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Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention postedthen removedupdated guidelines about airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. These guidelines indicated that there was good evidence that the virus can travel further than six feet through the air (the current presumed safe physical distance), especially in indoor settings without good ventilation.

According to the CDC, the updated guidelines were a draft that was accidentally posted too early. But the move left the public and politicians alike wondering if this was another case of political interference with a vital public health institution.

When we breathe, talk, sing, or cough, we produce respiratory particles of a variety of sizes. If a particle is five micrometers or larger, its considered a droplet. If its smaller than that, its an aerosol. The larger, heavier droplets that we spew will fall to the ground firstusually within about six feet or less. Smaller particles can travel farther or hang in the air like smoke.

Samuel Scarpino is an assistant professor in the College of Science and head of the Emergent Epidemics Lab.Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University

When the CDC and the WHO say airborne, they almost always mean aerosolized transmission, says Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern and head of the Emergent Epidemics Lab. However, the colloquial use of airborne would probably also include small or large droplet transmission.

We know this coronavirus can be spread through contact with larger droplets. The question is, can these smaller particles, known as aerosols, also transmit the virus?

We have an increasingly large body of anecdotal evidence that is all pointing in the same direction, which is that the virus can be transmitted via aerosol, Scarpino says.

In July, 239 scientists from 32 countries wrote an open letter to the World Health Organization, urging officials to recognize that the coronavirus is airborne. The WHO has since updated its guidelines to include airborne transmission, although it still places the majority of the emphasis on droplets.

Superspreader events, such as the one that occurred at a choir rehearsal in Skagit, Washington in March, are part of the evidence indicating the virus can spread through aerosols. Despite some basic safety measures, such as avoiding physical contact and keeping some distance, a single symptomatic person likely spread the virus to 52 people during the two and a half hour rehearsal.

There is also evidence from laboratory studies showing that the virus can be carried in the aerosolized particles, and that airborne transmission can spread the virus between both ferrets and hamsters.

But we dont have the smoking gun of a study demonstrating a person being infected by aerosol transmission in a laboratory-controlled setting. And we arent going to get it.

Unless you do human trials, which are completely unethical in this case, its very hard to convincingly demonstrate that aerosol transmission is happening, as opposed to the many other possible routes that someone could have gotten infected, Scarpino says. Were in a situation where the laboratory evidence is suggestive, but not as strong as it is for other diseases that we know are dominated by aerosol transmission.

You should still be wearing a mask.

We know that mask wearing is highly effective, Scarpino says. If it was just aerosol transmission, cloth masks would be pretty nearly worthless and thats not the case. So certainly, small and large droplets still matter.

Just because aerosol transmission is possible, doesnt mean it happens all the time. It could be rare, Scarpino says. This virus tends to spread through superspreader events, meaning that a large percentage of infections come from a small number of people. A study of the virus spread in Hong Kong estimated that 80 percent of infections were being caused by just 20 percent of people with the virus.

You could imagine a situation where a small number of the largest superspreading events are due to aerosol transmission, Scarpino says. So even if its uncommon, when it happens, and you have one of those individuals in an enclosed space, you end up with a huge number of secondary infections.

So it would be sensible to modify recommendations to limit the size of indoor gatherings, especially in places with poor ventilation. But definitely dont stop washing your hands, keeping your distance, and wearing the all-important mask.

By their very nature, these representative bodies like the CDC need to be a little bit slower around digesting the scientific evidence and making sure theres consensus in the scientific community before they really put out a big announcement, Scarpino says.

Especially at a time when everyone is paying attention, the CDC and similar organizations need to get the messaging right.

But there are political ramifications associated with acknowledging aerosol transmission, Scarpino says, especially as we approach the election. The large political rallies that Donald Trump has favored in the past, especially those being held indoors, for long periods of time, would be off the table.

Since we know that the Trump administration has manipulated the CDCs messaging in the past, I think we have every reason to be very cautious around what motivated this change that we saw, Scarpino says.

