On March 28, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted out, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” Over the n

With COVID-19, Air Is Both the Problem and the Solution

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2022-01-20 21:00:11

On March 28, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) tweeted out, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”

Over the next two years, the WHO and other organizations that had initially denied that the new coronavirus could stay in the air and move around like smoke quietly changed their stance. The virus could spread via respiratory droplets—those heavy globs that come out of our nose and mouth and rapidly fall to the ground—but it could also, these public bodies begrudgingly admitted, hang in the air and be breathed in by someone further away.

Now that the droplet dogma has been appropriately pilloried, the questions are: can ventilation and air filtration rescue us? And what made aerosols so taboo in our public discussions?

The irony of airborne denialism is that it is the product of rejecting an earlier dogma about all diseases being airborne. It’s the old bit about the pendulum: it swings from one extreme to the other, before making its way back to the first extreme. Over time, though, as the pendulum experiences friction, its movement becomes more nuanced and it starts to point in a more reliable direction. And this is, hopefully, where we find ourselves now.