Maarten Keulemans sees them (finally) flying

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Embarrassing

After WHO/RIVM/OMT had long denied the spread of SARS-CoV-2 through the air, this is no longer the case. Some of those involved acknowledge that they made a (big) mistake in 2020. As WHO’s chief science officer did in 2022.

That became a problem for Maarten Keulemans, because he had posted this tweet in his series on Twitter “Brating Maurice the Dog” at the beginning of 2021.

How would he get back to that? Also admit his mistake outwardly? Or come up with a nonsense argument to explain that he was right at the time?

The answer is in. Not only did he come up with a nonsense argument, the Twitter troublemaker Prof. Willy Spaan also indicated that Keulemans was right. Because when someone mentioned Keulemans’ tweet above, this was his response:

For many reasons, this response from Keulemans is too embarrassing for words. I will limit myself to two main points:

1. By air or not?

WHO/RIVM/OMT/Keulemans/Spaan indicated in 2020 that the virus spread almost exclusively via large droplets. WHO called it FAKE NEWS that the virus would travel through the air.

The fact that the virus spread almost only in January/March in areas with a moderate winter and low humidity was solid evidence that the mechanism of spread could not be large droplets, as I have been showing since March 2020. The many super spread events, the driving force behind the pandemic, cannot be explained other than by a virus that spreads through the air. This intensive investigation of a super spread event on February 15, 2020 also shows it.

During that period, physicists also spoke out en masse about the untenable statement that only droplets smaller than 5 microns could remain floating. They wrote an open letter to the WHO in July 2020. Prof. Jimenez indicated that droplets in clouds are between 20 and 30 microns and also float.

The researcher Linsey Marr, who has also been working on floating influenza viruses for a long time, was extensively described in the New York Times (in June 2020). She was analyzing the size of the droplets containing the influenza virus and in the research she published in 2011, she described the large numbers of virus particles found in the air in droplets smaller than 2.5 microns.

What is crucial, and Wells already showed this in the 1950s, is that virus particles that float in the air in very small particles, when inhaled, easily penetrate deep into the alveoli. That is the place where oxygen from the air is brought into the bloodstream. That is a lot riskier for people than a large droplet containing virus particles that ends up in a person’s nose.

In short: even with influenza (and SARS-1), the Corona virus ALSO moves through the air. Based on that alone, Keulemans’ tweet from January 2021 “it is demonstrably nonsense that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne” is completely wrong.

To protect against the lack of outbreaks in hospitals ignores the measures that apply as standard in hospitals to prevent the spread of pathogens as much as possible. When asked, Fahmi Yigit (from Virobuster), who has been active in making the air safe in important places for 20 years and was an important source of knowledge for me, explained to me how this works differently in hospitals than in offices or schools.

“Ventilation systems within a hospital, school or office building are not designed under the same conditions. In an office the focus is on comfort, in a school on CO level₂ and hospitals prevent infections.

Hospitals are already required by building regulations to focus on infection prevention. These are:

1. Air volumes in hospitals are higher than in offices and classrooms, which means that pathogens are extracted from a room more quickly
2. A mandatory air hierarchy has been defined that requires that air must never flow from one room to another room. For example, a patient room with an infected person must always be under negative pressure (more air is extracted from the room in the bathroom than is brought in and missing air enters through the corridor. This means that a sluice does not always have to be installed). placed.
3. Hospitals use additional filter techniques such as HEPA and UVC to prevent extracted pathogens from returning via the ventilation system elsewhere.

In summary: Hospital buildings were by definition already well prepared for infection prevention through their air hygiene.

So using the hospitals as an argument by Keulemans is also incorrect. With the additional argument: even after 2021, there have been no major outbreaks in hospitals. So the lack of major outbreaks in hospitals in 2020 is another bullshit argument from Keulemans.

2. Degree of pathogenicity

It is certainly the case that the different variants that have emerged since 2020 had different degrees of contagiousness and pathogenicity. Omikron is the most contagious and the least pathogenic. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the virus was airborne.

The two factors that did play a role were:

• the number of virus particles that were released into the air by an infected person. It does not necessarily have to be the case that the rate of replication of the virus was exactly the same for every variant that emerged. It can also be concluded from the values ​​measured in the sewer that it was not a constant factor per variant. This 2021 study describes that.
• the ease with which the new variant can “attach” (a simpler description of the real process) also improves during the evolution process of the virus.

The natural process of viruses is that they become more contagious on the one hand and less pathogenic on the other. This can happen both due to the number of virus particles that are excreted and the adhesion process.

To attribute that change to “first it didn’t go through the air and then it did” is a misunderstanding of both physical and medical laws.

Because a patient who coughed or sneezed in 2020 also released both small and large droplets into the air, just like after 2020!

So nonsense

Maarten Keulemans’ explanation that he was right when he claimed in January 2021 that the virus was not airborne is merely a camouflage for the fact that he was wrong then. But the last thing Keulemans will ever do in his life is acknowledge that I got it right in 2020 and he didn’t. This is evident from his extensive response to Ton Verlind’s blog. The title speaks volumes “Why Maurice de Hond was not right about Corona”

The quality of Keuleman’s way of working is already evident from the description of what I claimed in his blog “Open a window! And the virus would be gone.” The disdain drips from it.

And to demonstrate the level of our scientists, not only Prof. Willy Spaan gave his blessing to Keulemans’ argumentation. Also Prof. Koopmans shared this blog of his. Apparently she (once again) had no association with the scientific knowledge that she should have acquired.

It is also clear through other elements of Keulemans’ piece that his personal antipathy for me overshadows any degree of professionalism. But scientists are actually throwing their names and professions at risk by still pretending that they were right in 2020 to classify virus spread through the air as non-existent or unimportant.