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.

[silveradept]

There's a good chance that for most operations, we could do fewer days of quarantine and be fine, but this is one of those situations where overkill is warranted, because of the terrible that happens if you end up getting infected with the virus. We're on four days of quarantine, plus one for disc items as a just-in-case, since they're in sealed-ish plastic.

[thewayne]

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you, or, sometimes paranoia is a virtue.