Scientists Probe How Coronavirus Might Travel Through The Air

When researcher Josh Santarpia stands at the foot of a bed, taking measurements with a device that can detect tiny, invisible particles of mucus or saliva that come out of someone's mouth and move through the air, he can tell whether the bedridden person is speaking or not just by looking at the read-out on his instrument.

"So clearly the particles that that person is putting out are being breathed in by someone that is five feet away from them, at the foot of their bed," says Santarpia, who studies biological aerosols at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "Do they contain virus? I don't know for sure."

He and his colleagues are doing their best to find out. Already, using another contraption that looks like a fancy dustbuster, they've sucked up air samples from 11 isolation rooms that housed 13 people who tested positive for COVID-19 infection, all of whom had a variety of mild symptoms.

In those air samples, researchers found the genetic fingerprint of the virus. "It was more than half of the samples that we took. It was fairly ubiquitous," says Santarpia, "but the concentrations were really pretty low."

Finding the genetic material doesn't necessarily mean that there's viable virus that could potentially make someone sick, he cautions. Some preliminary evidence indicates that this might be the