An Epidemiologist Confirms That the CDC Director Misrepresented Her Study of Outdoor COVID-19 Transmission

After Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was criticized for grossly exaggerating the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission, she said she was relying on a study published in "one of our top infectious disease journals." But as I noted a couple of weeks ago, Walensky misrepresented that study, which was published by The Journal of Infectious Diseasesin February, in several significant ways. Today New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, who first called attention to Walensky's hyperbole, reports that a co-author of the study agrees the CDC director's gloss was misleading.

Walensky estimated that outdoor transmission accounted for "less than 10 percent" of COVID-19 cases, implying that its share is close to that number. The abstract of the article she cited said "five identified studies found a low proportion of reported global SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred outdoors (<10%)." But the evidence described in the article is inconsistent with the idea that anything like 10 percent of infections happen outside. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who co-authored the study, told Leonhardt the actual number is "probably substantially less than 1 percent."

Walensky's implication that close to 10 percent of infections can be traced to outdoor transmission—a figure that may be off by two orders of magnitude—never made sense. "Given that 90% of time is spent indoors in high- and middle-income countries," Razani and her co-authors noted, "it would be expected that 90% of transmission occurs indoors, all else being equal." If outdoor transmission's share were in the neighborhood of 10 percent, in other words, the outdoor risk would be nearly as high as the indoor risk. Yet Walensky herself said there is "almost a 20-fold increased risk of transmission in the indoor setting [compared to] the outdoor setting."

Instead of admitting she made a mistake, Walensky doubled down. During a May 11 Senate hearing, she said her estimate was based on the Journal of Infectious Diseasesarticle. The "top line result" of that study, she told Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine), was that "less than 10 percent of cases were transmitted outdoors." But Walensky's description of the article suggested that neither she nor anyone on her staff had bothered to read the whole thing.

Walensky repeatedly described the article as a "meta-analysis." It was actually a systematic review, which searches and summarizes the relevant scientific literature, rather than a meta-analysis, which pools data from several studies to generate an overall result. The distinction matters because "meta-analysis" implies that the "less than 10 percent" estimate was calculated based on the underlying data from multiple studies. "We were very clear we were not making a summary number," Razani told Leonhardt.

Walensky also claimed "over 19 studies were included" in the systematic review. As the abstract noted, the review actually covered just five studies that looked specifically at COVID-19, only three of which generated data that could be used to estimate outdoor transmission's share of infections. One study found that outdoor settings accounted for 0.03 percent of infections; another put the share at less than 0.9 percent; and the third one found that "5% of work-related cases occurred outdoors."