A person on a poorly ventilated Chinese bus infected nearly two dozen other passengers with coronavirus and may be patient zero, it is claimed.
The new research probes the threat of airborne infection by taking a close look at passengers who made a 50-minute trip to a Buddhist event in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo aboard two buses in January.
The scientists believe a passenger on the bus was likely patient zero because the person had been in contact with people from Wuhan.
The scientists managed to map out where the other passengers sat, and test them for the virus, with 23 of 68 passengers subsequently confirmed as infected.
What is notable is that the sickness infected people in the front and back of the bus, outside the perimeter of 1–2 metres that authorities and experts say infectious droplets can travel.
On top of that, the sick passenger was not yet showing symptoms of the disease, such as a cough, when the group made their trip.
The paper states: “The investigations suggest that, in closed environments with air recirculation, SARS-CoV-2 is a highly transmissible pathogen.”
