The Lancet: Exaggerated risk of COVID from fomite transmission?!

[thewayne]

Basic argument being that the testing takes place with ridiculously high concentrations of infectious material that can't take place in reality.

Myself, handling inter-library loan material, all of my books spend at least five or more days in the mail or in courier transit. I'm not isolating those materials. I'm wearing a mask and being careful taking them out of their packaging and disposing of said USPS packaging, and I wash my hands thoroughly with soap when I'm done. And I've been doing this for three or four months. We're continuing handling in-person and book drop returns with three-day isolation routines.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30561-2/fulltext

Comments

[moonhare]

There has been a lot of conjecture and theory on the survivability of the virus on surfaces, particularly when plastic covered books are stacked together. Our State Library group gave us a random “3 Days Quarantine “ directive based on someone’s research but told us REALM would have eventually some results we could use. So REALM came up with 4 days last month and we went with that, but now OSL says 3 again.... we stuck with 4.

More information and links than I can digest
https://www.oclc.org/realm/research.html

[kathmandu]

My library system commissioned an actual experiment and it produced results of 'most virus gone after 3 days, almost all gone after 5 days', with the usual slow curve of decay that means you'd have to wait a REALLY long time to be certain every last virion was gone. So they're doing 5 days.