PLAGUE JOURNAL June 2020: Inventing a New Threat to Keep the Fear Alive: Aerosols to Scare us All
Early summer: the press fall in love with aerosols, the perfect ever-present and long-range killer.
Scareosols: Mangling the Language to Spread Confusion and Alarm
Although academics can argue about the technical distinction between the tiny droplets that we call aerosols and the larger droplets that we call droplets (the language is admittedly confusing), the difference that matters for the coronavirus is straightforward. An aerosol is something that remains in the air, like dust or pollen or fog. For the coronavirus to be dangerous, the particles must stay in the air indefinitely and remain potent.
TV scientists suddenly discovered aerosols when we saw widespread protests and riots. The press had to scramble to explain why everyone wasn’t dropping dead, so they invited their handpicked experts on to discuss this pretend new “discovery.” For the previous three months, they had warned us about gathering in groups larger than one, making no distinction between indoors and outdoors. Parks, beaches, and outdoor pools were closed. Barbecues and picnics were considered dangerous and terrifying. Photographs of people sitting twelve feet apart on towels in a park on a sunny summer day were offered as evidence of a crime.
Now the newscasters and their experts had to find something that sounded like science to explain why people were suddenly safe outdoors as long as they engaged in the right political behavior. Aerosols seemed to fit the bill for audiences conditioned to believe the most unbelievable things. The coronavirus had not changed; droplets had always been the means of transmission, and remained so. The deception relied on simple confusion of the language: because viral droplets transmit through the air, the talking heads and TV doctors told us they were now airborne, or aerosolized.
But it’s not true. If you throw a baseball at my head, it will travel through the air and may hit my head, but that doesn’t mean the baseball is aerosolized. If I enter the room three hours later, it will not be flying around posing a threat to me. When a ski jumper leaves a ramp, the skier is not aerosolized. He will land. In these examples, the object travels through the air but does not remain aloft, only briefly resisting the forces of gravity and drag before falling to the ground.
A droplet is something that falls to the ground, like a raindrop. An aerosol remains in the air indefinitely. The distinction isn’t binary but occurs along a spectrum. From a scientific newsletter called First10EM: “A 1000 µm droplet will fall 1 meter in 0.3 seconds. A 100 µm droplet will take 3 second to fall 1 meter. A 10 µm droplet will take 300 seconds, and a 1 µm droplet will take 30,000 seconds.” The funny symbol indicates a micrometer, one-millionth of a meter.
Although specialists can argue about where the cutoff is, most put it at 5 µm: particles larger than 5 µm will fall to the ground relatively rapidly, while smaller ones may become airborne, or aerosolized. The physics are complicated and there are many variables, but the important thing is whether the bad stuff falls to the ground or remains in the air indefinitely at full concentration and potency. If you breathe a few microbes while a few million others fall to the floor, you will be fine, but if you breathe in a heavy concentration of the stuff over time, you will be at risk of infection. Dry air makes droplets smaller, and these smaller droplets fall more slowly and travel farther in an air current.
HEPA filters on modern jets filter droplets all way down to the tiniest ones, well below 5 μm. According to the International Air Transport Association, “Virtually all viruses and bacteria are removed; even the most difficult particles in the range of 0.1 to 0.3 micron are filtered out with an efficiency level of 99.995%” (.1 micron is 1 μm). If our coronavirus were aerosolized—in the way the press want us to believe—the fans and filters would push deadly quantities of it around the cabin from takeoff to landing. They want us to believe that our air itself is bad, not the droplets in the air. Early on, we learned the term “close contact,” which meant extended exposure to someone talking or shouting nearby at close range. But the press didn’t like the term because it wasn’t scary enough. If we understood the idea of close contact, we could take actions that would protect us from infection, but the press prefer lockdowns, closed beaches, ruined businesses, and masks. They kept the idea of “close,” which is why all of our signs and posters tell us to maintain the six-foot safety bubble. But they refuse to talk about “contact,” preferring to make the entire world a threat. They made everything from UPS packages to unoccupied air equally dangerous by pretending fomites and aerosols are killing us, and they made all people equally dangerous by pretending that asymptomatic spreading is rampant.
Gray Skies Outdoors; Dry Air Indoors
The warmed indoor air of Brussels and Boston and Milan in March is extremely dry. I spent a few days in Boston around New Year’s Day a few years ago and had to purchase the first stick of chapstick I’d used in years. I live in a dry climate, but not a sunless damp winter climate, which makes indoor air dryer than anything I’d experienced at home. (The dry, indoor, air-conditioned air of Phoenix or El Paso in July is also dangerous, although the capsid around the virus is less fortified without cold outdoor air, so the severity of cases in the summer is much lower.)
