Category:

FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.

The #coronavirus is mainly transmitted through droplets

generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes

or speaks.

To protect yourself:

-keep 1m distance from others

-disinfect surfaces frequently

-wash/rub your hands 

-avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth 

The day after that tweet, the Skagit Valley Chorale outbreak became international news. A story in the Los Angeles Times drew the world's attention to the singing group nestled in a valley that wasn't known for much besides an annual tulip festival. CNN interviewed Burdick about the experience. Strangers sent a blast of hate mail. They said the singers had blood on their hands.

The first lesson people took from the Skagit Valley Chorale outbreak was just how easily one person could infect many others. But in the months that followed, Ruth Backlund and her fellow survivors agreed to collaborate on a scientific study that helped establish something just as important. Contrary to what WHO claimed, the study concluded Covid-19 was airborne.

*  *  *

I am a journalist, and diseases are one of my beats. I became aware of the new virus in early January 2020, while it was still in China. By late January, a few scientists were predicting a pandemic. I started warning my friends to brace for a possible disaster. Like a paranoid doomsday prepper, I advised them to store extra toilet paper and canned food. When someone called me to plan a meeting in June, I told him meetings might not exist in June.

I was right in some ways and very wrong in others. Like the Skagit Valley Chorale, I did not concern myself with the air. If I stayed a few feet away from strangers, I'd be safe from any viruses they coughed or sneezed. The droplets they expelled would fall to the floor like ball bearings. The most worrisome risk seemed to lurk on surfaces: the skin of my hands, which I washed many times a day; the grocery bags that I disinfected with Clorox wipes.

Over the following months, I absorbed the growing consensus that Covid-19 was in fact airborne. As I recognized that floating droplets could transmit the virus from one person to another, I traded Clorox wipes for a carbon dioxide monitor. Masks became a staple. I also began to think about the air differently, as a gaseous ocean in which we all live, which infiltrates our bodies, which our own bodies transform and then return to the great transparent sea, that contains exhaled viruses that can then be inhaled. But I was also left with a question: how could such a fundamental mystery about the worst public health disaster in a century go unsolved for so long?

Once the pandemic passed its peak—after most people on Earth got infected, vaccinated, or both—I started looking for an answer. It became clear that for thousands of years the atmosphere had been an intimate, enveloping mystery. For hundreds of generations, scholars and physicians had claimed the air itself could turn dangerous. They gave bad air an assortment of names, such as miasma. Miasmas could be caused by the stars or swamps; they could spread down a street or float for hundreds of miles. When modern Western medicine took shape in the late 1800s, scientists and doctors alike tossed miasmas aside, treating them like an embarrassing relic of the Dark Ages, a concept with as much value to medicine as bleeding patients. They knew that germs spread diseases, and they knew that germs spread primarily through food, water, sex, and touch, as well as through coughs and sneezes. Germs were not airborne.

But in the 1930s, a few scientists challenged this consensus. They argued that diseases could indeed spread on currents, that germs could float for hours like smoke. They recognized that airborne pathogens posed a fundamentally different threat than the one posed by short-range coughs and sneezes. They argued that some of the worst diseases known to humanity, such as tuberculosis and influenza, spread this way. Those scientists helped create a new field: the science of airborne life. They called it aerobiology.

The aerobiologists were a motley crew. As some tracked pathogens floating inside schools and subways, others caught microbes soaring through the sky. They dazzled the world by finding spores as high as the stratosphere. The founders of aerobiology hoped their new science would unify all life of the air, whether indoors or outdoors, and make clear that the airborne diseases that afflict us are just a few species among a vast floating menagerie. 

Today, aerobiologists look at the atmosphere as one of the three great habitats of life. It didn't start out that way: when the Earth formed 4.7 billion years ago, a blanket of lifeless air formed from the gases hissing out of the molten planet. Life started off aquatic—some theories point to the young ocean as its nursery, others to freshwater ponds—but it did not stay restricted to water for long. Waves sprayed droplets containing bacteria and viruses into the air. About 2 billion years ago, the ancestors of algae and other single-celled forms of life also leaped from the water and traveled for hundreds or thousands of miles.