A new study revealed that COVID-19 disease spreads more in public transport. The study said that one COVID-19 infected person passed on the disease to 23 of 67 passengers on a bus stating that the virus can spread readily in a closed, small setting like public transport. The report was published in Hindustan Times.
The findings are significant for India as it enters the fourth phase of the Unlock plan, with more public transport including buses and metro trains being allowed to run soon.
According to the report in JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association, the spread happened in one of two buses that carried a group of 128 people who visited a worship event in eastern China. "Those who rode a bus with air recirculation and with a patient with Covid-19 had an increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with those who rode a different bus," said the authors, who studied the spread that took place on January 19 in Zhejiang province.
According to report, the super-spreader, whose gender was not specified, had no symptoms such as a fever or cough at the time of travel, and this was a period before wearing of masks was made mandatory in China. Passenger mapping that the sickest people were in the front and back of the bus, outside the perimeter of 1-2 meters (three-six feet) that infectious droplets are believed to travel.
"The investigations suggest that, in closed environments with air recirculation, SARS-CoV-2 is a highly transmissible pathogen," said the study.
For mobility to resume, safe behaviour is non-negotiable, experts say. "For buses, we must have thermal screening, spaced seating; masks (compulsory); supervised boarding (from back) and deboarding (from front); and open windows. For metros, thermal screening; orderly boarding and deboarding procedures ; and spaced seating, where possible," said Dr K Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India.
That apart, he suggests encouraging work from home, wherever possible. "We should try to encourage employers to stagger office hours to reduce crowd density of peak hours," said Dr Reddy.
The other option is using the government's contact-tracking app Aarogya Setu, which is being used by 154.5 million users, to track risk and allow only safe passengers to board. "Many offices have done this, but it has to be done at a public-service scale. The app should be made stronger with personalized, useful, and direct messaging to people, including tracking symptoms and communicating back to people, providing advice on how to protect themselves, and which routes to take and which areas to avoid. A more functional app will motivate people to use it, so people get into the habit of checking their Aarogya Setu before stepping out to minimize risk," said Dr Anurag Agrawal, director, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Genomics an Integrative Biology, New Delhi.