For media inquiries, please contact Marirose Sartoretto at m.sartoretto@northeastern.edu or 617-373-5718.

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What do we know about airborne transmission of the coronavirus? - News@Northeastern

"That was there in the [19]30's. That's not invented by social media you just see those reflexes mirrored in social media, theyre not created by social media," the executive added. "It's why tabloids do better than the [Financial Times], and it's also a human thing. People respond to engaging emotion much more than they do to, you know, dry coverage. ...This wasn't invented 15 years ago when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook."

In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, the Facebook posts with the most engagement in the United States most days measured by likes, comments, shares, and reactions are from conservative voices outside the mainstream media: Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, David Harris, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Blue Lives Matter, according to the Facebook-owned tool Crowdtangle. Trumps personal page also regularly makes the top of the list, in effect allowing him to become a publisher in his own right and navigate around the traditional media.

Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and the Facebook savvy Occupy Democrats are among the pages that occasionally hit such levels of engagement.

The growth of right-wing content on the platform has enraged liberals, who accuse the social media giant of kowtowing to the right out of fear of being painted as biased toward the left. It has also ratcheted up the brawl between the left and the right over the social network weeks before the election, as both parties try to influence the platforms policies.

After Trump effectively leveraged Facebook in 2016 to help make up for a significant cash disadvantage, it has become a pivotal theater in the electoral war. Trump and Biden have spent over $173 million for ads on the platform so far and are expected to spend tens of millions more, according to the companys political ad tracker (Trump over $109 million and Biden over $64 million).

But ads are only one battleground. Both parties are fighting for high engagement in organic content, which is much more widely seen. Essentially, it's the difference between "earned media" or coverage of the candidates by news outlets and paid TV ads.

This focus on organic posts is why the success of Bongino and Shapiro have caused so much frustration on the left, along with accusations that Facebook has a pro-conservative bias.

The liberal group Media Matters, which is mostly known for tracking conservative TV and radio, now monitors 5,250 Facebook pages and groups that theyve determined are either influential or of concern, according to spokesperson Laura Keiter. "Theres something [at Facebook] that reflexively or intentionally is mollifying the right-wing," said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters.

Adam Conner, who worked for Facebook in Washington from 2007 to 2014 and is now vice president of Tech Policy at the liberal Center for American Progress Action, told POLITICO that its absurd for Facebook to say this is just something thats playing out in a neutral way. This feels like an abdication of responsibility." He added that Facebook is not a mirror the newsfeed algorithm is an accelerant.

The Biden campaign also blasted Facebook for arguing that the right-wings success on the platform simply reflects society.

"Facebook's platform is a mirror alright a fun house mirror, campaign spokesperson Bill Russo said. One that has twisted and distorted our world and our politics into something barely recognizable, where conspiracy theories and disinformation run rampant. This is not a feature of our society that we must simply accept. It is a choice to create an algorithm that feeds the distrust and polarization that are tearing us apart."

Republicans have been just as critical of Facebook in the run-up to the election. This week, Trump spoke alongside nine state attorneys general and said the government is reviewing concrete legal steps against social media sites for limiting the reach of conservatives at the urging of the radical left.

Facebook says that the most engaged content isn't necessarily the most viewed political fare, the company maintains, is actually a small percentage of what people see on the platform. Users newsfeeds are filled with more nonpartisan, pop culture content than the engagement list suggests, according to the companys head of newsfeed, John Hegeman.

Facebook does not provide data on which articles and posts achieve the most reach but says it is trying to find a way to make that information publicly available.

The Facebook executive argued that frustration on the left on how to counter right-wing populism is another instance of social media reflecting an existing dynamic, rather than creating it.

If you're a far-left partisan then why can't you fight fire with fire? the executive said. That debate among progressives [and] I count myself as a center-left progressive is as old as the hills. All center-left campaigners and politicians always ask themselves, Why can't [we] seem to rile their supporters as much as right-wing populists have?

