WHO now admits the COVID virus and other germs spread “through the air.” This plain language may help improve research and action to fight disease
After four years of fighting about it, the World Health Organization has finally proclaimed that viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID, can be spread through the air.
The operative phrase here is “through the air.” It’s plain language that anyone can understand, and this switch from jargon such as “airborne” and “aerosol” may finally clear the way for researchers to get funding to study better, real-life ways to protect people from a range of infectious diseases.
And just maybe governments, retailers, school authorities and others can now start to get solid information about ways they can clean indoor air. While it is going to take more than a wordy WHO statement to persuade gym owners that fogged-up windows mean too many people are huffing out potentially infectious air, the new wording does provide a better explanation of why it’s gross and unhealthy.
It took four years to get here because some leaders in public health, medicine and science clung too tightly to precision and semantics. No one disputes that respiratory viruses are spread by droplets. The disagreements were over what sized droplets really counted as droplets, whether they hung in the air and how far they traveled. There were debates over the definition of “aerosol” and what sized droplet that meant. Some experts refused to say—or to let anyone else say—that a droplet could remain suspended in air or travel over a distance unless it was, technically, an aerosol. They said that meant it had to be five microns or less in size—a definition that itself did not have a basis in modern science.
One particular moment of shame came on March 28, 2020, when WHO tweeted: “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”
