"Data from surface survival studies indicate that a 99% reduction in infectious SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses can be expected under typical indoor environmental conditions within 3 days (72 hours) on common non-porous surfaces like stainless steel, plastic, and glass."<p>These are typical surfaces found on public transport, shopping malls, food courts. Three days allows for a lot of traffic to pass through and potentially come into contact with the infected surface. Of course, if the infection is coming from someone who is at that location on a daily basis (works there, takes the same bus/train each day) then the 3 days stretches out because surfaces are getting re-infected while the person is infected. Given that in densely populated areas such locations can get hundreds to thousands of people passing through each day, 1 in 10K may still translate to 1 infection every few days for a given "location". Each of those people would likely infect whoever they cohabitate with. So, while surface transmission is very low, it's not nothing, and can translate to real numbers in short order.<p>You may read the above and say "so what?". I should point out that I'm based in Australia, and the way we've handled the COVID situation and the numbers we've had and are having, means we are generally pretty highly sensitised to avoiding the kind of shitshow happening in most of the rest of the world. The numbers you are seeing in your countries are horrific to most of us.
I’m fairly certain information like this or similar was communicated very early on in the pandemic. A lot of people I know were sanitizing things from the grocery store for the first few weeks but then it quickly spread that surface transmission was very rare so everyone stopped.
The headline is very misleading. The actual text contains<p><pre><code> the relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is
considered low compared with direct contact, droplet
transmission, or airborne transmission 1, 2. However, it
is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are
acquired through surface transmission.</code></pre>
Not a great headline. What if I touch thousands of surfaces?<p>Better (and based on the text): Few SARS-Cov-2 transmissions reported to have been via surface transmission.<p>And note: However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission. Probably not many.
Against the argument of "it doesn't hurt to disinfect": it does have some negative effects.<p>Businesses have "installed" sanitizers and clean a bit more often. Correct air ventilation is mostly too costly, too inconvenient or outright impossible. But since the business is already doing _something_, "complying", there is a false sense of security.
<i>the relative risk of fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is considered low compared with direct contact, droplet transmission, or airborne transmission 1, 2. However, it is not clear what proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infections are acquired through surface transmission.</i>
Watch as HN takes its signature air of superiority and says "I called it last year it was so obvious smh".<p>1. Basic safety principles mean that as long as we're not sure, keep doing it<p>2. You may have been enjoying a year surprisingly free of common colds, of flus, and many more other illnesses. These are absolutely transmitted through surfaces, and increasing hygiene standards is the best way to get rid of them.<p>Keep washing your hands you filthy animals.
This could explain why Orange County, Florida has relatively low transmission rates in spite of Disney World being open to hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly outdoor parks, social distancing rules, masks required, but lots of shared surfaces.
Did anyone call this early on? Would’ve been nice to hear a free and open debate from the start—I don’t recall seeing one. There are costs to doing things everywhere on the planet “just in case.”
> Findings of these studies suggest that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via the fomite transmission route is low, and generally less than 1 in 10,000, which means that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection.
Where does the "1 in 10,000" come from in that paper? It seems like it might be from papers '7,8, and 9' in the references. Otherwise it's a number plucked from the air.<p>Whilst there's no doubt you <i>could</i> catch from touching a surface, it's a respitory disease that you catch by breathing in water droplets contaminated with the virus.<p>Wash your hands, fine. Leaving your shopping in the garden or spraying with bleach? Seems a touch hysterical to me. And I say that as someone that was in a high COVID area, grocery shop frequently, and still haven't caught it from touching a tin of beans on a shelf.
We're still sanitizing and/or quarantining everything that comes into our house from an unknown source. It's become a easy routine/habit anyways, and I've started to like that everything <i>in our house</i> is clean and I don't have to worry about it (have you seen how dirty groceries are?). Also, it's been the year of absolutely no flu, stomach aches and other various illnesses that afflict us in a <i>seemingly random</i> fashion.
If you needed to know everything about the pandemic, all you needed to listen was Michael Osterholm's interview in Joe Rogan podcast before the pandemic began. I m sure people would be a lot better prepared about the duration of the pandemic, the mode of transmission, the death rates etc if the epidemiologists had been frank about what to expect from a SARS pandemic. "Do not exchange air" should be an international slogan. Washing hands and groceries is just another security theater