Abstract
Chinese people have a very good mask-wearing culture; it is normal to wear masks to protect their faces from wind and pollution. Thus, they easily accept the wearing of masks to prevent infectious diseases, as seen with the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China today. However, Chinese people have a dangerous eating culture: they share foods or soups from the same bowls and pots using their personal chopsticks/spoons and emphasize loud talking when eating at banquets or at homes. We think this eating culture has raised the infection risk of COVID-19 from person to person by contamination. Therefore, in this paper, we propose models to elucidate how people are infected with COVID-19 through droplet transmission when eating with Chinese cultural context to address the urgent need to change Chinese eating culture; we believe these study models can help not only the Chinese people, but also other national people, to raise mindfulness of public health, prevent COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, at the present pandemic and in the future.
Author Contributions
Copyright© 2020
Cheng Kang, et al.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Competing interests The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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Introduction
An outbreak of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in Wuhan city, Hubei province of the People’s Republic of China at the end of 2019. COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic There are evidences of COIVD-19: person-to-person transmission in hospital and family settings, and reports of infected travelers in other geographical regions The coronavirus epidemic appeared to be nonlinear There is no proven treatment for COVID-19 at this early stage A computational tool to assess the risks of novel coronavirus outbreaks was developed to estimate the key epidemiological parameters of 2019-nCoV. The estimating results show: uncertainty range is given where provided; rapid implementation of the control generates much smaller case numbers; risk of major outbreaks is a function of cumulative number of infectious cases In this study, we propose a possible relationship between infection pathways and the Chinese eating culture and we suggest that Chinese people to change or improve their eating ways to prevent the diseases, especially contagious infectious diseases, at the present and future. To our knowledge, there is not any published model like ours in this study. Finally, in the discussion of this article, we compare the Chinese and American eating and mask-wearing cultures, to reduce the infection and fatality rates of COVID-19.
Discussion
For analysis of the data on the subject in the models, the merits are that we propose some of possible ways of COVID-19 infection, and correlations between the eating and masking cultures and the infections; and the demerits are that data are not complete; we will improve the models in our future studies. Although the models of this study are about the impacts of Chinese eating and mask-wearing cultures on the propagations of COVID-19, we believe that they can provide inspiration or clue (references) for how other cultures in the world can spread infectious diseases. We believe it will be very helpful for curing the disease to drink more warm soup (or juice) with complete nutrients We suggest, that during a virus epidemic season, to turn off the central air conditionings because they are able to transmit virus from room to room as well as from person to person. In In the pictures, we can see that Chinese eating culture, regardless of whether it is of people from villages of deep mountains or in modern cities, is the same or similar throughout the country. Sometimes, people will drink with the same wine glass to show brotherhood or friendships. In some high-quality restaurants in China, public spoons are placed in each large plate or pan (pot) to help consumers consume food. However, many diners still do not use the public spoons and continue to use their personal spoons or chopsticks to obtain the communal food because they feel that using a communal spoon will hurt the feelings of other diners. Other diners are usually family members, relatives, friends or colleagues. They worry that the other diners would think feel prejudiced for being dirty. Of course, Chinese and Asian people have a very good mask-wearing culture: they always or often use masks to protect themselves from pollution, such as smog, pollen; making it easy to accept masks as preventative measures against infectious diseases. As comparison, American people do not have the mask-wearing culture, because don't like to use masks even if they are sick during flu season. In America, if someone uses a mask, it usually only means that they are sick and American people like to show they are healthy, strong and able to work/socialize. We believe that if the Americans have a culture of wearing masks like the Chinese, then the infection and fatality rates of COVID-19 (or influenza) will be greatly reduced. Finally, in terms of eating culture, the American and Western eating culture is healthier and more sanitary than the Chinese. In the American style, everyone eats food pre-portioned in his or her own plate or bowl, similar to how people eat on an airplane. People eat food alone, closing their mouths when chewing, and talk more quietly and less frequently. Therefore, the American style reduces the risk of droplet infections compared to the Chinese style. We believe that if the Chinese have an eating culture like the Americans, then the infection and fatality rates of COVID-19 (or influenza) will be greatly reduced.