Temperature gaps help sneeze clouds stay denser and travel farther, experiments show

When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimizing the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are complex and depend on many factors: the force of the exhalation, the morphology of the respiratory system, the characteristics of the space, etc. Now, a new study led by researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has shown that temperature also plays an important role.