How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no? If you have a huge pile of infected dead bodies in a "bowl shaped terrain" with little wind, maybe that would do it? Add a temperature inversion* for good measure.
>How far the disease can spread would depend on sources and sinks, no?
By air alone? How far can it possibly spread? Can you get measles if you walked within 100ft of a mass grave? miasma theory would say yes, but I doubt that's actually the case.
If you include other forms of transmission (eg. insects, animals, food/water), then it can definitely spread miles away, but this goes back to my original point of only being correct about disease being (loosely) correlated by distance. But even then it gets a bunch of stuff wrong. A rat with the bubonic plague stowed away on a ship can infect people hundreds of miles away, for instance. You could also live next to a mass grave and be fine as long as you have mesh windows and boiled your drinking water.
It's a good point about other forms of transmission, but I think the air alone is an interesting question.
What would be the limiting factor on how far it can spread? Do the particles deactivate after a while in the air? Or is it that the concentration is not high enough? Latter case, wind patterns would matter a lot.
Surely, when authorities talk about diseases being able to spread x many feet, it ignores many factors and is meant to be an actionable simplification that works in a statistical sense.
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