The Molecules Hit My Nose from 29 Feet Away
I was out in the backyard cutting a branch off of a plant I’ll never know the name of, when I looked up and wondered, “What the hell is that smell, like sugar or something?”
And then I realized it was this outdoor model railroad train locomotive, puffing away on its ‘artificial smoke’ liquid that I had bought. There’s apparently a market in selling this stuff heavily scented, so that idiots like me will buy a 2-ounce bottle at roughly the price of caviar. (Then you learn that it’s simply mineral oil and you buy it at the supermarket for the price of chicken eggs.) And I couldn’t help but put it in the context of our battle with The Virus.
I’ve done a lot of reading on the science and medicine of this coronavirus thing from the beginning. I’ve read about the ‘minimum infectious dose.’ I’ve read enough to believe it’s almost 100% a respiratory thing, that ‘touch transmission,’ while it might happen, is a counterproductive distraction. And I’ve read many of the nuanced debates about ‘aerosol’ and ‘droplets’ and ‘airborne.’ I’ve written and corresponded, ad nauseum (to my wife at least), on the simple solution of cheap window fans as the salvation of our entire hospitality sector.
And then I’m in my backyard and see what it’s like to pick up molecules from 29 feet away. I’ve never doubted this. A few months into the pandemic, I noticed that you can smell people’s perfume or cologne in retails stores. And once, I was waiting outside of a UPS store and someone in the 6-foot-distanced (almost) line, was smoking. My nose was visited by plenty of those carbon and nicotine molecules. If you can smell it, you are detecting molecules in your nose. It’s not just some ethereal essence, some remote suggestion of the substance; those are the molecules of the substance that someone spritzed on their nape, wherever that is. Those are molecules, just like when that virus forces someone to cough, hoping to get a ride to another warm, moist host.
I smelled that choo-choo train from 29 feet away. I picked up those molecules — Gingerbread was the flavor — 29 feet away. They landed inside my nose and I detected them. And I must tell you that my sense of smell has been proven, time and again, to be less than other members of my family. So add that into the equation. And consider this, according to Google so it must be true: a bear’s sense of smell is 7 times better than a blood hound’s or 2,100 times better than a human.
Fortunately — hopefully? — there’s no gingerbread virus. And if those molecules can make the 29-foot trip and arrive at the next station, can they infect me? Well, that’s the matter of the ‘minimum infectious dose.’ Scientists seem to have figured out good guesses of the MID for other germs, but not for coronavirus, at least since I last read about it 10 months ago. So presumably, the small quantity of molecules you can pick up at 29 feet is not strong enough to establish a foothold. Thank goodness.
But it gets worse.
I’m still outside gibber-jabbering, or whatever it is I do with all those tools, when I looked up and wondered, “What the hell is that smell, like sugar or something?” And this time I was 75 feet away.
There was no question. I checked my gloves, my hands, my shovel. That smell was in the air. 75 feet. I don’t wear a mask walking around the neighborhood, and I don’t believe you ‘get’ the virus from just a few molecules, but I do cross the street, if I can, when others are walking by.
