How COVID-19 Is Spread

Scientists’ latest understanding of the facts, the suspicions, and the discounted rumors of SARS-CoV-2’s transmission from person to person

Written byCatherine Offord

| 8 min read

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The global outbreak of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is approaching the end of its second month amid widespread confusion among members of the public about how the virus is transmitted.

“There’s a massive amount of education that clearly hasn’t reached the public about this stuff,” says Ian Mackay, a public health virologist at the University of Queensland who helped develop diagnostics for COVID-19 in Australia. As is the case for many aspects of COVID-19 biology, “there are a lot of knowledge gaps out there in the community.”

With researchers around the world working to understand the pathology of the disease and slow its spread, The Scientist rounded up the latest on what is and isn’t known about how the virus is transmitted from person to person.

Like the flu, COVID-19 is spread primarily via respiratory droplets—little blobs of liquid released as someone ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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