Aerosol expert Linsey Marr on the return to mask wearing in indoor settings

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impact 1:01 Aerosol expert Linsey Marr on the return to mask wearing in indoor settings

By:

Dawn Jefferies

1 Sep 2021 454

Virginia Tech’s nationally-recognized expert in the airborne transmission of viruses, Charles P. Lunsford Professor Linsey Marr, shares her approach on the return to wearing masks in indoor settings. Marr shared her insight during a live streamed conversation with President Tim Sands on Aug. 19.

And then of course, there are people who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons. And we have other people who just still haven't in the community and surrounding areas, maybe your own or other people's friends and families who just haven't had a chance to get the vaccine yet. And that's where we're seeing all the really steep rise in hospitalizations and deaths right now is in the unvaccinated. So because people with, even with the vaccine, it's been shown that they can transmit. That's why we're going back to masks. Because if you have a classroom of, let's say 500 students and they're sitting in Burruss Hall or McBryde, and that that room is packed, yes, there's great ventilation, but people are in there for a long time, they're close. They are inevitably sharing the air with each other. And in that case, if we didn't have masks, you could easily have some kind of outbreak where people get infected without having severe symptoms of disease. Maybe mild symptoms, most likely nothing. But then all those people are contagious.