Groceries and Delivered Goods Decontamination Station Instructions (opens in new tab)

> This is stupid, it's a respiratory virus, it needs to enter your lungs. Get your stuff, wash your hands. Done. This is why restaurants are still open for takeout.

Why is washing your hands appropriate but not washing the contaminated items you'll touch with your washed hands afterwards?

Your comment strikes me as stupid.

I have not seen any evidence showing that the virus must directly enter via the lungs to be transmitted. Every authoritative source I've seen recommends taking precautions from transmission via surfaces as well.

And someone else in your household picks up one of those items a couple of hours later (not knowing it only recently arrived via delivery) and touches their eyes, mouth or nose...

All of these instructions apply to restaurant takeout.

This has been on my mind periodically today because I ordered takeout for lunch for the first time in a couple weeks. Aside from not all takeout foods requiring to be heated thanks to wider options from services like Favor and Uber Eats (deli sandwiches, sushi, salads, etc...), quite often it's food eaten with your hands out of disposable containers/packaging handled by someone else, rather than utensils preventing additional touching of the packaging it came in.

Even the article basically says no. First point: Your risk of getting infected by deliveries showing up at your door is very low.

Many delivered foods are eaten from the same containers they are delivered in, and many of those containers can't themselves be heated. (plastic doesn't get hot in the microwave and melts in an oven)

You could maybe transfer it to a metal container first?

Detectable in aerosols for up to three hours. Up to four hours on copper. Up to 24 hours on cardboard. Up to three days on stainless steel and plastic.

The visuals:

https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

The study (published March 17):

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

A "conclusive" report would pretty much have to be in terms of "up to" and account for outliers.

Hydrogen peroxide is excellent for many viruses, including coronaviruses. There's a "new" generation of disinfectants based on hydrogen peroxide (search for Clorox or Diversey brand) and they list a 30 second contact time for human coronavirus inactivation. It's an oxidizer like bleach, but like you said degrades to water and oxygen, making it safe and residue-free. I use it regularly to disinfect lab equipment that would get destroyed by bleach.

Have a look at the "Many common household disinfectants" recommendation. It links to an EPA page, which has a lot of Hydrogen Peroxide-containing products that should work.

I want to know as well because I've got a lot of it.

Good questions and I'm curious on the actual science too.

We're using liquid pool chlorine diluted with water -- pool chlorine is just higher-concentration bleach.

Although not scientific by any stretch, I know that the general guidance (and my experience from chlorinating & testing pools) is that you want to check the dates on the chlorine when purchasing because the strength can be substantially lower than stated if it's been sitting on the shelf for a long time. My understanding is that the effect is worse if the product has been sitting outside in direct sunlight / high heat (ie outdoors at a home improvement store), which I believe causes concentration to drop faster.

If you're having trouble finding bleach though, likely can get some at a pool store or a big-box home improvement store in the pool chemicals area. We just mix it down to suitably diluted concentrations in a spray bottle -- readily available & much cheaper than off-the-shelf spray products. I wasn't aware it might be 50% lower concentration in 30-days though, will have to re-mix ours here soon. But that's still small potatoes overall, a gallon of bleach goes a long way and has lots of uses. :)

As I understand it, chlorine loss is not a first order process like this. The more concentrated the solution, the shorter the half life.

It may well be that there is a first order effect as well, and the 30 day half-life is a conservative estimate when diluted with worst-case impurities in tap water.

It may have something to do with the lipid layer around covid-19 that isn't necessarily shared with all other viruses. Supposedly the lipid layer breaking down is why soap works so well

It's my understanding that its also necessary to dilute to slow down the evaporation rate. At above 90%, it simply evaporates too quickly to have effect.

The simplest solution is to not buy it, and only buy non-perishable food instead and multivitamin pills if necessary.

One of the food delivery apps available where I live initially started offering no-contact delivery as optional, after a few days no-contact was default and I think now it's the only option for delivery.

You can't fully reduce the risk from aerosol, as who says that in an apartment building someone didn't pass by 5 minutes before and went all disciple of Nurgle by coughing their lungs out, but that is that.

Wash your vegetables. You can also use a citric acid spray on them which has been shown to be effective on some viruses.

Paper and cardboard wash poorly.

For glass, metal, and plastic, as well as vegetables, soap should be fairly effective.