LONDON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The British people are "at more risk of catching COVID" after Prime Minister Boris Johnson decided to remove the legal requirement to self isolate following a positive test from Thursday, an aerosol scientist has said.
Britain will remove all remaining domestic restrictions in law, Johnson told the parliament on Monday. And after April 1, "we will encourage people with COVID-19 symptoms to exercise personal responsibility."
The prime minister's announcement means people could sit next to somebody with active COVID-19 in office or restaurant. Research has found that coronavirus can spread through droplets coming from people's breath, or from aerosols that spread in the air around contagious people.
In badly ventilated places, people could be infected if they do not wear masks, said Adam Squires, a biophysical chemist and aerosol scientist at the University of Bath. "It certainly could well happen and probably does quite a lot when you go out."
"In terms of the disease spread, when we breathe or we talk, or we shout or sing, we give off little particles made of the sort of fluids in our airways. If we are infected with COVID, those particles would have the virus inside. And because they are small enough to stay floating in the air like smoke, then they can be breathed in by someone else. And that's how the virus spreads with Omicron," Squires told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.
"We are at more risk of catching COVID if it's the Omicron strain. If we are in a room with someone with Omicron compared with the previous variants, we don't know if that is because the person who is infected gives off more of the infectious aerosol," said Squires.
"It could be that the aerosol has more virus in it, or it might be we just don't need to breathe in as much to get infected. We don't know at the moment," he added.
Squires said he would not describe the coronavirus or Omicron variants as flu. He said the first difference with flu is that Omicron is much more transmissible.
"So the flu we are used to in our lifetimes, we would have got maybe once every so many years. COVID is just different. It does a lot of different things. We don't know exactly what it does to all the different organs, so it's certainly not the same as flu," he said.
He compared the coronavirus with the 1918 flu pandemic, saying "it is also worth remembering that it had bad health outcomes in the decades that followed."
So 10, 20, or 30 years after the 1918 pandemic, there were people getting Parkinson's disease, he said, referring to studies that indicate a link between the 1918 influenza and the following sharp increase in Parkinson's cases.
"So with any new virus, we don't fully know what it does, and we are not going to fully know for years to come," Squires said. ■