If airborne spread between people were a big threat, you would expect to see some infections in people who did not have known contact with infected animals.
However, I would agree that dismissing the domain experts who asserted that there was good evidence that Covid was airborne right from the early days of the pandemic was problematic in the extreme.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that airborne spread was a strong possibility as soon as a cruise ship saw Covid continue to spread from cabin to cabin even after locking the passengers down in their cabins.
The categorical denial that airborne spread was even possible was the single biggest failure in public health leadership in decades.
> If airborne spread between people were a big threat, you would expect to see some infections in people who did not have known contact with infected animals.
COVID wasn't airborne in humans either until Dec 2019, then very suddenly it was. The virus didn't come out of thin air, it mutated and gained the ability to spread in humans. One morning the world woke up and there was a new virus with human-to-human transmission.
> Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory disease of zoonotic origin caused by the virus SARS-CoV-1, the first identified strain of the SARS-related coronavirus.
In December 2019, a second strain of SARS-CoV was identified: SARS-CoV-2. This strain causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the disease behind the COVID-19 pandemic.
Airborne spread is currently nonexistent in humans, because the H5N1 virus circulating in other mammals right now still lacks the exact right protein to bind to human lung cells. However, all this news about cows is a bit of a distraction. They're being infected in their udders, not their lungs, and that's why they're not dying en masse. Yet.
Sea lions are dying en masse. That's the big news. Because they are spreading it to each other's lungs through the air.
If it adapts to human lung cells it isn't going to be deniable that it's airborne and extremely deadly in that case.
The relevant authorities are currently waiting for that strain to emerge -it's called the pandemic strain- before declaring states of emergency and authorizing vaccines. The reason is that it is (A) unknown if or when that will happen, and (B) unknown whether a vaccine against the current strain which doesn't infect human lungs would be effective against the theoretical future mutant strain that does. Therefore from a public health perspective it's better in large bore to save the resources and not start producing a possibly useless vaccine now.
However, I would agree that dismissing the domain experts who asserted that there was good evidence that Covid was airborne right from the early days of the pandemic was problematic in the extreme.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that airborne spread was a strong possibility as soon as a cruise ship saw Covid continue to spread from cabin to cabin even after locking the passengers down in their cabins.
The categorical denial that airborne spread was even possible was the single biggest failure in public health leadership in decades.