[rhinoceraptor]

The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient.

Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the supply of respirators for medical staff.

[nicoburns]

That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.

[dekhn]

CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne spread. There is still something of an argument in the scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means. A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary because if there's just another infected person in the building, they can infect people far away!

and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air spreading (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article) came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.