"How long diseases like measles and the flu linger in the air — after an infected person has left the room"

Denis - The COVID info guy -

RSV: up to 45 mins
Influenza: at least 1 hour
Rhinovirus: 1-2 hours
Measles: up to 2 hours
Norovirus: up to 2 hours
COVID-19: up to 3 hours
Chickenpox: several hours
Mumps: several hours
Tuberculosis (TB): 6-12 hours

Source: https://archive.md/dKnQP

Hugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy Scary stats

MatthewToadAgain

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy And much longer on surfaces for most of those. Not the most important vector for Covid but important for flu etc.

Mike McCaffrey :pdx_badge:

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy @KanaMauna Surprising that tuberculosis could linger longest in the air, considering it is a bacteria, and about a thousand times larger and heavier than a virus.

Solomon

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy »[…] and build up indoors even after an infected person leaves.« Build up? How can they, the viruses at least, “build up”?

KanaMauna

@mikemccaffrey @DenisCOVIDinfoguy

From what I've read, it is a fairly tough microbe that can survive dry environments for surprisingly long periods. The other ones on the list are probably inactive before they hit the ground.

draNgNon

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy instead of just accepting these numbers, get air purifiers for spaces you control, and push the owners of space you don't control to do it too

FediThing :progress_pride:

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy

Best weapon against this is masking plus keeping windows open, preferably windows on different sides of the room so that there's a draught flowing through. If you only have one window you can use an electric fan next to it to create a draught.

The room's air exchanges several times more quickly if you have a good draught of some kind. I can't find it now, but Japanese researchers did an excellent video illustrating this with smoke machines and lasers.

If you get a good quality CO2 meter you can actually watch the air get fresher as the numbers drop.

Su_G

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy
A handy reference - thank you! That tuberculosis is a real outlier - I’m reading about some resurgence in the US, not good. ️

Cy

@mikemccaffrey @DenisCOVIDinfoguy @KanaMauna Seems sketchy to me. Is this one of those "only in a carefully controlled lab environment in total darkness" things?

I know the COVID scare had the researchers protesting (and being ignored) that it breaks down quickly in sunlight.