Men transmit coronavirus more than women

The aerosols, those small particles that they can remain for minutes and even hours floating in the air with viral load and infect those who inhale them, continue to be the subject of intense debate, almost two years after the start of the pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) took months to recognize its impact on the spread of covid, and now transmission by airway indoors is universally accepted, but it remains unclear exactly how many of these viral particles must be inhaled to become infected. A recent study, however, has managed to calculate why it is easier to get infected when singing than when only talking, and along the way it has also reached a different conclusion, but as or more relevant: mens are more capable of transmitting the virus than women.

Virology, like so many other disciplines, suffers from a lack of perspective on this ground. Only 4% of the studies on covid take into account the differences between the biological sexes, according to denounced at the beginning of summer the magazine ‘Nature’. Even so, from the first wave it is known that they are more likely to die from the coronavirus than they. What the new research, conducted by the University of Colorado and published this week in Environmental Science and Technology, it is the role of men in spreading the infection.

The study, which placed 63 healthy individuals between the ages of 12 and 62 in test chambers and had them sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and reading an extract from the children’s book ‘The beautiful caterpillar’ (‘The beautiful caterpillar’), reaches three relevant findings. Singing emits a 77% more aerosols than when talking. Adults produce 62% more of these particles than minors. And the men expel a 34% more than women, therefore their contagion capacity is much greater. Even so, an adult can produce more particles in normal conversation than a 12-year-old child, but if the same child sings or shouts their emission will be similar. Despite the novelty of the conclusion, the reasons for this important difference are very easy to explain: they usually have the bigger lungs than them.

The outbreak of the choir class

The researchers had no plans to come up with such a finding. They intended to test whether concert hall closures, Theaters and operas approved in half the world had been adequate and proportionate measures, and also to give an explanation to events such as the one that occurred in a choir class in Washington state in March 2020. Only one of the members of the group had symptoms, which attributed to a common cold, but 53 of the 61 attendees came out infected. Three had to be hospitalized; two died.

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Was the song to blame? The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded that he had to A lot to see. Since then, as the novel work that tests the differences between the sexes when it comes to spreading the virus explains, “several studies have analyzed aerosol emissions when breathing or speaking, shouting or singing, with volume playing an important role in those emissions & rdquor ;. However, research continues, those studies “had small samples and a limited scope & rdquor ;.

The authors of the work placed the participants (all were singers, actors, dancers or musicians who played wind instruments) in the test chambers, asking them to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ and recite a passage from ‘The Beautiful Caterpillar’ during four minutes, interrupted, both with face mask as without it. After the mandatory measurements, the conclusion did not admit any doubt: singing was more risky than speaking, the ability to emit aerosols of adults was greater than that of minors and men were more contagious than women. The study, finally, concludes that the decision to close shows for a time was the right one.