Planning to use a public loo or restroom to attend nature’s call? Beware, for high chances are that you might risk contracting the deadly coronavirus from there, researchers have warned.

They pointed out that while respiratory droplets are the most prominent source of transmission for Covid-19, the small numbers of viable viruses have, however, been found to be in urine and stool samples. 

Hence, public restrooms or toilets can be cause of concern for transmitting the pathogen because they are relatively confined, experience heavy foot traffic and may not have adequate ventilation, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science have now cautioned.

It is already known that a variety of pathogens are usually found in stagnant water as well as in urine, feces and vomit. When dispersed widely through aerosolisation, these pathogens can cause Ebola, norovirus that results in violent food poisoning, as well as Covid-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2, said the scientists who investigated droplets generated from flushing a toilet and a urinal in a public restroom under normal ventilation conditions. 

The study is published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

To measure the droplets, researchers used a particle counter placed at various heights of the toilet and urinal to capture the size and number of droplets generated upon flushing.

Results demonstrated that public restrooms could serve as hotbeds for airborne disease transmission, especially if they do not have adequate ventilation or if toilets do not have a lid or cover. The study holds importance in the context of India too where most public loos often are not equipped with toilet seat lids and urinals are not covered.

For the study, researchers obtained data from three different scenarios: toilet flushing; covered toilet flushing and urinal flushing. They examined the data to determine the increase in aerosol concentration, the behavior of droplets of different sizes, how high the droplets rose, and the impact of covering the toilet. Ambient aerosol levels were measured before and after conducting the experiments.