The following is part of Cecilia Brainard's series, Filipinos Coping with Covid.
As of October 9, 2020, there are 36,625,213 confirmed Covid 19 cases worldwide, with 1.056,186 deaths. The US has 7,611,722 confirmed cases and 212,840 deaths. (source: John Hopkins University of Medicine).
Filipino American poet, Tony Robles shares with us the following. He had lived in San Francisco for decades but now lives in North Carolina.
Covid-19: An Encounter with a Bee during Quarantine
Copyright 2020 by Tony Robles.
It’s quarantine, shelter in place--the stay at home order. I am blessed to have a home as many do not. Don’t go outside we are warned, do not gather in large groups so as not to spread Covid-19, aka the Coronavirus. With this diktat comes an assortment of mixed messages. We are told not to wear protective masks then we are told to wear them. We are told that the droplets from a cough or sneeze can travel 6 feet and to give others that amount of "social distance" upon encountering them. Then I read in the Washington Post that the droplets can travel as far as 8 feet while other reports indicate the possibility that Covid-19 can be spread by particles emitted via the mouth during normal conversation. Regarding the spread via sneezing and coughing, I came across the term cough droplet ballistics, used to describe the endeavor of observing and measuring the length and trajectory of droplets emanating from a cough or sneeze. I also came across a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that referred to the very phenomenon of coughs and sneezes as violent expiratory events and the issuance of fluids thereof as multiphase turbulent buoyant clouds with suspended droplets of various sizes. I have always been cognizant of my coughing and sneezing in public, but not all people are. Given our pandemic and the careless coughers and sneezers among us, studies such as these should not go unnoticed.