Some conservatives also argue that they invested in the platform early on as a workaround to the left-leaning mainstream press.

Whats really going on here is obvious to anyone paying attention: The mainstream media wants to censor content from other sources in an attempt to reestablish the control of the news narrative they lost when the internet broke up their monopoly, John Bickley, editor in chief of the conservative site The Daily Wire, wrote Thursday. The Daily Wire was the top news publisher on all of Facebook in July and August this year when measured by engagement, according to NewsWhip.

In an email to POLITICO, Bickley added: It also makes sense to me that social media users would engage more with content that has a clearer perspective or stronger take on stories and particularly those that push back on predominant narratives with glaring flaws. Ben Shapiro, the founding editor in chief of The Daily Wire, has logged over 175 million engagements on his Facebook page since June 21 compare to just 27 million for The New York Times Facebook page, per CrowdTangle.

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After years of Washington regarding Facebook as an amusing curiosity, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has struggled to counter the barrage of criticism over Facebooks role in the 2016 election and American politics more broadly.

Members of both parties are increasingly threatening to dismantle the so-called Section 230 protections that shield Facebook and other internet companies from liability.

Ive never been a fan of Facebook, as you probably know. Ive never been a big Zuckerberg fan. I think hes a real problem, Biden told The New York Times editorial board last year. Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked. The Trump administration this week introduced a bill to chip away at those protections.

Liberals are also still smarting over the role Facebook played in Hillary Clintons surprise defeat. But Republicans counter that Democrats had no problem with the company in 2012 when Facebooks engineers allowed the Obama campaign to get around some internal safeguards protecting user privacy. Facebook would "sigh and say, You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7, Will St. Clair, who helped write the Obama campaigns Facebook program, told The New York Times in 2013.

The company, with its largely liberal workforce, has been defensive about the censorship allegations from Republicans and also lax in enforcing its rules with some popular conservative pages. In one case, the company erased strikes and downgraded violations for posting misinformation by Trump surrogates Diamond & Silk, according to NBC News. Democrats, meanwhile, argue that its ridiculous for conservatives to claim that Facebook is suppressing content when many of their pages are so popular.

Facebook employees have challenged Zuckerberg in company-wide Q&As on these topics and the CEO has pushed back against his progressive workforce.

The community we serve tends to be, on average, ideologically a little bit more conservative than our employee base, Zuckerberg said during one such forum on June 18, according to a report this week from The Verge. Maybe a little is an understatement...If we want to actually do a good job of serving people, [we have to take] into account that there are different views on different things, and that if someone disagrees with a view, that doesnt necessarily mean that theyre hateful or have bad intent.

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Why the right-wing has a massive advantage on Facebook - POLITICO

The following tweets by Patel, dripping with satire, show what he thinks of PM Modi. But is that a crime that calls for police investigation? Let us look at his tweets on September 25.

There is also no dispute about the three tweets from June this year for which he was summoned by the police in Surat. They were fairly straight forward and did say that the Prime Minister belonged to the Ghanchi community, that the community was actually well off and Muslim Ghanchis were said to be responsible for setting railway coaches on fire at Godhra in 2002, triggering the riots. No investigation is needed to establish that Patel did tweet them.

The record shows that Muslim Ghanchis were included in the OBC list in 1993, Telis in 1999 but Modh Ghanchis were included in 2000. (An earlier report had erroneously mentioned that Patel had made a mistake in tweeting that Ghanchis were included in the list during the tenure of Vajpayee. The error is regretted.)

It is, however, instructive to see what the Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself had said about Ghanchis and OBCs. During his prime ministerial campaign in 2014, writes retired bureaucrat P.S. Krishnan, Modi had declared that the coming decade will be the decade of Dalits, Adivasis and the Picchade Varg (Socially and Educationally Backward Classes). He had also said that in the six decades after independence, the SCs, STs and SEdBCs had not got their due and it was for him to fulfil the task.

