COVID-19 and the museum environment

Abstract

In mid-February 2020, as Consultant Curator of The Tabley House Collection for the University of Manchester, I was in Forlí overseeing the loan of a painting to the ‘Ulysses’ exhibition mounted in the Museii San Domenico. The Private View, held during the evening of 14 February, was uncharacteristically subdued and gloomy, and I subsequently reported to the Trustees of The Tabley House Collection that it may have been influenced by the gathering storm in Northern Italy of which I was then not fully aware. I returned to the United Kingdom 15 February and the first cases of the novel Coronavirus in EmiliaRomagna were identified 22 February 2020, with 2644 cases by 14 March. Lock-down imposed by the Italian central government had been extended to the whole of Italy from 9 March 2020, resulting in closure of inter alia all museums and art galleries, and by 16 March 24,747 cases had been notified in Italy. COVID-19 is not the only public health issue which has to be addressed in the museum environment and too little attention has been directed towards combatting respiratory diseases in general when formulating institutional policy. Past experience provides warning signs which can be heeded or ignored, but what practical measures can be derived from it? Long before viruses were recognised as the pathogens transmitting influenza and a range of other respiratory infectious diseases, the principal means of spreading infection had been recognised empirically as respiratory droplets in the air. Infection from surfaces contaminated thereby was the obvious corollary. However, the mechanisms involved in the transfer of pathogens have attracted only limited attention. ‘Respiratory droplets in the air’ is a description which misleads as much as it informs, and questions have to be asked about how droplets of water of different sizes behave in different environmental conditions after exhalation. At the Copenhagen meeting of the International Committee for Museum Security (ICMS) in 2014 I presented a paper, ‘Water Mist Fire Suppression in the Cultural Property Environment: an Update’, which built on the article ‘Water Mist’ for Fire Protection of Historic Buildings and Museums’ which Professor Torgrim Log and I published in Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 14, 1995, pp. 283–298. In these we drew attention to the characteristics of fine water sprays as fire suppressants and the rate of evaporation of fine water droplets. These findings are also of direct relevance in coming to an understanding of the behaviour of water droplets when expelled from human lungs. As a contaminated droplet evaporates it becomes smaller and under conditions favourable to itself it joins the general melée of dust particles benefitting from Brownian Motion. Recently I had a meeting