WASHINGTON: An international group of 239 scientists on Monday urged authorities including the World Health Organization to recognize that the coronavirus can spread in the air at distances well beyond two meters (six feet), and to revise their prevention guidelines accordingly.

In a commentary that appeared in the Oxford Academic journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers wrote that studies have shown "beyond any reasonable doubt" that viruses can travel tens of meters in the air, and analyses of certain spreading events had demonstrated the same was true of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19.

"Hand washing and social distancing are appropriate, but in our view, insufficient to provide protection from virus-carrying respiratory microdroplets released into the air by infected people," wrote the authors, led by Lidia Morawska of the Queensland University of Technology.