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."
Edit: Remove line number from copy and pasted quote. Also fixed SARS virus name.
I see so many people claiming that you need to quarantine your packages for X days to be safe - this does not seem to be what the study says!
That doesn't seem to be true unless the number of particles they spread on the surfaces is representative of someone handling a package with contaminated hands.
Viral particles seem to decay exponentially with a specific half-life (the environment just seems to break them down/inactivate and it's essentially a random process). So if you start with many more viral particles than this study, then more infectious viral particles will be on the surface after a set amount of time. Viruses do not seem to be like cells with a specific "life-time".
This study essentially shows that this virus behaves a lot like SARS-CoV-1 but spreads more aggressively - it must be something other than longer viability on surfaces/aerosols.
Is there something else specifically, or is this just a general observation that greater transmissibility must be due to 'some other factor(s)'?
If I read this paper right, viruses on surfaces/aerosols decay exponentially (so no specific "life-time") and they determined the half-lives here. Start with more particles and you reach the detection threshold later.
To figure out when all viral particles are inactive you'd have to know how many particles you'd typically start with. I doubt that the amount of particles they spread on the surfaces is typical of what an infected person would spread.
Also why don't we say virii anymore?
Now I really hope this report turns out to be flawed.
If viruses die because of spontaneous reactions, eg interaction with surfaces, interactions with photons, or a spontaneous chemical reaction like oxidation, then I would expect half-life decay similar to radioactive elements.
I don't know how viruses die. I wonder if they can be preserved near indefinitely in a non reactive gas or vacuum in the dark.
Put the kick button a few inches off the floor, so anyone can easily kick it, and it activates a mechanical arm that swings open the door for you. Mount it on the wall next to the door, and of course, you will need two, one on each side of the door.
Is this pretty normal in these sorts of papers?
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.
It didn’t come from China, but from your friendly (and sick) Amazon warehouse worker.
