Friends Smoked Shisha Together, Ended Up Contracting COVID-19

A village in Haryana has just been sealed by the district administration after 24 residents contracted COVID-19. On July 8, one of them came back from a wedding. He then smoked shisha with 23 other people. After the incident, shisha has been banned in the village.

After the man tested positive with COVID-19, district health department officials traced his friends and got them all tested. A committee has been formed by the villagers to detect shisha smoking. They also started a sanitization drive.

A senior medical officer in the region said that when the COVID-19 cases started increasing in the village, they discovered that shisha was the main source of transmission. Shisha smoking is actually a common practice and it needs to be banned to prevent the virus to spread further.

Surender Singh, a station house officer, said that the containment zone had already been sealed following the 24 cases.

With how fast COVID-19 has been infecting people, we are trying our best to protect ourselves from the novel coronavirus. Recently, WHO and researchers admitted that there were chances that the virus could be transmitted through aerosol transmission.

Researchers point the reason for the higher chance of infection to the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in aerosols. When a person talks or sneezes, saliva droplets will travel a certain distance until they are pulled down to the floor by gravity.

However, microdroplets turning into aerosols can stay in the air longer, thus infecting more people. These then can be stuck in areas that are poorly ventilated. And then they travel to wherever the air currents flow, without landing anywhere. Therefore, wearing a mask might not be as effective as it seems to be in protecting people against the virus.

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