Air-conditioned rooms help spread COVID-19, research shows

For office workers and students worldwide, the findings are important as they head back to their desks after months in lockdown.

“The role of humidity seems to be extremely important to the airborne spread of COVID-19 in indoor environments,” the researchers reported. on the website of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS).

The scientists, who reviewed 10 international studies of swine flu and other infectious diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, found humidity affects a virus in three ways: droplet size, how droplets float and how droplets land on surfaces.

In more humid rooms, virus droplets become heavier and fall faster in higher humidity, “providing less chances for other people to breathe in infectious viral droplets,” the team wrote, according to DW, a German news website.