Airborne infections like Covid, flu, RSV, measles, norovirus, and tuberculosis are spread by inhaling tiny aerosols hanging in the air like smoke. Key ways to prevent this are to improve air quality and to wear well-fitted respiratory masks.
Where Covid is concerned, reinfection increases the risk of long-term serious damage, not just for immuno-compromised people but potentially for anyone. This is known as long Covid, in which damage can be to the brain, the heart, the immune system, and much more. Care and healthcare workers top the long Covid league.
Poor public health messaging
Wards have been closed and visits suspended in hospitals across Wales due to increases in a variety of infections, including airborne infections. For example, seven wards at Morriston Hospital in Swansea have been affected due to rising cases of Covid, flu, Norovirus, and C.difficile, the latter being a bacterial infection which causes diarrhoea. Visiting has been cancelled until further notice except in cases involving the last days or end of life.
Of the 18 hospitals monitored by the Welsh Government, 15 were reported to be on the red level of escalation, which is the highest level: that of ‘extreme pressure’. This means emergency departments are extremely busy yet cannot move patients to wards as they too are full.
Fomite transmission of Covid – by touch rather than airborne infection – is comparatively rare. And yet, on 29 December, Public Health Wales posted about it on Twitter/X with its focus purely on the washing of hands.
The organisation blocked replies, so was both retweeted citicially and was ‘community noted’. The note says that “World Health Organisation Guidance remains that masks should be used as part of a comprehensive strategy of measures to suppress transmission. Alone, washing hands does not provide protection from airborne viruses.”
Such context is written by people who use the app, and appears when it is rated helpful by others. Public Health Wales has left its disinforming tweet up, and made no corrections or comments. Its tweet acknowledges that there’s a problem, yet doesn’t mention the most effective solutions.
The costs of long Covid
Repeated illness and job losses caused by airborne infections including norovirus and Covid put avoidable pressure on health and other public services. The rate of hospital-acquired Covid infection has been shown to be higher than in the wider community. Clinically vulnerable people often need care but avoid or cancel essential health appointments due to the risks of exposure.
Covid transmission is often asymptomatic. This can happen at any time as, despite a widespread belief that it is, Covid is not in fact seasonal. Routine testing is thus essential. There are many tools to protect people’s health. Only one is being used, vaccination, yet it’s unavailable to many, including some clinically vulnerable people. Performers and others in crowded spaces have been affected by airborne infections like Covid, often leading to long Covid.
According to one long Covid sufferer, “Everyone is so keen to move on from Covid that they are happy to swallow the lie that Covid is over. I and others like me in the long Covid community know differently. Approximately two million people are disabled with long Covid. We all have had no option but to advocate for ourselves.”
Neglected tools for airborne infections
We could protect health and even lives by taking basic steps:
- Improve air quality in health and social care settings through addressing ventilation, air filtration, and sterilisation.
- Reintroduce routine mask-wearing in those settings, as per the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of 20 December 2023, particularly respiratory masks.
- Reintroduce routine Covid testing, as it can be asymptomatic.
- Ensure that staff manuals fully cover preventing airborne infection.
- Provide public health information on the use of respiratory masks and HEPA air filtration against airborne infections.
Our campaign organisation wrote to the health minister for Wales Eluned Morgan before Christmas to ask for urgent action by the Welsh Government to restore masking in healthcare settings in line with the WHO recommendation. We have still, weeks on, received no reply to or acknowledgement of our letter and its plea.
As the Welsh and UK governments are not even mentioning the word Covid anymore, or commenting on the pressure on and risks for healthcare settings, we must put more pressure on them. All of the wisdom regarding public health built up over centuries appears to be forgotten or ignored. People, including children, are falling ill when it could be avoided, and some are still dying.
Please click this link to sign our petition to the Welsh Government asking for immediate action on airborne infections in healthcare settings. Show them that you care. Diolch yn fawr.