Krishnan also noted, Modi had, in his speeches of 2014, outlined what he would do for weavers (who are Muslim SEdBCs in Varanasi and most of north India, Hindu SEdBCs in the south, SCs in the west and north-west, Hindu and Muslim SEdBCs in the east and STs in the northeast) and fisher-folk (Hindu, Christian and Muslim SEdBCs in the south and SCs in the east and north east).

Clearly, naming Backward Castes or OBC communities, referring to their backwardness etc., is not a caste slur. So, how did Aakar Patels tweets defame the Prime Minister or the community? Media reports do provide a clue and suggest that the complainant is blaming Patel for linking the Hindu Ghanchis and the Prime Minister by implication with the Godhra train burning incident when he tweeted that Muslim Ghanchis were said to be behind the arson? The complainant points out that Hindu Ghanchis had nothing to do with Muslim Ghanchis but by association it has been implied that Modi, then the Gujarat CM, was behind the burning of the train. Makes any sense? It clearly does to Surat Police.

Surat Police did take cognizance and Patel did have to fly from Bangalore to Surat, obtain anticipatory bail and spent the better part of a day in the company of the Crime Branch.

Patel had got anticipatory bail from the Surat Sessions court on in the case registered under IPC Sections 153 (A) (promoting enmity between different groups), 295 (A) (intent to insult a class of people), 505(1), (b), (c) (public statement intent to cause fear among public) and 499 and 500 (defamation) following a complaint filed by Purnesh Modi.

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Making sense of PM Modis caste, Aakar Patels tweets and defamation - National Herald

Only the day before, he had put his name on a list to volunteer for medical reinforcements in Wuhan, the central Chinese city in the grip of an unknown virus.

When the call came on Jan 27, the third day of the Chinese New Year, Beijing intensive care physician Liu Zhuang felt a mix of emotions - anticipation and anxiety - as the adrenaline coursed through him.

"The severity of the virus, how the disease would behave, and the exact condition of the patients we were facing, we had no idea," Dr Liu said. "It was with a lot of nervousness and unknowns that we departed for Wuhan."

His wife, a homemaker, and their 10-year-old son barely had time to react to the news before he had to go: Volunteer doctors and nurses were given two hours to report to the hospital.

"From the time we got the notice to pack... to the time we arrived at the airport to leave for Wuhan was about six hours," the 39-year-old told The Straits Times.

Days earlier, Wuhan had been put under a strict lockdown to contain the virus, believed to have first surfaced at a market.

But the scale of the outbreak had been downplayed and was slowly becoming clear in the images of overwhelmed hospitals, near-hysterical patients and overworked medical staff that flooded social media, prompting the Chinese government to redirect medical personnel and resources from around the country.

Dr Liu was part of a 138-strong reinforcement team from a collective of Beijing hospitals which consisted of nursing staff, doctors and two administrators. When the team landed in Wuhan late that night, the usually bustling city was deserted as their chartered bus raced through streets still decked out with Chinese New Year decorations.

"On the bus, my feelings were a lot more complex too because we didn't know what to expect the next day," he said.

Appointed one of several operations coordinators, his first task was to reorganise the workflow of the Wuhan Union Hospital by separating the building into clean and contaminated zones.

But his clearly defined duties aside, he and the others could not help feeling overwhelmed.

"We felt the biggest pressure in the first two weeks because the cases we saw were far more severe, and the backup medical supplies had not arrived," he said.

Though some medics were working to the point of exhaustion, Dr Liu said his team was careful to work in rotations of six-to eight-hour shifts to ensure that everyone got enough rest.

Still, beset by anxiety, many team members could not sleep at night. He found the quiet moments hardest, after a punishing day at work, when he was alone in his hotel room and even a simple letter from home could make him emotional.

