The evidence that the coronavirus spreads through the air has been mounting for months. However, the official guidance from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control is still that droplets are the main route of transmission.
Back in July, a group of 239 experts sent an open letter to the WHO imploring it to acknowledge airborne transmission. Three months later, the WHO’s guidance has changed subtly but still only suggests airborne transmission plays a limited role.
Rather than wait for officialdom to catch up, one of those signatories, Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemistry professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who has studied aerosols for 20 years, decided to go straight to the public with the latest advice on how people can protect themselves and those around them. He convened a group of nine other experts in the field to create this open-access Google Doc - read from the MIT Technology Review why he created the document, and the response he’s had so far.
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