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Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborne

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.
  1. Dyani Lewis

    1. Dyani Lewis is freelance reporter in Melbourne, Australia.

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Workers in masks and overalls spray disinfectant on the pews of an Orthodox Greek Church in Istanbul

Public-health advice on COVID-19 in early 2020 focused on sanitizing surfaces more than protecting against airborne transmission. Credit: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty

As 2021 drew to a close, the highly contagious Omicron variant of the pandemic virus was racing around the globe, forcing governments to take drastic actions once again. The Netherlands ordered most businesses to close on 19 December, Ireland set curfews and many countries imposed travel bans in the hope of taming the tsunami of COVID-19 cases filling hospitals. Amid the wave of desperate news around the year-end holidays, one group of researchers hailed a development that had seemed as though it might never arrive. On 23 December, the World Health Organization (WHO) uttered the one word it had previously seemed incapable of applying to the virus SARS-CoV-2: ‘airborne’.

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Nature 604, 26-31 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00925-7

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