The DOI matches its Crossref record; 35 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Airborne or Droplet Precautions for Health Workers Treating Coronavirus Disease 2019?
Open accessAbstract
Cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been reported in more than 200 countries. Thousands of health workers have been infected, and outbreaks have occurred in hospitals, aged care facilities, and prisons. The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued guidelines for contact and droplet precautions for healthcare workers caring for suspected COVID-19 patients, whereas the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has initially recommended airborne precautions. The 1- to 2-meter (≈3–6 feet) rule of spatial separation is central to droplet precautions and assumes that large droplets do not travel further than 2 meters (≈6 feet). We aimed to review the evidence for horizontal distance traveled by droplets and the guidelines issued by the WHO, CDC, and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on respiratory protection for COVID-19. We found that the evidence base for current guidelines is sparse, and the available data do not support the 1- to 2-meter (≈3–6 feet) rule of spatial separation. Of 10 studies on horizontal droplet distance, 8 showed droplets travel more than 2 meters (≈6 feet), in some cases up to 8 meters (≈26 feet). Several studies of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) support aerosol transmission, and 1 study documented virus at a distance of 4 meters (≈13 feet) from the patient. Moreover, evidence suggests that infections cannot neatly be separated into the dichotomy of droplet versus airborne transmission routes. Available studies also show that SARS-CoV-2 can be detected in the air, and remain viable 3 hours after aerosolization. The weight of combined evidence supports airborne precautions for the occupational health and safety of health workers treating patients with COVID-19.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: the PRISMA statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & for the PRISMA Group (2009) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.b2535 · Cited by 83,823
Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA Statement.
(2009) · PubMed Central · Cited by 44,859
Early transmission dynamics in Wuhan, China, of novel coronavirus-infected pneumonia
Li, Q., Guan, X., Wu, P., Wang, X., Zhou, L., Tong, Y., Ren, R., Leung, K. S. M., Lau, E. H. Y., Wong, J. Y., et al. (2020) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmoa2001316 · Cited by 16,575
Aerosol and surface stability of SARS-CoV-2 as compared with SARS-CoV-1
van Doremalen, N., Bushmaker, T., Morris, D. H., Holbrook, M. G., Gamble, A., Williamson, B. N., Tamin, A., Harcourt, J. L., Thornburg, N. J., Gerber, S. I., et al. (2020) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmc2004973 · Cited by 9,951
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019
Wölfel, R., Corman, V. M., Guggemos, W., Seilmaier, M., Zange, S., Müller, M. A., Niemeyer, D., Jones, T. C., Vollmar, P., Rothe, C., et al. (2020) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2196-x · Cited by 6,661
Siegel, J. D., Rhinehart, E., Jackson, M., & Chiarello, L. (2007) · American Journal of Infection Control · doi:10.1016/j.ajic.2007.10.007 · Cited by 3,456
Aerosol Technology Properties, Behavior, and Measurement of Airborne Particles
LAUCKS, M. L. (2000) · Journal of Aerosol Science · doi:10.1016/s0021-8502(99)00571-6 · Cited by 3,367
The reproductive number of COVID-19 is higher compared to SARS coronavirus
Liu, Y., Gayle, A. A., Wilder-Smith, A., & Rocklöv, J. (2020) · Journal of Travel Medicine · doi:10.1093/jtm/taaa021 · Cited by 3,192
Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breath and efficacy of face masks
Leung, N. H. L., Chu, D. K. W., Shiu, E. Y. C., Chan, K.-H., McDevitt, J. J., Hau, B. J. P., Yen, H.-L., Li, Y., Ip, D. K. M., Peiris, J. S. M., et al. (2020) · Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-020-0843-2 · Cited by 2,270
Ong, S. W. X., Tan, Y. K., Chia, P. Y., Lee, T. H., Ng, O. T., Wong, M. S. Y., & Marimuthu, K. (2020) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3227 · Cited by 2,140
Research works printed but not linked: 3
- Jennison, 1942, Atomizing of mouth and nose secretions into the air as revealed by high-speed photography, 106
- Wells, 1934, On air-borne infection. II. Droplets and droplet nuclei, Am J Hyg, 20, 611
- MacIntyre, 2015, Uncertainty, risk analysis and change for Ebola personal protective equipment guidelines, Int J Nurs Stud, 52, 899, 10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2014.12.001 · doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2014.12.001
Cited by
Chu, D. K., Akl, E. A., Duda, S., Solo, K., Yaacoub, S., Schünemann, H. J., Chu, D. K., Akl, E. A., El-harakeh, A., Bognanni, A., et al. (2020) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31142-9 · Cited by 3,843
Particle Sizes of Infectious Aerosols: Implications for Infection Control
Fennelly, K. P. (2020) · The Lancet Respiratory Medicine · doi:10.1016/s2213-2600(20)30323-4 · Cited by 621
Gkiotsalitis, K., & Cats, O. (2021) · Transport Reviews · doi:10.1080/01441647.2020.1857886 · Cited by 478
The fluid dynamics of disease transmission
Bourouiba, L. (2021) · Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics · doi:10.1146/annurev-fluid-060220-113712 · Cited by 366
Self-citationMacIntyre, C. R., & Chughtai, A. A. (2020) · International Journal of Nursing Studies · doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2020.103629 · Cited by 319
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Bahl, P., Doolan, C., de Silva, C., Chughtai, A. A., Bourouiba, L., & MacIntyre, C. R.
- Venue
- The Journal of Infectious Diseases
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2022-05-01
- Volume
- 225
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1561-1568
- ISSN
- 0022-1899 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-6613
- OpenAlex
- W3016849874
- Cited by
- 513
- References
- 35
- FWCI
- 55.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- Funders
- NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence (APP1107393)
- Integrated Systems for Epidemic Response
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Airborne or Droplet Precautions for Health Workers Treating Coronavirus Disease 2019? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189
- The paper
- Bahl, P., Doolan, C., de Silva, C., Chughtai, A. A., Bourouiba, L., & MacIntyre, C. R. (2022). Airborne or Droplet Precautions for Health Workers Treating Coronavirus Disease 2019? The Journal of Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaa189
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
