Shopping is set to return – but not as we know it. Under new rules, shops will be asked to stash returned goods, or clothes that have been tried on, for up to 72 hours before another customer can handle them, while some stores have added they will also quarantine other items that have been handled by browsing shoppers – such as books.
But how long does coronavirus last on different materials?
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Hard surfaces
A much-discussed study published in the New England Medical Journal by researchers in the US looked at the survival of the coronavirus on a variety of surfaces – plastic, stainless steel, copper and cardboard. The results reveal that while viable virus was still detected on plastic and stainless steel after 72 hours, for cardboard and copper it was no longer detectable after 24 hours and four hours respectively.
For all surfaces, the quantity of virus dropped rapidly over time – in the case of plastic, the estimated median half-life of was around 6.8 hours on plastic.
However, another study released this month – not yet peer-reviewed – by researchers in Bejing reported: “Sars-CoV-2 was stable on plastic, stainless steel, glass, ceramics, wood, latex gloves, and surgical mask, and remained viable for seven days on these seven surfaces.”
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William Keevil, a professor of environmental healthcare at the University of Southampton said, in the case of copper, the US study likely overestimates the time the virus would survive. “I have spent 20 years looking at superbug bacteria, and then flu, noravirus, and coronavirus 229E [which is a cause of common colds] and they are all killed in minutes,” he said. The reason, he said, is that copper ions destroy the genetic material of bacteria and viruses.
Clothes and shoes
The US team did not look at all materials, and fabric was not studied. “People are extrapolating from the cardboard experiments [by the US team],” said Keevil. “So they say ah, absorbent surface, less than 24 hours, so we assume fabrics are the same – but that is a big assumption.”
A recent study into the coronavirus behind Covid-19 by researchers in Hong Kong suggested no infectious virus could be detected from cloth on the second day after virus was deposited. Meanwhile, the Beijing study reported: “No infectious virus could be recovered from cotton clothes after four days,” but added: “Rapid loss of infectivity was observed within one hour after incubation on both paper and cotton clothes surfaces.”
But there are many considerations. Prof Deenan Pillay, a virologist at the University College London, told the Guardian Science Weekly podcast in March: “We have got to remember the virus, when it goes on to a surface, it is not just the virus, it is of course a virus within a droplet. So if for instance it is covered with proteinaceous material, from sputum that comes from cells in the lung from which the virus has been coughed up, then clearly that virus will last longer on the surface than if it is without that.”
In the case of shoes, said Keevil, the situation is also unclear. “Shoes have some kind of a finish to them, like a polish – so no one knows,” he said. “You might argue that if, say, shoes have got a polish on them, does it act anyway like soap? And if the answer is yes, the virus might die quickly on these.”
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But, even then, that would only apply to the outside of the shoe.
Books
“If you think of a book, it has got two types of surface, it has got the outer glossy surface and then the inner paper,” said Keevil. “The outer glossy [surface], you could consider that to be like a hard surface, so that could be three days.”
In the case of paper, said Keevil, studies into the Sars virus – which the US study suggests has similar survival times to the virus behind Covid-19 – have offered a range of possible survival times ranging from three hours to five days. A similar range was seen from the Hong Kong and Beijing studies for the coronavirus behind Covid-19.
The wide range of survival times, Keevil adds, is down to factors including, in the case of the Sars work, people using different strains of the same virus (at least for the Sars work) and differences in the way researchers explore if a virus is viable. He cautioned that in some cases researchers may extract the virus from materials, such as fabric and paper, that is trapped within layers, “arguably meaning it is not released to the hand during contact when people report just hours survival”.
If viable virus is still present on surfaces, what does this mean for infection?
Keevil said the matter is a big question. “At the moment everyone is referring back to things like flu,” he said, adding that virus is known to be spread by people touching their face – a reason why handwashing has been highlighted as crucial in tackling coronavirus.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It may be possible that a person can get Covid-19 by touching a surface or object, like a packaging container, that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.”
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: HOW
