I don't think it's necessarily political. One of the issues is that airborne diseases have a totally different set of requirements for hospitals, and they're m

I don't think it's necessarily political. One of the issues is that airborne diseases have a totally different set of requirements for hospitals, and they're much harder and more expensive to comply with. Specifically, patients with contagious airborne diseases need to be kept in rooms with lower pressure than the rest of the hospital to prevent contagions leaking out. I would imagine we have even fewer of those than we have ventilators and ER beds. Of course, we can free doctors of that restriction, but I don't know how much we stand to gain versus any losses that occur in the transition period as hospitals wonder what the guidelines are. The other complication is that as I understand it (and I could be wrong), airborne vs droplet is not a hard and firm line, it's more of a spectrum. The distinction seems to be largely in how long a space will "carry" the disease. Things like the flu aren't typically considered airborne because they don't hang in the air for very long. If someone coughs on you, you might get infected. If you walk through a grocery store an hour after someone with the flu walked through, you're probably not going to get infected. Measles is a classic airborne illness because the space is infections for ~2 hours after someone with measles walks through. Some think the distinction is outdated, and anything that spreads via the air should be considered airborne. Others seem to think that larger particles should be considered airborne. At any rate, I can see some validity to attempting to maintain the status quo. Several regions are in the midst of severe COVID outbreaks, and given the upheaval an airborne recognition would create, I think the CDCs stance of strongly hinting that it's airborne without declaring it such is reasonable. They don't seem to be denying it's airborne, just not officially declaring it so. We can loop back and formalize the airborne status later, when hospitals aren't swamped. I don't want to stress already stressed hospitals, and I don't want to overly stress our healthcare workers. They have it hard enough, and we are having a hard time getting enough of them.