I don't agree with your conclusion. Airborne is airborne regardless of whether it's 5 minutes or 12 hours. The point of the word is to tell people that you can become infected without being in direct physical contact with them. Trying to come up with words for different durations of airborne is only going to make it more confusing, even if it becomes less ambiguous to the people who know the difference between the terms.
It's unfortunate that you don't have the source, because it would be nice to see how long after after the covid-19 patient left the chamber they tested the air for the virus.
People need to understand that there is a good possibility that this virus can stay in the air, even if it is only for 5 or 10 minutes. If using the word airborne isn't correct use of scientific jargon, it at least is correct use of common English.
Only in the sense that "airborne" is a scientific medical term meaning larger than 0.5 µm. When most people hear "airborne" they think it means "in the air", which the virus certainly is. The use of this terminology in the strict scientific sense when speaking to general audiences is borderline irresponsible.
The title while technically correct stokes fear more than anything else. The article goes into depth on how “airborne” is not terribly different than what we know now about aerosols hanging in the air. Most people will read the title and react at too large of a scale, while the only real insight should be that in crowded indoor places with poor ventilation (offices, restaurants), you may be able to get infected even when socially distancing.
That is much more reasonable and solvable. Airborne is a overused Hollywood term that makes most people think it floats on the wind and infects you anywhere, anytime.
The public guidance on “airborne” vs “droplet” transmission is deeply harmful. Public health officials have too-narrowly defined the word “airborne”. In choosing jargon over plain language, they’ve misled the public.
I understand the distinction, but the terminology should be renamed imho, to something like "epidemiologist airborne". Because to the layperson it definitely is transmitted "through the air", implying again in everyday terms "airborne transmission".
After this pandemic, doctors and scientists are going to have to come up with more media-friendly terms from now on.
The problem is that "airborne droplets" and "airborne" sound too similar and it's very hard for regular people to understand what that means. "Airborne droplets" means that viruses need saliva to transmit between people. "Airborne" means that the virus only needs dust particles to transmit to other people. Measles is airborne transmission, which means that if someone with measles enters a room, that room can be infectious for 12+ hours because viruses will be infectious in the dust. If someone with coronavirus sneezes in a room, the large heavy droplets will quickly fall to the ground. If you breathe in the droplets then you can catch the virus, but these only stay in the air for seconds. However, there are microdroplets which stay in the air for 30+ minutes depending on the air currents.
So there is a distinction between them. If coronavirus were truly airborne, then we would all need to wear masks all the time, even when no one is around. No where would be safe and we would have to implement extremely strict lockdowns.
But the fact that scientists and doctors have chosen to use the term "airborne" in both have made it extremely confusing and given how quickly information and misinformation is disseminated these days, they need to choose terms with care from now on.
Aye, that brings up another issue. What exactly does “airborne” mean? The assumption early on was that Covid was not airborne, and required droplets of a certain size, though I think that changed over time.
I remember a listening to a podcast interviewing a physician from a major hospital who made sure to explain the difference between an airborne pathogen and one that is respiratory active.
Jogging my memory. Airborne meaning a virus that a person exhales in an elevator (example) will still be present and transmissible x amount of time later. Respiratory active meaning transmissible by coughing/exhaling in the presence of someone else.
These are important distinctions if true and still relevant.
It's a useful distinction to say someone walking through a room 30 seconds after a sick person left is or is not at significant risk. Especially when setting up quarantine etc.
Basically, respiratory droplets are considered a different category from true airborne transmission because they are much easier to contain.
oh I get it, the virus teleports from the patient to the surface, no air transmission. /s
(you're splitting hairs, and the implied medical advice will actually kill people who follow it - much MUCH MUCH safer to simply say "airborne" to the general public, who need a simpler model than this)
Scientists have already published work confirming the virus is airborne stable and viable for many hours.
I don’t know why there hasn’t been more discussions about the consequences of this though.
For example, with airborne transmission, 6 ft distance is not enough, you need > 30 ft, e.g. if you are inside with poor airflow for a long time with someone who is infected, good luck (unless you have a good N95).
> Please understand that airborne has a scientific meaning, and that is the terminology that scientists use. There is no actual clinical evidence of the airborne transmission of COVID.It is spread through large droplets.
At this point, it's expert consensus that airborne transmission of COVID is a significant if not the major route of transmission[1].
There's one key paragraph buried in the article that will help a lot of people:
> However, to date, there is also no evidence of truly long-range transmission of COVID-19, or any pattern of spread like that of measles. Screaming “it’s airborne!” can give the wrong impression to an already weary and panicked public, and that’s one reason that some public-health specialists have been understandably wary of the term, sometimes even if they agreed aerosol transmission was possible. Cowling told me that it’s better to call these “short-range aerosols,” as that communicates the nature of the threat more accurately: Most of these particles are concentrated around the infected person, but, under the right circumstances, they can accumulate and get around.
Translation: people can get infected further away than with larger droplets -- especially in stuffy, enclosed environments -- but distance still reduces the risks.
Well that March 2020 quote is still correct, isn't it? You as a layperson just think that airborne means something it doesn't mean for virologists (aerosol transmission <> airborne virus).
So the tweet certainly was a typical science communication error, i.e. they forgot that words can have different meanings in different milieus, but it wasn't wrong.
Airborne has special meaning. Clearly covid spreads "through the air" that doesnt mean it is airborne.
One problem is there is no strict definition of airborne. There is no doubt that covid can spread via an airborne path, but it may not be the dominant path.
The original variant had about a .7% infection rate through casual contact. For people living in the same household it was something like 12%.
When people talk about airborne, one implication is that it floats in the air and is infectious for a long time. This generally means a much higher rate of transmission. One factor in this is the infectious dose. The lower the infectious dose, the more likely it is to be airborne. A TB infection can start from one bacterium. So even though they are huge, it is airborne.
Delta is 2X more infectious than the original, that means it likely needs a smaller infectious dose and is more likely to transmit via airborne particles.
Just because covid can transmit via an airborne path doesnt mean it is the main way it is transmitted. When we think of airborne we think of highly infectious viruses like the measles virus.
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Measles is so contagious that if one person has it, up to 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.
Measles virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace after an infected person leaves an area.
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Yes, it is, but IIRC the term "airborne" can also refer to disease particles that can survive in the air unencapsulated (such as certain fungi), and can therefore travel quite some distance, and can remain hanging in the air for hours.
Aerosols are heavier than air, and therefore have a very limited range and duration in which the virus can remain "airborne" in common parlance.
(edit: expanded the definition to include more than just viruses as I couldn't find an example of a virus that can survive unencapsulated)
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