It's Airborne

On March 28, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted out, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” For medical doctors and biomedical scientists (including me),

When COVID-19 first emerged, Linsey Marr suspected right away it spread through the air. Time has proved this aerosols engineer right. Now she's being honored with a MacArthur "genius grant."

Canadian public health officials are increasingly agreeing with the idea that COVID-19 is a disease that can spread through the air, not just via large droplets. The Agenda asks what an increase in aerosol transmission through lingering airborne particles means for keeping Ontarians safe from the Omicron variant.

Two years after the pandemic started it's clear that early confusion around how COVID-19 was transmitted was disastrous for our response

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.

There is overwhelming evidence that inhalation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) represents a major transmission route for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). There is an urgent need to harmonize discussions about modes of virus transmission across disciplines to ensure the most effective control strategies and provide clear and consistent guidance to the public. To do so, we must clarify the terminology to distinguish between aerosols and droplets using a size threshold of 100 µm, not the historical 5 µm (1). This size more effectively separates their aerodynamic behavior, ability to be inhaled, and efficacy of interventions.