falcon-fox-and-coyote:

autumngracy:

commandersgrab:

hopefulmisanthrope:

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill

All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with

Wired

I have so many feelings about this, but they boil down to the same frustrated rage I’ve had for a year or more.

you need to read this article

No, really. You need to read this.

TLDR (though you REALLY SHOULD READ) Lindsey Marr, an Aerosol scientist and infectious disease researcher, attempted for years to explain that the CDC’s guidelines saying that there is no transmission of airborne viruses/bacterium that are greater than 5-micron in size was incorrect. With basically no funding, she and her fellows contacted a graduate student of medical history named Katie Randall to figure out where the CDC even got this information from since it wasn’t cited in any literature they could find. 

Randall refocused her dissertation on this topic and discovered that after the death of a Harvard engineer named William Firth Wells, the CDC misquoted his research which said that any particle 100-micron in size should be considered  viable as an airborne illness, and instead said only 5-micron was the correct amount. This was based on one test that Wells had done, rather than the crux of his work. 

After their research went public, despite almost no journals publishing any of Marr or her colleagues’ previous data and research on the topic from as early as 2001, they were quickly asked to write articles on the topic. Because of these women’s work and interest, and especially the research of a graduate student, the CDC has quietly changed their position on whether Covid is airborne. They’ve been updating their guidelines and website/literature since.