The nation’s top infectious disease expert said he can’t rule out the possibility of getting the coronavirus from the air.
“The possibility of aerosol transmission always comes up when you have situations like that,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters at Friday’s White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.
“It comes up with influenza. It came up with SARS, in which there was a documented, you know, one-off episode of some aerosol transmission. Aerosol means that it can stay in the air for a period of time because it’s in a droplet that’s very small and doesn’t go down,” he said.
“Is it possible that there is aerosol transmission? Yeah, there certainly is,” Fauci continued. “But clearly, what we have seen in the situations where people have gotten infected from the areas that we have experience — China, South Korea, now Europe — most of it is in the situation where people are close enough to each other that a symptomatic person will have a real droplet transmission. So, I’m not ruling out the possibility that it’s aerosol.”
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President Trump recommended on Monday that people limit their gatherings to 10 or fewer to slow transmission for at least two weeks. Both New York and California have issued “shelter-in-place” orders for their states, a move Fauci said he “strongly supports.”
There are nearly 15,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States. Nationwide, 210 people have died and 121 have recovered, according to the latest reading of the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
