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Some background on why it took the CDC a year to admit COVID-19 is airborne
A fascinating thread on the history of belief in respiratory transmission, and why the CDC took so long to follow the evidence:
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708
(alternative format: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html; paper at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3829873)
What I took away from this is that respiratory transmission has been known since ancient times, before there was even proper germ theory (see "bad air", miasma, even the term "influenza"). Some people rebelled against this in the past couple centuries, ignoring the really quite strong evidence, focusing on contact transmission (and to some extent droplets). Some of this seems to have been because contact transmission had been under-studied, but some seems to be just... pig-headishness? Pet theories? And the CDC had its founding in the context of airborne-transmission-deniers, so it has continued to kind of suck in this regard.
There are also some lovely bits in here about how the CDC was working with (and promulgating) completely wrong information about the aerosol/droplet boundary, and confidently describing airborne transmission of COVID-19 as "myth".
https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1391111720526024708
(alternative format: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html; paper at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3829873)
What I took away from this is that respiratory transmission has been known since ancient times, before there was even proper germ theory (see "bad air", miasma, even the term "influenza"). Some people rebelled against this in the past couple centuries, ignoring the really quite strong evidence, focusing on contact transmission (and to some extent droplets). Some of this seems to have been because contact transmission had been under-studied, but some seems to be just... pig-headishness? Pet theories? And the CDC had its founding in the context of airborne-transmission-deniers, so it has continued to kind of suck in this regard.
There are also some lovely bits in here about how the CDC was working with (and promulgating) completely wrong information about the aerosol/droplet boundary, and confidently describing airborne transmission of COVID-19 as "myth".