I think the important result of this study is that HCov-19 has essentially the same half life on every surface they tested as SARS-CoV-1 except cardboard. "In general, there was no statistically discernable difference in half-life between the two viruses on any given surface except for cardboard: all other 95% credible intervals for the difference in half-lives overlapped 0".<p>Importantly, "Our results indicate that the greater transmissibility observed for HCoV-19 is unlikely to be due to greater environmental viability of this virus compared to SARS-CoV-1."<p>Edit: Remove line number from copy and pasted quote. Also fixed SARS virus name.
About the same range as influenza, which is thought to be about 48 hours, but significantly longer than most common cold viruses, which remain active for only a few hours at most.
Validates the Chinese approach of essentially banning doorhandles - jam doors open, and for those that can't be jammed, wrap them in cloth covered in disinfectant.
Aside: this paper demonstrates an interesting use of Bayesian regression to get the full posterior distribution over plausible decay rates rather than just a single point estimate. See the last few pages.<p>Is this pretty normal in these sorts of papers?
That means any items you buy in a supermarket (greens wrapped in plastic, toilet paper, packaged meet, tin cans) should be set aside at home for 3 days? And you need to disinfect yourself after each round to the store...
It looks like we can now get COVID-19 from Amazon Prime. Free 2-day delivery for all!<p>A tired warehouse worker, forced to work overtime by Jeff Bezos, with no health insurance or paid sick time, and with a robot that watches his every move to make sure he isn’t slacking, gets sick with the virus, and sneezes on your order. The package gets delivered to you in 2 days, and you open it up, and hold it in your hands, thinking the product is clean and sterile. Then 3 days later, you get a strange cough, then the next day, you develop a high fever. Boom! You just got infected with COVID-19.<p>It didn’t come from China, but from your friendly (and sick) Amazon warehouse worker.
Perhaps it's a good idea to place copper tape on all door handles and other frequently touched objects. It's certainly very cheap to do so. Here's some discussion on that idea with more evidence: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LwcKYR8bykM6vDHyo/coronavirus-justified-practical-advice-thread" rel="nofollow">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LwcKYR8bykM6vDHyo/coronaviru...</a>
> Caution: Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.<p>Now I really hope this report turns out to be flawed.
Reading that the virus is stable in the air for 3h, you would think that the R0 would be closer to measles, i.e. ~18 instead of ~2. Any ideas why this is not the case?