
Speaker 1: when a person's sneezes or coughs, they produced infectious droplets
Speaker 1: that quickly fall to the ground. In the thirties, Harvard
Speaker 1: scientists suggested those droplets could travel three ft. Fast forward
Speaker 1: to the early ops, a study of stars transmission on
Speaker 1: a plane suggested droplets could travel more like six ft.
Speaker 1: Another recent study found that coughs and sneezes create turbulent
Speaker 1: gas clouds that can carry pathogens a whopping twenty seven feet.
Speaker 1: More recently, the World Health Organization recognized that COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: can be airborne in indoor spaces with poor ventilation after
Speaker 1: pressure from hundreds of scientists. The issue, though, as Gabriel
Speaker 1: points out, is that there isn't a dichotomy here. It's
Speaker 1: not that a virus is either airborne or spreads through
Speaker 1: droplets when we cough and sneeze. It's a spectrum. The
Speaker 1: bigger question instead is whether the virus is actually infectious
Speaker 1: in all of these different ways that we encounter it. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we know that sneezing and coughing produce a lot of
Speaker 1: different sized particles. We know they can travel fairly far.
Speaker 1: We have a pretty good body of literature now that
Speaker 1: says that even things like talking and singing produce some
Speaker 1: of the smaller particles. We have some literature that says
Speaker 1: that in certain cases we can find we can basically
Speaker 1: find RNA, we can find viruns, We can find some
Speaker 1: information that says that coronavirus is in these smaller particles.
Speaker 1: But we don't have great information on is how infectious
Speaker 1: are those smaller particles. How much do we have to
Speaker 1: breathe in to get infected In that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: The thing is the world we live in isn't rearranging
Speaker 1: itself to accommodate a spectrum of conditions. Our built world
Speaker 1: is starting to revolve around maintaining a distance of six feet. Parks,
Speaker 1: including San Francisco's famous Dolores Park, are painting white circles
Speaker 1: on the ground to designate where to sit as school's reopen.
Speaker 1: Guidelines from places like the American Pediatric Society have suggested
Speaker 1: that desks should be placed between three and six feet apart.
Speaker 1: I also spoke with Eron Betsky, the director of Virginia
Speaker 1: Tech School of Architecture and Design, about what kinds of
Speaker 1: more permanent changes we might expect to our built world
Speaker 1: after the pandemic. Aaron says we can expect things like
Speaker 1: better ventilation in indoor spaces and more easily cleaned surfaces.
Speaker 1: He also said design will become more private and isolating.
Speaker 1: This is going to be just one more layer of
Speaker 1: trying to isolate and insulate ourselves from other human beings
Speaker 1: in the real world, and in the end it will
Speaker 1: be used. Should we do it. Of course, we should
Speaker 1: do it. We need to protect people, We need to
Speaker 1: protect ourselves because we have made ourselves vulnerable. All that
Speaker 1: you will see is the erection of shields and separating devices.
Speaker 1: So I think it's unfortunate that what had become a
Speaker 1: more collective and open environment workplace in many areas of
Speaker 1: people complain that they can't concentrate, is going to turn
Speaker 1: back into Dilbert Land. So we'll see a revenge at
Speaker 1: the office qube. Aaron says that design will also try
Speaker 1: to look safe, like the hospital rooms with rounded corners
Speaker 1: designed to prevent dirt from accumulating in them that cropped
Speaker 1: up in the twenties and thirties. You're also going to
Speaker 1: see a style where things should need to look safe
Speaker 1: to reassure people. So I'm not saying that necessarily we're
Speaker 1: going to make things that are safer by having rounded corners,
Speaker 1: but we're going to make things that reassure people that
Speaker 1: there's not something hiding somewhere that's going to come out
Speaker 1: and bite them or make them sick. This won't be
Speaker 1: the first time our physical realm has been altered due
Speaker 1: to disease. In the eighteen hundreds, for example, after cholera
Speaker 1: killed tens of thousands of Parisians, the city condemned crowded
Speaker 1: medieval neighborhoods and instead built wide avenues and parks. But
Speaker 1: the sign suggests we should be considering things like airflow
Speaker 1: and the size of a room when making decisions about
Speaker 1: what distance is a safe distance. You know, probably any
Speaker 1: researcher in any of the related fields would agree is
Speaker 1: that the farther way you can be the better. Right,
Speaker 1: And and so you have to make some messaging decision.
Speaker 1: And I suppose about what is far and what is close.
Speaker 1: Six ft doesn't feel that far to me um, But
Speaker 1: also there I understand that there are other sort of
Speaker 1: things that go into making that decision. Right, can you
Speaker 1: open up? Would you be able to reopen any of
Speaker 1: our day to day life if we insisted on right?
Speaker 1: That becomes a lot harder at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: It's not exactly six ft that's a rule to live by. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's more important to remember to keep your distance no
Speaker 1: matter where you are, and of course to wear a mask.
Speaker 1: That was Kristin v. Brown and that's it for our
Speaker 1: show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one around
Speaker 1: the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if
Speaker 1: you like the show, please leave us a review. And
Speaker 1: a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best
Speaker 1: way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The
Speaker 1: Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topher foreheads Jordan Gospore,
Speaker 1: Magnus Hendrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was
Speaker 1: reported by Kristin V. Brown. Original music by Leo Citrin.
Speaker 1: Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi
Speaker 1: is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.