Eunice Y C Shiu's research while affiliated with The University of Hong Kong and other places

... Primary transmission of the virus occurs at the microscale level, where respiratory droplets rapidly spread the SARS-CoV-2 amongst human beings [1,2]. To arrest the transmission of the virus, wearing a facemask and maintaining social distances has been advised by the scientific and medical community worldwide [3][4][5]. The ejected droplets are in size range of 1-2000 lm [6] and creates two possible scenarios of infection. ...

... While efficacy (performance in controlled or ideal conditions) and effectiveness (performance in usual or realworld conditions) are not synonymous [450,509], a large consensus and a growing body of literature have moved forward the uptake of community masking as part of comprehensive NPI bundles or "policy packages" aimed at preventing infections caused by respiratory viruses including SARS-CoV-2 [55,58,261,262,295,464,508,[510][511][512][513][514][515][516]. Importantly, a fact undergirding community mask wearing during the pandemic is the risk of transmission, not only from symptomatic individuals, but also from presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals (discussed in section 3). ...

... Social distancing in the context of pandemics relate to steps taken to initiate a "social contact network-focused mitigation " to offer protection against the spread of a disease in the absence or shortage of medical means to control it ( [33] , p.1671) .The purpose of such social distancing currently is to "to reduce transmission, thereby delaying the epidemic peak, reducing the size of the epidemic peak, and spreading cases over a longer time to relieve pressure on the healthcare system " ( [28] , p. 976). ...

... Indeed, the use of face masks and filtering facepiece respirators (FFP) (i.e. N95 or FFP2 or FFP3 or equivalent with a minimum filtration efficiency of 95%) has been recommended to reduce the risk of infection [3,4]. Furthermore, it has been showed that surgical masks reduce virus detection in large respiratory droplets and in aerosols, suggesting that surgical face masks could be used by infected patients to reduce virus transmission [4]. ...

... Although government stimulus packages provide some relief for firms that are severely affected (Foo et al., 2020), the capacity for recovery of the tourism system is fundamentally affected by the imposition of nonpharmaceutical interventions (e.g. quarantine, border control) because of the extent to which they restrict mobility (Ryu et al., 2020). This argument indicates that public health interventions might delay the recovery of the tourism industry, a view also shared by Hall et al. (2020) and Gossling et al. (2020). ...

... On 9 July, the WHO issued a updated scientific brief 39 , citing some of the evidence described in the open letter 132 and extensive subsequent evidence on SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Addressing studies that identified low quantities of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the exhaled breath of infected individuals 152 or in air samples collected from health-care facilities in the absence of aerosol-generating procedures 140,[153][154][155][156] , the WHO commented these do not necessarily indicate a sufficient dose of infectious virus for transmission to occur 157 . Addressing outbreak reports 54,147,158,159 , the WHO acknowledged possible SARS-CoV-2 transmission through aerosols in indoor crowded spaces in the absence of aerosol-generating procedures, although transmission through droplets or fomites cannot be ruled out. ...