Submitted:
28 August 2020
Posted:
30 August 2020
You are already at the latest version
Preprints on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2
Abstract
Many individuals are wearing face masks improperly at ‘half mask’ and potentially breathing out microbes that can contaminate the air as well as anything below the nose. This note provides the first report that bacteria and fungi breathed out during nasal air exhalation are able to be cultured after landing on blood agar plates. The CFU’s are higher after both 10 breaths and extremely significant for 20 breaths compared to the control plates exposed to the air. Implications of this finding are that going ‘nose commando’ may be able to continue the spread of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19.
Keywords:
Mask
; PPE
; Bacteria
; Nasal
; Breath
; Bacterial Culture
; bioaerosols
; COVID-19
; SARS-CoV-2
; hygiene behavior
; face mask
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
