Back on March 14, Wired published an article with a very clever headline: “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne — but It’s Definitely Borne By Air.”
To bother with technical numerical precision, there were 112 days between that piece and the publication of a July 4 New York Times article about “239 Experts with One Big Claim: The Coronavirus is Airborne.” It turned out to be a language issue. The New York Times described scientists who disagreed with the World Health Organization’s “rigid” preset technical definition of “airborne” that coronavirus transmission didn’t slot well into. The WHO had just broken with many of its own individual scientists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and falsely “said airborne transmission of the virus is possible only after medical procedures that produce aerosols, or droplets smaller than 5 microns.” The piece described how “several experts criticized the W.H.O.’s messaging throughout the pandemic, saying the staff seems to prize scientific perspective over clarity. ‘What you say is designed to help people understand the nature of a public health problem,’ said Dr. William Aldis, a longtime W.H.O. collaborator based in Thailand. ‘That’s different than just scientifically describing a disease or a virus.’”
Wired writer Roxanne Khamsi, almost four months prior, already had this all figured out. She noted that “when health officials say the pathogen isn’t ‘airborne,’ they’re relying on a narrow definition of the term, and one that’s been disputed by some leading scholars of viral transmission through the air.” So, “the definition used by these officials [such as WHO head Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus] may also be obscuring vital details of transmission.” Later: “This black-and-white division between droplets and aerosols doesn’t sit well with researchers who spend their lives studying the intricate patterns of airborne viral transmission. The 5-micron cutoff is arbitrary and ill-advised, according Lydia Bourouiba, whose lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focuses on how fluid dynamics influence the spread of pathogens. ‘This creates confusion,’ she says. First of all, it garbles terminology.”
What made Wired relatively prescient is that it realized what kind of technical distinction was guiding events: a verbal technicality. Here, then, is why I think that headline is so good: It’s a perfect encapsulation of someone who knows it’s possible to believe in words too much and also too little. You have to know when an issue is a words thing or a things-words-describe thing. Yes, it is a scientific fact that the Caspian Sea is a lake, but if somebody on its shore asks you to help with first aid to save a friend whose lungs are “full of seawater,” you had really better not point that out. All sorts of things in life are made tangibly worse by people being technical in the wrong way, especially when it is about arbitrary distinctions experts agree on as norms, such as statistical significance or what have you. Particularly in common conversation, “Well, you know, technically,” hardly precedes information that is useful.
Technical-minded people are important. Technique is important. Technology is important. But “techne” means specialized craft in Greek. It’s inherently contextual. So, when somebody insists on technicalities, ask if that person isn’t just being the numerical kind of semantical. That’s how you outthink dangerously wrong guidance about masks from people in positions of authority who either focus on the technical details too little or focus on the “technical” details too much. And wear a mask, please.
