[Izkata]

That was the messaging in the first couple of months, and why social distancing was thought to be sufficient: The droplets would fall to the ground before traveling very far.

Then several months later we started hearing about how the virus can hang in the air for hours in buildings with poor ventilation; that's aerosols, not droplets. At that point social distancing does almost nothing, and even masks are questionable since it can far far more easily go around the edges of any masks, and slip through cloth masks in ways droplets can't.