We know that someone shouting and singing in still, dry air can put enough droplets into the air to infect someone 20 feet away—but not instantly, and not asynchronously. The tracing studies suggest that, in an outlier case, a long-distance transmission can take place over a few hours of continuous output. But not from someone who sneezed or shouted once and then left the party. Very small respiratory droplets, near the aerosolized end of the spectrum, may hang in the air for many minutes but will lose concentration and potency over time, dispersing like a puff of smoke. Sunlight and outdoor air are especially disruptive, but even still or slow-moving indoor air allows the mass to dissipate and fall. If a 10 µm droplet takes just five minutes to fall a meter and a 1 µm droplet takes 500 minutes—more than eight hours—clearly the risk of extended exposure to someone shouting or singing or coughing indoors differs greatly depending on the size of the droplets. Some studies estimate that most coronavirus droplets from the earlier SARs outbreak were between 4 and 8 μm.
There are mountains of medical and technical papers about droplets and aerosols, but they tend to be full of technical jargon and the kind of maybe this, maybe that language that make them appealing to the scare media and relatively safe from online filtering mechanisms. Evidence or research these days (what used to be called science before that term became a cudgel) is flagged or removed as “false” by Google or Facebook when it doesn’t conform to the prevailing politics. To get through the filter, researchers publish the broadest, scariest conventional wisdom rather than empirical findings.
[Edit, May 2021: I see that the authors of the First10EM article have felt compelled to issue a “don’t hurt us” disclaimer at the top of the article: “
December 1, 2020: This post was based on the best available evidence at the beginning of the pandemic (March-April 2020). The information contained is still very relevant, but there is also now an updated/companion review specifically looking at the transmission of COVID-19 (and concluding aerosols play a very important role in its transmission), that can be found here.
A lot of clear and thoughtful information has been taken down, covered up, tagged, disclaimered beyond recognition. Google, Facebook, Vox, NYT, and the rest attack any information that doesn’t conform to the distorted version of reality they have scripted.]
Searching for Threats in the Laboratory
A typical academic paper on a U.S. government site reads like any publication from a field in which there are too many academics writing too many words without enough research: “The disease is caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Gorbalenya, 2020) and asseverated to be transmitted from human-to-human by multiple means, namely, by droplets, aerosols, and fomites.” (At least they omitted fecal matter, an early culprit.) This paper, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, was published in June 2020, many months after we knew there was no transmission from fomites (infected surfaces)—yet we are still not allowed to touch a cream dispenser at Starbucks or a pair of tongs at Whole Foods. I would argue we have also known there is no aerosol transmission, but aerosols have an even more powerful lobby than fomites have because aerosols are so useful to the scaremongers.
A widespread problem of academic papers is that they tend to over-emphasize lab results, which deal in theoretical possibilities rather than real-world probabilities. Lab findings are so much easier to get than environmental data, and can be used to suggest anything. Whether the coronavirus may travel in aerosols is irrelevant to whether we are at risk of getting infected from them. Despite the mountains of jargon and prevarication from the academic press, we can easily find passages that challenge the aerosol-risk narrative.
Massachusetts General Hospital published a June paper called “Still No Evidence of Airborne Transmission of the Novel Coronavirus.” A summary at the top of the article sums up the message succinctly:
Respiratory particles, produced every time we talk, cough, sneeze, shout or sing, vary in size from fine aerosol particles and droplet nuclei (less than five microns) to larger droplets
Airborne transmission requires pathogens in fine aerosol particles to remain infectious over distance and time
Recent evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, may remain aerosolized for several hours, but the presence of the virus in aerosols or air samples is not evidence of airborne transmission
Available evidence supports the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 primarily through droplets and contact routes
Regardless of the size of the droplets, potency declines rapidly after the virus leaves its host, which is one of the reasons, though not the only one, that surfaces pose no risk. The article writes, “The CDC defines airborne transmission as occurring when organisms in respiratory particles remain infectious over distance and time. Classic long-range airborne transmission has been established for only a very small number of pathogens, notably measles and tuberculosis.” For airborne transmission, the particles must remain infectious over distance and time. The media routinely scare us with reports of lab studies that find pieces of the virus on metal or plastic hours after exposure, but such findings tell us nothing about our risk of becoming infected or ill.
The article cites a couple of studies that found the virus can hang in the air yet notes that these same studies found no risk of infection from these decaying particles. The authors cite a New England Journal of Medicine letter that found the virus remaining in the air for three hours, but “with an exponential decay in virus titer” (concentration). They cite another study, from medRxiv, reporting that although air found in the rooms and hallways of medical patients contained SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA, “there was no viable, infectious virus in these samples.” The authors conclude by writing, “It is important to keep in mind that the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in aerosols is not evidence of airborne transmission,” before appending the standard disclaimer that “further evidence is needed to determine if this virus remains infectious over distance and time.”
The burden of proof is on the non-experts and the fear-mongers pushing the aerosol threat. They advertise aerosols to arouse fear and uncertainty, to justify the most restrictive measures, and to provide cover for their failure to distinguish between the risks of indoor and outdoor transmissions before the riots and protests erupted in early June. We know their motivation for spreading the story, and we also know that neither data nor personal observations support their hypothesis. People get infected from talking or shouting near each other indoors, with varying risk levels depending on duration, distance, vocal levels, humidity, airflow, infectiousness of the carrier, and vulnerability of the target. People do not get infected from walking into empty rooms.
