Resuming Business in A COVID Normal Environment

Abstract

1. Abstract Although pandemics of its scale and geographical coverage are not unprecedented as widely claimed, coronavirus continues to pose novel and complex challenges to governments, businesses, and individuals. Governments had and continue to have obligations to respond speedily with both health and economic policies to prevent irrevocable damages to their respective economies and sovereignties-some more successful than others. The speed at which governments responded meant there had to be incremental knowledge on the virus, hence public health handling methodologies and policies morphed from form to form in the face of balancing economic realities with health imperatives, inadequate supplies of personal protective equipment and manpower. Amongst all these, MKPro Engineering Pty Ltd (‘MKPro’) identified a critical oversight as of May 2020-official advice had not recognised that aerosol mode of transmission was clearly feasible and was of grave danger. In our modelling, we mathematically established that coronavirus, at published mass of 33.8kDa and 1million cells/mL cluster density, is about 22billion times lighter than air, and can be air-borne, hence able to travel as aerosol particles under suitable conditions for at least several meters before the aerosols become considerably dispersed. Upon establishing the above, MKPro articulated and suggested behavioural and Engineering solutions that can help businesses recover and safely contemplate resumption to business in a COVID-Normal environment. 2. Introduction As SARS-CoV-22 (and COVID-19) pandemic gripped the world, the attention of governments and businesses turned to the widespread damages it was and is still causing to public and private economies. While they battled with stabilising economies and contemplated recoveries, the attention of professionals including doctors, scientists, researchers, public health managers and engineers were focused on the deterministic programming for such recoveries. Those attentions and interests did not always align. Although similar pandemics, by scale, occurred in 1918-1920 (Jarus, 2020; US CDC, 2019; WHO, 2019), COVID19 pandemic was hyped as unprecedented giving rise to governments wielding sweeping Emergency and Public Health powers with elements of public health responses demonstrating most governments may not have adequately learnt from prior comparable pandemics. The attending challenges which include diminished cognition (Marshal, 2021) [14,15], Long-COVID (Marshall, 2021), human behavioural social fatigue (Petherick et al., 2021) [19], deteriorating mental health (Hampshire et al., 2021) [8], shortages of personal protective equipment (Koehler et al., 2020) [13], and non-compliance to public health orders (Nivette et al., 2020) [18] were exacerbated by limited knowledge on coronavirus epidemiology, and in particular on whether coronavirus is communicable via aerosol mode and from saliva (Hu et al, 2020) [9]. With a view to advising necessary government agencies and departments on plausible engineering solutions, researchers at MKPro (Akindeju, 2020-a) sought to establish the feasible range of cluster volume at which coronavirus can exist and to determine whether aerosol mode of transmission was not only feasible but also practical.