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Superspreader event in China: one temple, two buses, 31 infected people

2020-09-03T13:18:22.866Z


A man in China probably infected 30 other people with the corona virus in January. What role did a ventilation system play and what scientists can learn from it.


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Bus driver in Beijing: virus transport through ventilation system?

Photo: Kevin Frayer / Getty Images

Sometimes life creates almost ideal conditions for scientific observation: This is what happened in January of this year in the city of Ningbo in the east Chinese province of Zhejiang.

You can already guess: It's about Corona.

About the spread of viruses, about super spreaders and the question of why the virus sometimes spreads so quickly and sometimes not.

On January 19, 126 lay Buddhists made their way to a temple in Ningbo, where a total of 300 people met.

They took two different buses, 59 of them were in the first, 67 in the second, each with an additional driver.

The journey lasted 50 minutes, the religious meeting 150 minutes.

Cough, freeze, muscle pain

In one of the buses sat a man who was infected with the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus, as it later turned out.

The man in his sixties had sat at a table two days earlier with four people who had been in Hubei.

Hubei, with the capital Wuhan, is the province in which the corona pandemic began.

The evening after returning from the religious meeting, he began to cough and freeze, and his muscles ached.

The next day he was feeling better.

However, three days later, his wife and child also had a fever and coughed, and the three of them went to a hospital to be examined for Sars-CoV-2.

All three were positive.

The man was not the only person infected at the temple meeting: He presumably infected at least 23 other people, all of whom were passengers on the bus in which he was sitting.

This was a so-called super spreader, at least employees of the Central Health Authority in Zhejiang now assume that they report on the event in the journal "Jama".

There was not a single proven infection on the other bus.

172 other people attended the temple meeting, which was mostly outdoors, including five monks.

They had a total of seven infections.

During the follow-up, all infected people remembered that they had had closer contact with the man.

Virus transport by air circulation

Since so many people were infected with the infected person on the bus, the scientists tried to find out afterwards whether a pattern could be discovered that could explain the infection.

Passengers who were seated at the very back while the man in row eight of 15 was also infected.

It was noticeable that neither the bus driver nor the passengers sitting near the other doors or opening windows had become infected.

However, the bus driver had turned on the heating and air circulation so that the air in the bus was constantly moving during the journey.

It is known that the coronavirus spreads via aerosols.

In the bus, the ventilation system is likely to have transported the tiny particles through the entire interior.

In contrast, in the vicinity of the exits and the windows, where there was an exchange of air, hardly any passengers were infected.

Of course, the investigation cannot prove that the man was actually the one who infected everyone else.

After all, more than eight million people live in Ningbo.

On January 19, however, the virus was very likely not to have spread much.

But uncertainties remain.

But that's the way it is in science: The conditions are always almost ideal.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2020-09-03

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