Delivery likely safe to use
Experts: Transmission of virus usually airborne
As the spread of the coronavirus has forced restaurants across the country to close their dining areas and switch to pick-up and delivery only, questions have been raised over whether having another person handle and deliver your food can put you at risk of getting the virus.
Fortunately, medical experts say that ordering food to your home is probably a safe bet.
“There’s no reason to be worried about food delivery, I’m doing it myself,” said Dr.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “This is not a food-borne infection.”
Reiterating what other experts have said about the virus, Adalja described COVID-19 as a disease that spreads through the respiratory system, and said that as long as people avoid touching their faces and wash their hands after paying the delivery person, they won’t be at any risk.
“These are not major mechanisms for this virus to transmit, and they’re not anything that people should be really worried about,” Adalja said. “I myself, as an infectious disease doctor, am not worried about my own personal exposure through those routes, because I think they are very minimal risks, if not negligible.”
Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention support Adalja’s remarks, saying in guidance on their websites that there is no evidence of food or food packaging being associated with transmission of the coronavirus.
“It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads,” the FDA said. “However, it’s always critical to follow the four key steps of food safety — clean, separate, cook, and chill – to prevent foodborne illness.”
However, officials at Harvard Medical School have cast some doubt on the subject, saying that it’s “not clear” if an infected person can spread the virus through food they handled or prepared.
“We currently cannot rule out the possibility of the infection being transmitted through food by an infected person who has not thoroughly washed their hands,” read a post on the school’s Coronavirus Resource Center page. “But if so it would more likely be the exception than the rule.”