COVID-19 Implications of the Physical Interaction of Artificial Fog on Respiratory Aerosols
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Abstract
Introduction
Artificial fog is used in the film, television, and live entertainment industries to enhance lighting, as a visual effect, and to create a specific sense of mood or atmosphere. This study investigated whether the suspension time of respiratory aerosols spiked with tagged DNA tracers would change in the presence of glycerin- or glycol-containing artificial fogs.
Methods & Materials
Respiratory aerosols with tagged DNA tracers were sprayed into a closed environment without and with glycerin- or glycol-containing artificial fog, with air samples taken at regular intervals to determine the decay of tagged DNA tracer over time. The study treatments included Control (no fog), Glycerin Low (3 mg/m 3 ), Glycerin High (∼15 mg/m 3 ), Glycol Low (∼5 mg/m 3 ), and Glycol High (∼40 mg/m 3 ).
Results
All artificial fog treatments had lower mean log reduction curves compared to the Control treatment. Compared to the Control and Glycerin Low treatments, the differences in mean log reduction for nearly all other artificial fog treatments were statistically significant (p<0.001); the difference between Control and Glycerin Low treatments was not statistically significant (p=0.087). The differences in mean log reduction between treatments using the same artificial fog type were not statistically significant.
Conclusion
Artificial fog use does not increase suspension time of respiratory aerosols, and therefore does not appear to increase the risk of airborne transmission of diseases from respiratory aerosols, such as COVID-19. Of the two types of artificial fogs investigated, that containing glycol decreased suspension time more than that containing glycerin. In practice, the additional reduction in suspension time provided by the physical interaction of respiratory aerosols with artificial fog does not suggest any practical benefit for using artificial fog as a control measure.
Article activity feed
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.18.21253891: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources 2.12 Statistical Analysis: All data were organized using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, 2018); statistical analyses and figures for log reductions were conducted and produced in R version 4.0.3 (R Core Team, 2021) using packages contained in Tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019). Microsoft Excelsuggested: (Microsoft Excel, RRID:SCR_016137)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.18.21253891: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources 2.12 Statistical Analysis: All data were organized using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, 2018); statistical analyses and figures for log reductions were conducted and produced in R version 4.0.3 (R Core Team, 2021) using packages contained in Tidyverse (Wickham et al., 2019). Microsoft Excelsuggested: (Microsoft Excel, RRID:SCR_016137)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The limitations of this study are noteworthy. The small sample size for each treatment was limited, which impacted the resolution of mean log reduction curves and reduced the power to detect statistically significant differences in mean log reductions. Despite this limitation, there was consistency within each treatment and sampling interval, with all mean standard deviations being less than 0.50. The samplers used were not size selective, thereby may have captured all aerosol size fractions and potentially captured larger aerosols outside the respiratory size range. This limitation was partially controlled for by adjusting the calculated number of DNA copies to align the Flairosol spray bottle aerosol distribution with the distribution of aerosols generated by sneezing, talking, and coughing and which partially or totally evaporated. This study did not investigate how artificial fog may affect the propagation distance of respirable aerosols, nor the disinfection properties of glycerin or glycol on tagged DNA tracers. Only one type of each glycerin-containing and glycol-containing artificial fog fluid was used for this study. There are a large range of manufacturers and fluid types available, each with slightly different liquid compositions and percentages of glycerin or glycol. The impact of different liquid compositions and percentages of glycerin or glycol were outside the scope of this study.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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