There's a paywall on nytimes so I can't confirm if it's the same topic, but see also https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-c

There's a paywall on nytimes so I can't confirm if it's the same topic, but see also https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... The screw-up the title refers to is that the medical definition of the droplet/aerosol threshold has been wrong for most of a century, and the source only just tracked down in late 2020/early 2021. Also buried in there is an interesting tidbit that experts resist aerosol spread in general because it's too similar to the long-discredited miasma theory, so each virus has had to individually be proven in a lab to have aerosol spread before it's acceptable to say so.