Singing, Covid-19, and the Future of Live Entertainment – Part 2

Read part 1 of this blog post here.

Since the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, singing has been a super-spreading culprit leading to an effect on the future of live entertainment.

What about Singing?

Until Covid-19 emerged, just one study, conducted in 1968 and prompted by choir-related TB outbreaks, had analyzed particles generated by singing. The study involved just three singers, none of them professionals.

Forty years later, the explosion of choir-related coronavirus outbreaks prompted larger, more robust, and more sophisticated studies. These trials, in combination with prior flu-focused research, provide insight on the safest way to reopen live entertainment and dining venues.

Scientists at Sweden’s Lund University, for example, compared respiratory emissions from 12 vocalists, including seven opera singers, under three conditions: singing, reading a book out loud, and breathing silently.

With metal funnels fitted around their faces, the volunteers performed for 2 minutes at a time while a vacuum pump continually introduced fresh air into the funnel. A high-speed camera imaged the emissions produced by five of the singers.

Overall, the results were unsurprising: “Normal singing generated significantly more aerosol particles than normal talking. Loud singing produced more particles than normal singing.” Also, the professional singers generated about twice as many particles as the amateurs.

One finding, though, was intriguing. While loud singing and loud talking both generated vastly more particles than normal talking and breathing, the difference between both types of loud vocalization was relatively small. In other words, infection might spread as readily at a noisy pub as at musical performance.

University of Bristol scientists obtained similar, but even more dramatic, results when they studied emissions from 25 professional singers from a broad range of genres — gospel, opera, jazz, and pop, among them.

Performing in a highly filtered operating theatre, volunteers sang single notes at different pitches. They also sang and spoke the “Happy Birthday” song at multiple volumes.

Like the Swedish scientists, the UK team found singing generates more aerosol than talking — about 1.5 to 3 times more. These differences, however, were “eclipsed by the effect of volume on aerosol production.”

Both loud singing and loud talking produced an astonishing 20 to 30 times more aerosolized particles than vocalizing at a typical volume.

Why Pubs and Future Live Entertainment Music Venues Must Clean the Air

Loud singing and loud talking — those are the hallmarks, along with exuberant merrymaking. TradFest, Dublin’s annual 5-day celebration of Irish music and culture. Since 2005, the festival has drawn top bands and massive crowds to historic churches, castles, and pubs. It’s an aerosol eruption of the highest order. Yet when the pandemic struck, organiser Martin Harte was determined not to cancel. With the right precautions, he felt, live performances could happen, even if live audiences could not.

At the time, plastic dividers and relentless surface cleaning protocols were all the rage in entertainment and hospitality. “Everyone was obsessed with handwashing and hygiene, as opposed to cleaning air,” Harte recalls. Even today, more than a year into the pandemic, “disinfectant mania” persists while ventilation, filtration, and air dis-infection are undervalued.

“Some people still don’t get it,” asserts microbiologist Emanuel Goldman, Ph.D., of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “They’re distracting the public from the measures that can really protect them.”

Among the most protective measures is air dis-infection, particularly NanoStrike technology, used in Novaerus portable devices.

Inside Novaerus’ sleek, compact units, coil tubes produce an electrical discharge that obliterates pathogens at the molecular level. Instantly, the DNA of a virus or bacteria becomes inert, harmless debris, and clean air is released back into the room.

Noaverus technology has been used in over 60 countries to fight Covid-19, particularly in hospital operating rooms, Covid wards, emergency departmentes, waiting rooms, and surgical theatres.

That’s largely why Harte chose Novaerus as his solution for TradFest 2021. For five days, musicians performed at Dublin Castle, with portable Novaerus units parked in the castle’s historic rooms but out of camera range.

“Novaerus isn’t a hygiene product,” says Harte. “This is something you’ll find in an ICU, in a neonatal unit. That was the level of protection we wanted.” The devices featured prominently in TradFest’s safety proposal to the Office of Public Works, the government agency that operates Dublin Castle.

“Novaerus helped us hugely in securing approval to use the castle and made all the difference in getting musicians to agree to perform,” Harte says.

TradFest deployed Novaerus’ most powerful unit, the Defend 1050, which has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a 510(k) Class II medical device.

In independent laboratory testing, the Defend 1050 has demonstrated a 99.99% reduction of live SARS-CoV-2 virus, within 30 minutes. Like other Novaerus units, the Defend 1050 shown similar efficacy with other airborne pathogens, including influenza, Clostridium difficile, Aspergillus, and surrogates for Measles virus, tuberculosis, and Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA).

NanoStrike technology also destroys surrogates for tuberculosis and measles — two deadly pathogens that, while tamed, were never eradicated and continue to plague the globe, infecting millions each year. That may be the destiny of SARS-CoV-2, a virus expected to circulate well beyond the end of the pandemic.

