Deep cleaning every surface won't save us from COVID because according to Jessia Kramer 'the risk of contracting coronavirus from touching a surface is quite low'
Remember the COVID deep-cleanse? Two years ago, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, many businesses and even homeowners obsessively sprayed disinfectant on open surfaces, aggressively wiping down and scrubbing every countertop and desk and table.
Viruses interact differently with water than they do with mucus, Herek Clack, a University of Michigan engineer who specializes in protection from viruses, told The Daily Beast. For one, mucus evaporates slower than water does, Clack said. The scientists added samples of OC43 to droplets of cow saliva, which is similar to human saliva, and placed them on a variety of surfaces. They waited varying spans of time for the droplets to evaporate, then exposed the dried-out virus to a “cellular growth medium”—i.e., simulated human tissue.
The surface the droplets landed on made no difference. “We tested glass, plastic, metal, and surgical masks and mucus works on all of them,” Kramer said.So why would mucus cripple the coronavirus? The answer, Kramer and her teammates concluded, lies in the distinctive spike protein that helps coronaviruses grab onto and infect our cells. In a droplet of snot or spit, there are plenty of proteins for the virus’s spikes to grab. The glycans seem to encourage the process.
But a virus that’s evaporating on a tabletop somewhere grabs all the proteins it can as the surrounding fluid disappears. By the time the virus is dry, its spikes are full. In Kramer’s experiment, even rehydrating a desiccated virus with a drop of water didn’t restore its infectivity. Instead, once you’ve gotten vaccinated and boosted, try increasing ventilation of indoor spaces. Fast turnover of indoor air can dissipate the aerosols that are responsible for most COVID transmission. “A greater focus on addressing airborne spread would be good,” Douglas Reed, an expert in respiratory viruses at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Daily Beast.
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