The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
- Author: Megan Molteni
- Full Title: The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill
- Type: #snippet✂️
- Document Tags: #planet
- URL: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
Highlights
- Marr is an aerosol scientist at Virginia Tech and one of the few in the world who also studies infectious diseases. To her, the new coronavirus looked as if it could hang in the air, infecting anyone who breathed in enough of it. For people indoors, that posed a considerable risk. But the WHO didn’t seem to have caught on. Just days before, the organization had tweeted “FACT: COVID19 is NOT airborne.” That’s why Marr was skipping her usual morning workout to join 35 other aerosol scientists. They were trying to warn the WHO it was making a big mistake. (View Highlight)
- She tried another tack. Everyone agreed that tuberculosis was airborne. So she plugged “5 microns” and “tuberculosis” into a search of the CDC’s archives. She scrolled and scrolled until she reached the earliest document on tuberculosis prevention that mentioned aerosol size. It cited an out-of-print book written by a Harvard engineer named William Firth Wells. Published in 1955, it was called Airborne Contagion and Air Hygiene. A lead! (View Highlight)
- But Marr was paying attention. She couldn’t help but note the timing. She, Li, and two other aerosol scientists had just published an editorial in The BMJ, a top medical journal, entitled “Covid-19 Has Redefined Airborne Transmission.” For once, she hadn’t had to beg; the journal’s editors came to her. And her team had finally posted their paper on the origins of the 5-micron error to a public preprint server. (View Highlight)