Though a small amount of the virus may remain in the air over time, it loses potency too rapidly to cause infection. A baseball thrown at my head may cause injury, but if the baseball somehow transformed into a soap bubble that hangs in the air, it no longer poses a threat.
The Infectious Environment
A handful of environmental conditions combine to create the ideal spreading environment, for both general spreading and for spreading the most dangerous form of the virus. Cold, damp weather causes people to go inside, close windows, and turn on the heat. Artificial heating dries the indoor air. Respiratory droplets emitted into dry air fall more slowly than heavier droplets in humid air, allowing them to travel farther and to become more concentrated over time as long as the source continues to emit new droplets. The virus is not aerosolized. The lighter droplets simply fall more slowly and may become more concentrated or cover a greater distance than wet, heavy droplets will.
Dry air also makes a potential target more susceptible because dry cilia in the nasal passage provide a sticky landing for the virions. Cool, gray, outdoor air—above freezing but below 40—hardens the protein capsid around the virus inside the carrier’s lungs, providing a protective delivery capsule for the virus. This fortifying effect lasts for some time, making the carrier highly infectious for 12 to 24 hours after breathing mid-30s air.
Gray skies cause narrow temperature bands with lows that sit in the 30s for long stretches, expanding infection windows and enabling chain transmissions as the virus hops like a rock skipping across water, finding new targets every five days. Gray skies compromise the target’s immune system, having already compromised the carrier’s immune system, creating a heavy viral load. Weakened immune systems allow the virus to replicate and spread in the lungs, resulting in severe cases rather than mild ones, mild cases rather than asymptomatic ones, and asymptomatic cases rather than non-cases. (The distinction between these last two is mostly academic.)
Each of these conditions interacts with and compounds the others. If the weather is sunny and hot, a highly infectious person shouting in a small dry room may cause infections, but resulting cases are likely to be relatively mild, with few secondary transmissions. (One may ask how the carrier is so infectious in this climate, but for the sake of argument, let’s say he’s been working long shifts at a meat plant and playing indoor hockey after work, seldom going outdoors.)
On the other hand, if the temperature has been in a band between 33 and 56 degrees for the last week and skies have been gray, the same infectious person in the same environment is more likely to cause explosive spreading, resulting in far more severe cases. If the cool gray weather persists, additional spreading will occur, secondary and tertiary cases every four to six days. Temperature weaponizes the virions; gray skies weaken the targets. Outbreaks beget outbreaks in a chain reaction, as we saw in northern Europe and a stretch of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic coast between February and April.
If this same spreading event is followed immediately by ten days of frigid weather, with lows in the single digits or teens, the chain will break. The cold air will slow the growth and spread of the virus in the population overall. It doesn’t move well in freezing weather.
Consider one last imaginary example: take the worst, most dangerous climatic conditions—persistent mid-30s low temperatures under gray skies—but now move the potential spreading event to a steaming hot tub. Now we have dense, humid air, which causes most of the larger respiratory droplets to drop harmlessly into the water, and the few that find their way to a nasal passage will struggle to find purchase in wet nasal cilia. Each factor works in step with the others, either clearing the path for spreading or putting obstacles in the way.
If our professional talking classes were correct in their dogmatic belief that policy and behavior alone affect the spread of our virus and its resulting lethality, we would see correlations between behavior and outcomes. Moreover, we would see only modest differences in outcomes from one place to another, as most of the U.S. and most places in the developed world have adopted similar policies and practices. We might see a 10% difference in fatality rates between Florida and New Jersey, for example, or between Hawaii and Rhode Island, or between Hong Kong and Spain. Instead, we see massive differences, often tenfold or more, even where policy and behavior look the same. If the prevailing wisdom were correct, we would see the inverse of what we see. Our worst-hit places are usually the ones following prescribed orthodoxy the most. The staggering differences in outcomes result from the compounding effect of these few simple environmental factors interacting with one another. They have little or nothing to do with proximity, lockdowns, masks, aerosols, worker essentialness, and the rest of the canon.
Our understanding of the science of aerosols and droplets suffers in the same way that our understanding of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spreading suffers, and for the same reason. The press confuse the terminology because they are careless and because they want to spread fear. They cite findings from lab conditions to keep us afraid even though the lab conditions tell us nothing about real-world risks. By April, the headlines told us every day about new studies indicating that the virus could live for hours or days on cardboard, or plastic, or steel, but there was never any evidence that people were getting sick from these surfaces. We saw the scary animations showing the deadly cloud emitted when someone coughed or sneezed, but the tracing studies showed that transmission occurred from indoor “close contact,” meaning proximity plus time, not from a whiff across a room or a passing stranger on the sidewalk.