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Date: | Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:43:09 -0400 |
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Covid-19 remains viable - i.e. can establish a productive infection - on fomites for up to 3 days. Here's the abstract from a Biorxive paper submitted to NEJM. (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1.full.pdf)
32 Abstract
33 HCoV-19 (SARS-2) has caused >88,000 reported illnesses with a current case-fatality ratio of ~2%. Here,
34 we investigate the stability of viable HCoV-19 on surfaces and in aerosols in comparison with SARS35 CoV-1. Overall, stability is very similar between HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1. We found that viable virus
36 could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on
37 cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar
38 half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability
39 on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for
40 HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate that
41 aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for
42 multiple hours and on surfaces up to days
Apologies for the formatting.
You can do this sort of thing with Covid because you can grow the virus in cells in tissue culture. With bee viruses we are less fortunate. We have no cell lines to work with and, as Randy said earlier, most bees are (understandably) pretty resistant to ingested virus (at least as adult bees). You could - and people do/have -swabbed hive woodwork or hive tools or whatever, and inject virus to determine whether it remains infectious and pathogenic. However, this does not recapitulate natural routes of transmission of virus on fomites.
I'm not sure I agree with the virus classification scheme discussed by PJB. The primary distinction is based upon their genetic material and mode of replication. The Baltimore scheme - named after Nobel laureate David Baltimore - is the one most virologists know. The huge variation of viruses currently circulating have not independently evolved - there are clear relationships based upon genetic organisation and gene relationships.
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