The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads through airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance.
The agency said the guidance, which went up Friday largely without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft.
“ Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” said Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases. “ We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process. It was a failure of process at CDC.”
Evidence that the virus floats in the air has mounted for months, with an increasingly loud chorus of aerosol biologists pointing to super-spreading events in choirs, buses, bars and other poorly ventilated spaces. They cheered when the CDC seemed to join them in agreeing that the coronavirus can be airborne.
Experts who reviewed the CDC’s Friday post had said the language change had the power to shift policy and drive a major rethinking on the need to better ventilate indoor air.
Jose-Luis Jimenez, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies how aerosols spread the virus, told The Washington Post before the CDC reversed its guidance that “ this is a good thing, if we can reduce transmission because more people understand how it is spreading and know what to do to stop it.”