
It’s not.”īut the WHO recognizes that in the context of coronavirus, “airborne transmission may be possible in specific circumstances and settings in which procedures or support treatments that generate aerosols are performed.”īourouiba’s research also cites a 2020 report from China that showed COVID-19 particles were found in the hospital ventilation systems above rooms where patients had coronavirus. “If it was a 27-foot radius that was a high risk to somebody, this would be a totally different conversation. Everybody would know it’s true because everybody would be infected,” Pottinger told USA Today. “If you think about it, if this really traveled very efficiently by air, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. “Infection control strategies were then developed based on whether a respiratory infectious disease is primarily transmitted via the large or the small droplet route,” Bourouiba wrote. The large droplets settle fast, but small droplets – also referred to as aerosols - evaporate and “form residual particulates made of the dried material from the original droplets,” according to Bourouiba. Wells, who studied Tuberculosis transmission in the 1930s, categorized those droplets as large and small, Bourouiba writes. Droplets are transmitted when someone coughs or sneezes into the air, according to WHO. The World Health Organization says respiratory infections are spread through droplets of different sizes, and the coronavirus is no different.


“Implementing public health recommendations based on these older models may limit the effectiveness of the proposed interventions,” Bourouiba wrote in the study published March 26.

Bourouiba wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the social distancing measures in place now are based on a model of disease transmission developed in the 1930s.
