Portland researcher warns about airborne transmission of COVID-19

As restrictions are slowly lifted and more and more people head to indoor spaces like restaurants, bars or classrooms, scientists around the world have a warning: there's another way to get COVID-19 that health authorities have been ignoring.

"From the beginning of the pandemic, in the United States, there were six to eight of us trying to get the message out that this looks airborne to us," said Dr. Richard Corsi.

Corsi is an internationally recognized expert on indoor air quality and dean of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University.

He's also one of more than 200 scientists from 32 countries who signed an open letter to the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the agency of neglecting one very important way COVID-19 can infect people: by becoming airborne.

"It's not just close contact and it's not just contaminated surfaces," Corsi explained. "It's also what I call 'far field' contact, which is if you're not standing 3 or 6 feet from a person but you happen to be in the same crowded restaurant or the same crowded bar or a classroom and you're not near the infector ... you can inhale aerosols, droplet nuclei that contain infectious viruses in them."