This study demonstrated infectious porcine epidemic diarrhea virus in air from experimentally infected pigs and detected PEDV RNA up to 10 miles downwind of naturally infected farms. Together those results establish airborne transmission as a potential route for PEDV dissemination between herds.
The two halves of the finding are different kinds of evidence and should be kept apart when quoted. Infectivity was demonstrated experimentally, under conditions the researchers controlled. The 10 mile figure is RNA detection in the field, which shows that viral genetic material travelled that far and does not by itself establish that infectious virus did. The same distinction runs through the PRRSV literature, where Otake and colleagues in 2010 confirmed infectious virus in recovered samples at 9.1 kilometres and the later field sampling by Alonso and colleagues in 2017 reported RNA detection only, without infectivity testing by size fraction.
PEDV is also the virus that shows most strongly in carrier particle measurement. In the 2015 chamber work by the same group it was detected across all particle sizes and in higher quantities than either influenza A or PRRSV, and in the 2017 field sampling it showed a bimodal size distribution during active outbreaks. For a producer in a region with PEDV pressure, the practical consequence is that neighbouring site distance provides less protection than intuition suggests, and that the carrier size range involved is wide rather than concentrated at the fine end.