For this reason, Harte says, and because he knows that noisy conversation itself can generate highly infectious aerosol plumes, he has encouraged bars and restaurants throughout Temple Bar, Dublin’s primary tourist district, to deploy Novaerus devices.

“I don’t think you can safely open any establishment, anywhere, without cleaning the air.”

If you are interested in learning more about the Novaerus products, additional information can be found here, or please contact Novaerus.

“Particles shoot out like a geyser”: Singing, Covid-19, and the Future of Live Entertainment

Since the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, singing has been a super-spreading culprit leading to an effect on the future of live entertainment.

Around the world, choristers have become infected at remarkably high rates. At a rehearsal in the United States, 53 of 61 singers contracted Covid-19, and a practice in France infected 19 of 27. A choir seminar in Austria left 43 of 44 singers infected, and after the Amsterdam Mixed Choir performed Bach’s St John Passion, 102 of 130 members fell ill.

Karaoke, too, has sparked numerous outbreaks, including an explosion of cases traced to a popular Quebec City bar. In the coronavirus era, noted Quebec City’s health director, “All singing poses a problem.”

Science shows that’s true. Singing emits high volumes of aerosol, and infectious particles generated by one singer can sail across a choir hall, as far as 13 meters, only to be inhaled by another. But is singing more hazardous than, say, loud conversation at a pub? Not substantially.

As British scientists have found, aerosol transmission of disease is “equally possible” whether the particles are produced by singing or loud speaking — a finding of importance to anyone who operates an establishment noisier than a library.

With vaccinations underway, we can plan for a time when choirs reconvene, karaoke bars reopen, restaurants operate at full capacity, and musicians get back on the road. But post-pandemic, the landscape for entertainment and hospitality will look different than it did before.

Moving forward, building operators will need a working knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and of the precautions, such as air dis-infection, proven to mitigate the risks of singing and socializing indoors.

“Covid is here to stay, in some shape or form, and we need to adapt,” says Martin Harte, CEO of The Temple Bar Company, the not-for-profit organiser of TradFest, Ireland’s largest festival of traditional music. Harte adapted by installing medical-grade air dis-infection devices at Dublin Castle, the historic fortress where TradFest musicians performed indoors, with government permission, amidst the pandemic. The sessions, livestreamed to a global audience, did not lead to a single infection.

“Music travels through the air, and so does the coronavirus,” says Harte. “I wasn’t going to put our performers or crew at risk.”

From TB to Covid: The Super-Spreading Power of Singing

In 1962, at an American boarding school, two boys, feverish and coughing, were diagnosed with tuberculosis and admitted to the hospital. Testing at the school turned up 25 more cases. A medical team was dispatched to study the outbreak. At the time, conventional wisdom held that TB was transmitted via large respiratory droplets and close contact. But intriguing rodent studies suggested otherwise. If guinea pigs could become infected from afar, perhaps humans could, too.

But how? What behaviors might spread the disease?

At first, the medical team was stumped. Though all 153 students slept in a single, poorly ventilated dormitory, the TB cases were randomly distributed. Classroom and chore groupings revealed no patterns, either.

But further analysis yielded a clue: Among members of the school choir, 60% contracted TB, compared to just 20% of the student body as a whole. Reporting in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the doctors noted that three other mid-century TB outbreaks had been associated with choir singing.

“It seems quite possible,” the doctors wrote, “that vigorous singing could be an effective generator of fine particles in large quantity.”

Today, we know that’s not just “possible” — it’s a fact.

“When you sing, microscopic particles burst forth from your mouth in a fountain of mist . . . shooting out like a geyser,” explains James Hamblin, M.D., an American public health physician. “The rush of exhaled air creates an aerosolized mixture of everything that’s lingering in the mucus membrane of your pharynx.”

This location, he notes, is “exactly where the coronavirus attaches and replicates.” Until Covid-19 began rampaging through choirs, the connection between singing and disease transmission had largely been forgotten.

Instead, aerosol scientists focused on more ordinary sources of respiratory emissions — coughing, sneezing, talking, and breathing. Studies were conducted for the purpose of helping reduce spread of the flu.

As one prescient research team, from the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, noted: “To prepare for a possible influenza pandemic, a better understanding of the potential for the airborne transmission of influenza from person to person is needed.”

What that study found: while coughing generated more viable influenza particles than mere breathing, the difference was not large and “both respiratory activities could be important in airborne influenza transmission.”

Another flu-focused study compared emissions while speaking at various volumes. “We showed that as you talk louder, no matter what you say, you will release more particles,” reported chemical engineer Sima Asadi, Ph.D., the study’s lead author.

The key take-away, Asadi said: “Talking is potentially as important as sneezing and coughing for influenza transmission.

Read part 2 of this blog post here.

Tag: live entertainment