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¿Que? Cornelius!
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- Dec 2, 2014
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https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill
It's aerosolized, not droplets.
It's aerosolized, not droplets.
On the video call, tensions rose. At one point, Lidia Morawska, a revered atmospheric physicist who had arranged the meeting, tried to explain how far infectious particles of different sizes could potentially travel. One of the WHO experts abruptly cut her off, telling her she was wrong, Marr recalls. His rudeness shocked her. "You just don't argue with Lidia about physics," she says.
Morawska had spent more than two decades advising a different branch. of the WHO on the impacts of air pollution. When it came to flecks of soot and ash belched out by smokestacks and tailpipes, the organization readily accepted the physics she was describing-that particles of many sizes can hang aloft, travel far, and be inhaled. Now, though, the WHO's advisers seemed to be saying those same laws didn't apply to virus-laced respiratory particles. To them, the word airborne only applied to particles smaller than 5 microns. Trapped in their group specific jargon, the two camps on Zoom literally couldn't understand one another.
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