Mike Osterholm

Now take that on a more apparent basis of saying every day, if I were walking down the street today and I suddenly smelled cigarette smoke, I look up and I see the person smoking is 35 to 40 feet ahead of me, but I'm downwind.

Smoke is an aerosol.

And so what we were trying to get across the point is if you look at influenza, obviously that's an airborne related transmitted disease.

There's nothing real about this six feet space, whatever.

And there really has been a misconception as to what it means to actually put virus out in terms of droplets versus aerosol.

Everywhere that there's a droplet where it's big enough.

So when you're sitting in the second row at the theater and the actor is, you can spew it away, you can see it in the lights, that does fall largely usually within six feet.

But there's aerosols in those six feet, these tiny things that float.

And then they go from there.

You know, Minneapolis has just spent the entire summer working with our aerosol prevention means because we've had all these wildfires from Canada where the smoke has gone over 1,000 miles.

Smoke is an aerosol.

It floats in the air.

And so one of the things that caused us to react as we did, when I got the first call about what was happening in Wuhan on December 30th, you know, my first reaction was, oh, my God, no, this is another flu.

This could be the bad one, okay?

And then we learned over the next few days, of course, it wasn't.

It was a coronavirus.

I thought, oh, we're covered.

You know, it's not going to be good, but we can put this one out.

But then what we did is we had contacts with people in Wuhan.

We had contacts with people in Hong Kong that were coming back and forth with Wuhan.