[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.