Pollen abetted virus transport

"On pollen and airborne virus transmission" models how pollen w/ viruses adhered can distribute the virus farther than models of simple virus transport. (Hat tip to SciTechDaily).

The correlations illustrated below encouraged them to think about this kind of transport.

Also, RNA viruses have been found in "pollen pellets" before. The maps above are interesting, but you can famously find correlations between deaths by swimming poll drowning and Nicholas Cage movies. Careful checking and modeling are in order.

They put together what looks like a nice careful model, but on first reading through their paper I only found this for the critical part: "some of these contaminated droplets have a high probability of attaching to a surrounding pollen grain and thus being transported." What's that probability? Everything else hangs off that. To be fair, this is a "what if" paper that assumes that contamination. Modeling the adhesion rate would be a different paper.

Adhering to a pollen grain might help keep a virus from drying out as fast, since it would be shielded on one side, so transport isn't the only benefit the virus would get from piggy-backing. And Wuhan 2019A isn't the only disease with a seasonal rate. This seems like it might be a promising research direction. "Mold spores are also released in autumn, and become more common in the air as decaying leaves and other vegetation fall to the ground". Maybe not just pollen...