According to MIT’s social distance expansion research, “the 6-foot rule has little merit” indoors.

Two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that there was virtually no difference between people 6 feet and 60 feet apart when it came to the COVID-19 epidemic, and no indoor social distancing guidelines were needed. And states that it is not science-based.

What are the details?

MIT Professor Martin Bazant and Professor John WM Bush Research “The current resurgence of the American economy is based on the 6-foot rule, a guideline that provides little protection from aerosol droplets containing pathogens that are small enough to be continuously mixed in social distances, especially indoor spaces. Insists.

In short, they found: CNBC “The risk of being exposed to Covid-19 indoors is as great at 60 feet as at 6 feet, even when wearing a mask,” he said.

“We argue that the 6-foot rule doesn’t offer much benefit, especially if people are wearing masks,” Bazant told the outlets. “The air that a person breathes while wearing a mask tends to move up and down somewhere in the room, so there is really no physical basis, so it’s more average than a person far away. It is exposed to the background. “

“Our analysis continues to show that many spaces that are actually closed do not need to be closed,” he continued. “Often the spaces are large enough, well ventilated, and the time people spend together is such that they can be safely operated even at full capacity, and of the capacity of these spaces. Scientific support for decline is actually not very good. ”

He argued that the nationwide obligation to close businesses and schools during the pandemic was unnecessary.

“This emphasis on distance was really irrelevant from the beginning,” he said. “The CDC or WHO has never really justified it. They say this is what you have to do and the only justification I know is based on cough and sneezing studies. , So they said they see the largest particles. It may settle on the floor, and it is still very approximate, you can certainly have longer or shorter ranges, larger droplets. I will. “

“The distance isn’t very useful, and when you’re indoors, it’s as safe as 60 feet at 6 feet, which gives you a false sense of security. Everyone in that space is, in fact, about the same risk. . “

anything else?

Looking at the CNBC report, Twitter users called themselves “Political neutral social scientist“Experts took a year to discover that a 14-year-old science project should not be used as a guide for a pandemic response plan. Social distance is a bad science.”

They pointed to a post from American Institute of Economic Research that is New York Times The idea of ​​social distance actually came from a child during President George W. Bush’s administration and was “considered unrealistic, unnecessary, and politically infeasible.” Report one year ago to explain.

The Times reported on April 22, 2020:

Fourteen years ago, two federal doctors, Richard Hatchet and Carter Mesher, met with a colleague at a hamburger joint in the suburbs of Washington and made a final review of a proposal that they knew would be treated like a pinata. The next school when the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.

Shortly after they announced the plan, it faced skepticism and some ridicule. Senior officials, like everyone else in the United States, were accustomed to relying on the pharmaceutical industry for an ever-growing number of new therapies. Face evolving health challenges.

Dr. Hatchett and Mecher instead suggested that Americans in some places might have to return to the first widely adopted approach in the Middle Ages, self-isolation.

How did the idea come from President George W. Bush’s request to better prepare the country for the next outbreak of infectious disease? The center of a national playbook for pandemics It is one of the secret stories of the coronavirus crisis.

Dr. Mecher, a Veterans Affairs doctor, and Dr. Hatchett, who turned from an oncologist to a White House adviser, needed key supporters to overcome the first fierce opposition.

It combined their work with the work of the Pentagon team assigned to a similar job.

There were also unexpected detours, such as digging deeper into the history of the 1918 Spanish flu and making important discoveries. Started by a high school research project pursued by the daughter of a scientist At Sandia National Laboratories.
The concept of social distance is now familiar to almost everyone. But when it first passed the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as: Unrealistic, unnecessary and politically infeasible.