And similarly, while the researchers tested how long the virus can survive in aerosols suspended in the air, they didn’t actually sample the air around infected people. Instead, they put the virus into a nebulizer and puffed it into a rotating drum to keep it airborne. Then they tested how long the virus could survive in the air inside the drum.
The fact that it could live under these conditions for three hours doesn’t mean it’s “gone airborne”—that it hangs around so long in the air that a person can get it just from sharing airspace with an infected person.
“This is not evidence of aerosol transmission,” Neeltje van Doremalen, a researcher at the NIH and a coauthor of the study,
cautioned on Twitter.