Coronavirus May Survive in Air For Hours and On Some Surfaces For Days
Coronavirus (Maksim Tkachenko/Getty Images/iStockphoto)
(IBEXNews) - The novel coronavirus can survive for hours in the air and on a variety of surfaces, up to 24 hours on cardboard and 2 to 3 days on plastic and stainless steel, according to a new study.
The study answered some questions about the virus but raised many others.
While the analysis by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles showed the virus hanging around, there was a difference between that and transmission, the team said in a statement.
“We’re not by any way saying there is aerosolized transmission of the virus,” study leader Neeltje van Doremalen at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told the Associated Press.
But given that their work demonstrates the virus’s viability for long periods in certain conditions, it is at least theoretically possible, van Doremalen said.
To test, they placed samples of the virus onto various surfaces such as plastic, stainless steel, cardboard and copper, AP said, to simulate the types of household and hospital settings that might be out there. They also mixed it into an aerosol solution to see how long it would remain viable.
Over time the amount of viable virus on these surfaces decreased sharply.
The disease clinically known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) “was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel,” the researchers said in their statement.
Their goal was not only to learn more about the characteristics of this virus that has infected more than 200,000 people — that we know of — and killed nearly 9,000. But researchers also sought insight into why this particular incarnation, and not its predecessor corona cousin SARS-CoV-1, which causes SARS, spread worldwide.
SARS infected more than 8,000 people in 2002 and 2003, the NIH said, and “was eradicated by intensive contact tracing and case isolation measures,” the statement said, noting that there have been no cases detected since 2004.
“SARS-CoV-1 is the human coronavirus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2,” the researchers said. “In the stability study the two viruses behaved similarly, which unfortunately fails to explain why COVID-19 has become a much larger outbreak.”
The evidence suggests that people infected with the new incarnation could be spreading the virus before manifesting or recognizing symptoms, which would make control and mitigation more difficult.
The results pointed first and foremost to what is already known about avoidance, the researchers noted. Avoiding close contact with sick people, not touching one’s face, staying home when sic, sneezing or coughing into a tissue or the elbow, and regularly cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched objects and surfaces.
Either way, the findings don’t automatically mean that coronavirus is smeared all over packages or takeout food bags from restaurants, USA Today reported.
“The paper that recently published, these are under ideal sort of experimental situations,” Yale University School of Medicine professor Joseph Vinetz, an infectious disease researcher not affiliated with the study, told USA Today. “If somebody were to, say, cough ... on a box or on a letter, the chances of that remaining viable for the period of time it’s in transit seems extremely unlikely.”
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