Prof Erin Bromage, an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, recently wrote a blog post The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them for his undergraduate class but went viral with more than 17.8 million views and over 7400 comments, at this time of this writing.

Prof Bromage appeared in a CNN interview on Thursday March 27, where he advised ‘peoples should socialize outdoors as much as possible, wear masks and be mindful of distance and proper ventilation when interacting with others indoors’. The following is adoption of his interview published on CNN daily update.

• Distance when hanging out with friends: Six feet away, outside … If we’re sitting down having a conversation, and a good talk, as long as you’ve got that six feet of distance and you’ve got the air blowing and you just are enjoying each other’s company, then six feet is fine. If you’re exercising and huffing and puffing away from six feet, I would get a little further apart.
• Wearing masks outside: Definitely make the interaction safer. He said you should wear a mask if you’re spending an extended period of time with someone, even if it’s outside.
• Interacting with older relatives: Take more precautions with interacting with people who are at higher risk. Further away, make sure that you have a mask, preferably a better quality mask on both you and them.
• The difference between masks: “A standard mask, the ones that we’ve been making, cut things down by 50%. I wear it to protect you, you wear it to protect me. But now we’re getting better masks coming out from just local manufacturers that catch more of those respiratory emissions, which then lowers the amount of virus in the air, which just makes it safer.
• Outdoors vs. indoors: The risk of contracting the virus is increased when you are inside making it “much more risky” to be inside and around other people.
• If you must interact indoors: Ventilation as much as you possibly can. Natural ventilation. Changing the inside air with outside air as regularly as possible. Not air conditioning, but ventilation.
• The difference between air conditioning and ventilation: Most of our home air conditioners just go through a very basic filter, and they recycle the same air over and over inside the house, there is no makeup air coming from outside. Opening your windows is just allowing fresh new air coming in, and pushing out the air that you’ve been breathing outside. So it makes a big difference in those respiratory droplets building up.
• Sometimes six feet isn’t far enough: When you are outdoors, six feet is going to be one of the lower-risk things that you can do. But inside, because the virus hangs in the air longer in an enclosed environment, six feet is not far enough apart. Just little bits that you’re breathing in over an extended period of time can lead to infection. Six feet will not be enough indoors if there is an infected person there.

The content of this post is adopted from Biologist says you should stay further than 6 feet away indoors, a CNN interview with Dr Erin Bromage of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, an associate professor of biology.