SUPERSPREADERS

Researchers at Tulane, Harvard, MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have learned that subjects who were older with higher body mass indexes and an increasing degree of COVID-19 infection had three times the number of exhaled respiratory droplets — key spreaders of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 — as others in the study groups. The increase in exhaled aerosols occurred even among those with asymptomatic cases of COVID-19, said Chad Roy, corresponding author and director of infectious disease aerobiology at the Tulane National Primate Research Center.

Horizontal thumbnail