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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 ...
