Per that Wired article, it was intentionally ignored when the first virus-related research came up in the 1940s because it was too close to the discredited miasma theory.

> Given a virus' size and weight, it should be trivial for a physics graduate student to simulate how long it will be airborne.

This is also in the article, known research from decades ago. Social distancing is in fact based on a misunderstanding and conflation of a few things in that early research.