It’s a question that many have wondered, but few have asked aloud: can farting spread the coronavirus?

According to a report in the New York Post, several doctors have tried to tackle that question both on social media and in a podcast, discussing whether or not flatulence has the possibility of spreading COVID-19.

On Twitter, Andy Tagg, an emergency physician at Western Health in California, posted a thread diving into whether farts can carry the virus, and found that while there wasn’t much research on the subject, the only study found that farting without pants on could potentially be risky.

Is farting an aerosol-generating procedure?



A tweetorial… pic.twitter.com/XOuMzNXSQp — Andy Tagg (@andrewjtagg) April 6, 2020

The New York Post reported that on a podcast between two doctors, one of them, Dr. Norman Swan, suggested that farting without pants would not be advised and that it would be safer if people “don’t fart close to other people."

Dr. Aaron E. Glatt, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau, told the New York Post in an email that there have been studies to suggest that a high number of coronavirus patients show gastrointestinal symptoms while infected.

Glatt told the New York Post that “there are no published data on whether flatulence alone presents any risk of transmission, although in a closed person, it would be unlikely to be a significant route of transmission.”