"Being a boy, my son doesn't really talk about his feelings but he wrote me a letter telling me to take care of myself at work, that school had started virtual classes, and that everything was fine at home. I was very touched," Dr Liu said.

The team spent 65 days in Wuhan, treating 345 patients in their unit. They felt a gamut of emotions, celebrating each recovery, and rallying together whenever a patient died.

As at yesterday, China had reported 90,934 coronavirus infections and 4,745 deaths. Most of these stemmed from Wuhan and the surrounding Hubei province in the earlier half of the year.

A man with a portrait standing outside the Biandanshan cemetery in Wuhan, in China's Hubei province, in March this year. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The country largely reopened to inter-provincial travel by May, even though Wuhan saw a brief second wave of cases that month, which led to the authorities ordering the entire city of 11 million to undergo nucleic acid testing.

Cities like Beijing, north China's Dalian and Urumqi in the west also had second outbreaks that were quickly put under control with a combination of movement restrictions and mass testing.

While there are still about a dozen new cases reported daily, most are imported as China gradually reopens its borders.

Much of the nation's success in battling the virus comes down to the ability to direct large amounts of resources to the worst affected areas, but it is also the willingness of the entire country to work together that has helped get the disease under control, said Dr Liu.

Medical workers preparing to remove the body of a Covid-19 victim in a hospital in Wuhan, early in February. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

"I feel that going forward, we still need medical staff, researchers and scientists to work hard together to uncover the nature of this virus, to even better understand how it develops so we can better treat our patients," he said.

And while China appears to have successfully contained the virus for now, it cannot be complacent as the global war has not been won, he noted.

"What we know about the disease is still very little and limited," he said.

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Rushing headlong into a dangerous unknown: Beijing doctor joins Covid-19 fight in Wuhan - The Straits Times

GENEVA Rates of Covid-19 infection and hospital bed occupancy are rising in Europe, where the authorities need to work to halt the spread ahead of the influenza season, a top World Health Organisation (WHO) official has said.

"Europe has a lot of work to do to stabilise the situation and bring transmission under control," WHO's emergency expert Mike Ryan told a press conference on Friday.

"Overall, within that very large region, we are seeing a worrying increase in disease."

Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's technical lead on Covid-19, said: "We are at the end of September and we haven't even started our flu season yet, so what we are worried about is the possibility that these trends are going in the wrong direction."

Earlier admissions to hospitals and the use of the steroid dexamethasone were saving lives, she said, adding: "We want to avoid any national lockdowns that were happening in the beginning."

Pressure is mounting on European leaders to contain the resurgent coronavirus pandemic as countries such as Spain re-emerge as hot spots.

In Spain, tensions erupted into a public spat, with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's government urging local Madrid officials to lock down the entire city.

The proposal was promptly rebuffed by the capital region's administration, which is controlled by the biggest opposition party to Mr Sanchez's coalition.

Europe's biggest economies are experiencing a disquieting spike in infections, adding to risks weighing on a slowing recovery.

Officials in Italy and France are facing new questions about intensive care capacity, and Britain's daily cases remain at the highest level yet. Italy reported over 1,900 new infections on Friday, the most since May 1.

The authorities across the region are fighting back with a series of piecemeal measures dubbed "lockdown lite".

But even those limited curbs are spurring unrest. Madrid has seen street protests in working-class areas subject to new curbs, with locals claiming officials are favouring wealthier neighbourhoods.

In Marseille, French Health Minister Olivier Veran sought to confront detractors of the Paris government's move to close the city's bars and restaurants for at least two weeks, saying it is a way to avert even stricter measures.

Mr Veran also cited the risk of a breakdown in intensive-care unit care at a time of "maximum alert" for the Marseille area. That means taking "the necessary measures, even if they are unpopular", he said on Twitter.

REUTERS, BLOOMBERG

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Coronavirus: Tensions erupt in Europe over 'lockdown lite' measures - The Straits Times