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Two years after the pandemic began, we finally have a good understanding of how COVID-19 is transmitted: some infected people exhale virus in small, invisible particles (aerosols). These do not fall quickly to the ground, but move in the air like cigarette smoke. Other people can get infected when breathing in those aerosols, either in close proximity, in shared room air, or less frequently, at a distance. But the journey to accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of how COVID-19 spread was far too slow and contentious. Even today, the updated guidance and policies of how to protect ourselves remain haphazardly applied, in part because of one word: “airborne.”
This fundamental misunderstanding of the virus disastrously shaped the response during the first few months of the pandemic and continues to this day. We still see it now in the surface cleaning protocols that many have kept in place even while walking around without masks. There is a key explanation for this early error. In hospitals, the word “airborne” is associated with a rigid set of protective methods, including the use of N95 respirators by workers and negative pressure rooms for patients. These are resource-intensive and legally required. There was a shortage of N95s at the beginning of the pandemic, so it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to fully implement “airborne” precautions in hospitals.
Due to its specific meaning in hospitals and longstanding misunderstanding about how airborne transmission actually happens and underappreciation of its importance, public health officials were wary of saying the word, even though it would have been the clearest way to communicate with the public about transmission and how to control it. As one article put it, “They say coronavirus isn’t airborne–but it’s definitely borne by air.”…
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Source : time
