Since the early forties, experts have long stressed the importance of aerosols, as well as the need for good ventilation to avoid new infections. Now, Jose Luis Jimenez, Spanish scientist and professor at the University of Colorado (United States) warns of the greatest danger of a COVID contagion that we can find in a supermarket. And the most curious thing is that it is not about the surfaces that are touched when visiting an establishment.
Jimenez, one of the world’s leading aerosol experts, states in an interview with ABC TV Paraguay that the greatest danger is in the air we breathe inside supermarkets. Therefore, good protection is necessary with the use of masks. In the same interview, the expert answers this question from the journalist in the face of what they have had to do during these months of the pandemic: “I know people who go to the supermarket and spray the cans with alcohol, he washes them with soap and water, or the packages, or the same bags they bring from the supermarket. Would this be unnecessary?”
To which the Spaniard insists that the greatest danger is not in the products we buy: “If you go to the supermarket, the danger is not in the bags you bring, the danger is in the air you breathe in the supermarket. And what one needs is to spend as little time as possible in the supermarket, better ventilated, and with a mask very well on.” An opinion that has changed with the advance of the pandemic is that, during the first months, José Luis Jiménez believed that the survivors were the great point of infection, although now “it is known that they spread very little.”
How to avoid a contagion?
“You just have to keep washing your hands, but there is no need to disinfect things or waste money on disinfecting, money must be invested in ventilating or doing things that protect us from breathing infected air,” underlines the Spanish, who has recently warned of the misuse of surgical masks through your Twitter account.
“ATTENTION to this very important error with the rubber bands of surgical masks. (which no longer seal very well in itself. But with the rubber bands in this way, we greatly increase the amount of air that enters and leaves without being filtered),” he wrote on his profile on social networks.
ATTENTION to this very important error with the rubber bands of surgical masks.
(They do not seal very well in themselves. But with the rubbers in this way, we greatly increase the amount of air that enters and leaves without being filtered) https://t.co/SzgPFYMO9J
– Jose-Luis Jimenez (@jljcolorado) February 8, 2021
And it is that, at this point, too the new variants of the coronavirus must be taken into account, more contagious, and that, according to the expert in an interview with Heraldo de Aragón, could cause “a tsunami if not controlled”. You even fear that “the wave we just passed will look like a tiny wave to us when we see things six months from now.”