The Atlantic Treating clean indoor air as a public good would have protected Americans against more than COVID-19. In the early evening of March 7, 2020, I was on my cellphone in an airport terminal, telling a friend that I was afraid to write an article that risked ruining my journalistic reputation. I had been speaking with the small but close-knit aerobiologist community about the possibility that the new coronavirus could travel easily from person to person through the air—not just through large droplets that reach only a short distance from an infected person or through handshakes. The scientists had stressed that the idea of airborne transmission of the new virus was still mostly theoretical, but they’d seemed pretty concerned.
When my story came out the following week, it was, to my knowledge, the first article by a journalist to make the case that the virus causing COVID-19 might travel efficiently through the air, and could potentially cover many meters in a gaseous cloud emitted with a cough or a sneeze. To avoid stoking undue worry, I had argued against calling the virus “airborne” in the headline, which ran as “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne—But It’s Definitely Borne by Air.” That idea was not immediately accepted: Two weeks later, the World Health Organization tweeted, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” As the pandemic unfolded, though, it became clear that the coronavirus did indeed spread through airborne transmission—even if the WHO took more than a year and a half to officially describe the coronavirus as a long-range airborne pathogen.